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Rumi breaks a vase when she is five years old. She shouldn’t have been near it anyways, shouldn’t have been stretching and reaching for that shelf, small as she was. Pudgy, slippery fingers, a lack of balance and motor skill.
She should’ve known better, really.
The vase trembles, it shakes with the squeaky wood of the silent, silent house and catches the light in a beautiful way before it tumbles down and falls to the floor.
Rumi thought it looked so pretty, up there, the sun hitting it and showering the wall behind it in kaleidoscopic hues.
Rumi had thought it looked pretty when it shattered, too. Shards of sharp glass and now unrecognizable details littered on the floor.
It didn’t bleed. Of course it didn’t, it wasn’t alive like her. But the colors on the floor looked like they were breathing, so it couldn’t have been anything but blood.
(Celine had said that anything that bled was alive. Rumi was glad to have heard that, back then. That meant she was too. She wishes she hadn’t been so placid, so easily convinced. Wishes she’d asked, why, why, why. Why do I bleed? Wishes she’d asked, what for? What do I bleed for?)
That’s what she’d thought as Celine opened the door to her study with a frown, sighing as she saw Rumi’s weeping palm holding one of the pieces up like it was a trophy and not scrap to be thrown out.
That’s what she’d thought until her mentor stood with her, running said palm under hot water, no tears to be found in the five year-old’s eyes.
“Do you know why you are not supposed to touch things like that, Rumi?” Celine asked, stern but never yelling. Just that quiet disappointment she’d grown used to. Surely, she’d get it right next time. Until then, she’d learn. She’d learn, and she’d be good once more.
“Because I’m too clumsy?” She asked, the sting of the antiseptic unimportant as she stared widely into Celine’s eyes.
The woman shook her head, like one might before chuckling and sighing, stalling for a small smile threatening to appear. But Celine didn’t smile. She just huffed and stopped adjusting the gauze for a second to look back at Rumi’s eyes.
(Similar enough to her mother’s to warrant a flinch, different enough to reason no such reaction was needed.)
“Because, Rumi, pretty things are meant to be admired. From far away. If you get too close, you risk breaking them. And when they break, they’re no longer beautiful, no longer valuable, understand?” Said easily enough for her to comprehend, but surely not to accept. No kid would simply take such an answer at face value. They’d chew on it like a bone and ask why it hurt their teeth, and where it came from, and where it would go after it was finished being chewed on.
But Rumi was not a normal kid. Rumi listened, and she did as was told. And so, Rumi was taught that beautiful things would no longer have any worth to them when touched. She learned that her touch in particular was a filthy thing, and that once something pretty broke, it could not be rebuilt. Learned that some things only know how to break, and that she was one of them.
(She learned that she was a beautiful thing too, just barely.)
She understood, that she was not made for touching. She understood that she was not to be touched in return, either, lest she stop being worthwhile.
(And how a foolish girl craves things she can't have.)
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
A few weeks after the incident, the kaleidoscope she’d seen reflected on the dusty floor tiles had imprinted itself on her shoulder, jagged and cutting.
Rumi knew better now. She could be good. She had learned.
She came to the conclusion that something in her must have broken, too.
That purple lightning, small and watercolorlike.
She’d learned about those a few days ago, but had been too afraid to paint something subpar, something that would make that disappointment in Celine’s eyes glaze and drift, looking at her from head to toe –looking for faults–, so she had simply never picked them up at all, the brush still clean and pristine because she’d exercised control. Because she’d been good.
That way, it could keep its worth, and so could she.
But now, it didn’t really matter, did it? The colors had imprinted themselves on her skin, branding her as something. She didn’t know what, but a brand was a brand. And shame was shame. Whether she understood them or not matters little in the eyes of others. It simply has to exist first, to be loathed later.
And she’d tried to wash them off, really, she had. She had scraped until the skin bled, and then some.
When Celine found her in that same bathroom sink she’d ran her palm under no longer than a month ago, kneeling as if on an altar, confessing sins, she’d snatched her hand and asked her what she thought she was doing. Why she would make herself bleed like this.
(Who, who do I bleed for?)
Rumi had looked at her again, those big brown eyes, afraid of not knowing, not afraid enough of what it meant to know. “It’s not coming off.”
“What’s not coming off, Rumi?” Celine sounded confused, tired, stressed. She’d done that. It was okay, though, she’d learn to be good again. And again, and again. However many tries it took.
“The paint.” She pouted, unsure how to explain it better. She struggled with bigger words still.
As she hefted her arm up to show her mentor, she felt the woman’s grip tighten before loosening up immediately, then watched her take a step back to hold herself up on the bathroom door, tiredness giving way to horror overtaken by disgust.
If she had known, that that would be the last time Celine ever touched her at all, she’d have asked for just a little longer. Scrubbed a little harder. Begged a little louder.
(Asked Celine to hold her tighter, even if it bruised. She bled, she bled, she bled, didn’t she? Why wasn’t that enough?)
If she had known, that she’d never even had the chance of being something pretty. That she'd always be something unsightly.
Oh, if only she had known.
(And what difference would it have even made?)
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
Rumi is six years old, the day she learns of divinity and duty. She is six years old, when she learns she has a place in one of those two, but not both, and that she is welcome in neither, but must strive for them anyways.
Rumi is six years old, the day she learns to shape the Honmoon.
(Rumi’s questions are finally answered. She bled for this. She bled for punishment, for what she was, and what she couldn’t be. She bled because divinity had not been kind enough to reach her, only whisper her name. She bled because it was her duty to.
She accepts it like she does everything else. She sees it as fact. She is told that she is human, and not. She is told that she must be much more than she is now, and that it can never be enough anyways. She is told that she has to bleed, and so, she does.)
Rumi is six years old, when she sees the manifestation of her soul take shape in her hands.
Rumi is six years old, when she kindly asks the Honmoon why holding it like this isn’t making it any uglier, isn’t tearing it at the seams, like everything else.
Like she had been told would happen if she dared to reach for more.
She receives no answer.
Rumi is six years old, when she feels just how sharp a blade is.
(She is six years old, and she learns to hold a sword before she ever learns how to hold a hand.)
She vows to be gentle without ever understanding what a vow really is, and she swears she’ll learn how to be softer without ever having the means to make good on either of those promises.
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
There is a storybook nestled in a girl’s shelf. It’s one of the only things in the entire room that seems to have seen much use at all.
The cover is weathered and pliant at the edges, as things become when loving touch and time have their way.
There is one page in particular that seems more worn than others. The title of the story reads ‘The Bat, the Birds and the Beasts’.
It goes as follows;
There was once a bat that lived when a great conflict between the Birds and the Beasts was taking place.
The Birds sang beautifully, but had honed their beaks and talons into pointy ends, sharp like blades, in order to survive and protect their own, as divinity had demanded of their song.
The Beasts growled and snarled at their own shadows, tormented yet strangely loyal to the moonlight. Their claws and fangs were gnarled and unsightly, ground against stone and dirt to tear and maim, as was their duty to their tyrant king.
The Beasts asked the bat, “Come join us,” but the bat shook its head, “I may have claws and fangs like yours, but I am no Beast, for I sing and fly just like the Birds. I am a bird.”
(She was what she was told to strive for. She was not enough, and so she learned how to make up for that, too.)
The Birds asked the bat then, “Come join us,” but the bat shook its head once more, “I may sing like you and fly like you, but I bear the crooked teeth the Beasts do. I am a beast.”
(To die pure or to die gentle, is the question. She will not be awarded either mercy, for she is neither. This, too, is her fault.)
When the war was over, the bat had gone to the Beasts, eager to celebrate, but was turned away. It could sing, after all, could it not? So it was no beast, for they only howled and bit.
And then, the Birds had done the same. It sported the claws responsible for tearing down so many of their beloved from the sky, did it not? So it was no bird, for they were pure and unbound.
“Ah,” said the bat, finally having learned its lesson. “She that is neither one nor the other… has no friends.”
The bat, for all its worth, had tried to be good. Its only mistake, really, was being born.
What a cruel and pointless existence, d̶o̶o̶m̶e̶d̶ destined for loneliness.
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
The first time Rumi had knowingly touched Zoey and Mira, it had been awkward and stiff.
It had been to help them readjust their grip on their own weapons. It was what she knew how to do, really. What she was good at. It was her duty.
(For them, for them. I’ll bleed for them.)
She was quick about it, earning her twin confused glances from the girls before her. It was okay, though. She’d double and triple checked that she had not scratched them, or been too rough.
(And how terrible the Honmoon was, promising her beautiful things, knowing she could not touch, promising her love and telling her ‘No, no, you cannot savor it, you cannot reach out and taste it, for you will ruin it’.)
She wouldn’t ruin them.
(Always too late. It's never enough. Spill it, spill it. Let your veins apologize in your stead.)
Rumi made a decision far too big for her body, that day.
She would bleed for them, if that meant that they would not bleed for her.
(‘Your mother bled for you Rumi, you understand? She bled, and now you’re here and she’s not.’)
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
Her hands are sweaty and tingly, their grip on her braid loose. She recalls what Celine had drilled into her when she was younger;
‘The day it happens, it’ll be like any other. You will know, though, you will know it in your bones, Rumi. You’ll know the fulfilment of your duty, what it means to stay loyal to a purpose. You’ll be ready then, because you’re ready now, aren’t you? You are ready now, and you will be so tomorrow, and the day after. This is what it means, to be a Hunter.’
But Rumi hadn’t felt ready. And yet. And yet.
It was the creature, or the two girls shaking and shivering against the alley wall. This was the wager she’d taken, and she had decided the creature’s life could never measure up to her girls. She had chosen right. She was good.
(The creature dies alongside her kindness, but a demon is never truly alive to begin with, so perhaps there's something to be said about her character, too.
It will get no burial, no grave, no flowers or anyone that mourns it at all. Well. It didn't bleed, so maybe nothing was ever lost in the first place.)
There is no blood on her saingeom. No blood on the pavement. No blood on her hands.
(Liar, liar, liar.)
The Honmoon trembles, it shakes in the same way Zoey and Mira are, the same way Rumi’s clenched fists are, and catches the light in a beautiful way before it smooths out like a drawn out exhale and sinks into the floor.
(Rumi was thirteen years old when her hands finally caught up to their destiny. The same blood that had brought her into existence now coated her entire shoulder. It weighed down her pristine, rustless sword made of starlight, her eyes, her every step.
No one but her could see it, but she felt it all the same. She knew what she was, and what she had done. She knew what it meant to kill.
What difference does it make to the prey, if the predator is hungry or not? What did it matter, if Rumi was starving? She was the one that killed what she ate. This guilt, she would carry alone.)
Rumi turns, wiping sweat that isn’t there off her forehead, and extending a hand before thinking better of it. “Celine is probably waiting for us to get back. Can you guys stand up?” She asks, like bile isn’t begging to run up her throat. Like she isn’t the worst friend in the world. Like she isn’t a great liar.
The only thing she’ll ever be able to be good for.
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
They are currently being taught how to gut a fish near a stream, sitting cross-legged in a circle around Celine, who is utilizing a slightly curved knife to disembowel the medium-sized carp Mira had caught earlier –that Zoey cried for and tried to release almost seven times– and Rumi finds herself wondering which one she is, in this scenario, the fish, or the knife.
She knows that her spacing out has gotten worse, knows that entertaining symbolic happenings and ironies of life is naught but a waste of time. But she can’t help herself.
She reckons that this time, she’d rather be the knife.
(What wicked claws you have, little girl. Worry not who else you’ll hurt, but if one day you’ll find yourself pierced in your sleep from your own grip.)
Though she’s never really been given the option to choose, she likes to play this game.
Last month it had been the flowers she’d helped Celine tending to –she'd chosen to be the bugs in the dirt, that time, for many reasons, but mostly because Zoey had once made some joke about bugs when you lift up a rock–, only to be asked to uproot them later for a bouquet meant for a slab of stone, unmoving, silent as was the house, like she once was, before her fate had come along, before two people in her life had asked for her to sing.
(Prove to them, then, as you do yourself, that you are still as much bird as you are beast. For how much longer will your own lullaby soothe you? Whyever did your mother never sing one for you?)
She’d felt terrible, watching the flowers wilt. Would they not have, had Mira cut them? Precisely, confidently, following a pattern that came naturally to her.
Or maybe Zoey, with a certain rhythm only she could hear, efficiently and quickly done.
Maybe it was just because it had been Rumi, that they had lost their color like that. That they’d gone back into the soil after only a few days, even though she’d been careful with her gloves and meticulous in their placement by the grave.
Maybe the things she touched just all belonged underground.
She’ll stay far away from the carp, just in case.
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
It turns out that musings from when she was fifteen years old stay true even years later. She should’ve stayed away from that vase, like she’d stayed away from the paintbrush, from the fish, f̶r̶o̶m̶ h̶e̶r̶ g̶i̶r̶l̶s̶, from her destiny.
(From a mother's love.)
From the Honmoon.
(From a loving touch.)
She should’ve known. Should’ve listened better. She should have done as she was told.
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
Rumi trembles, she shakes and shakes and shakes in the way she didn’t allow herself to for the longest time, her patterns catch the light in b̶e̶a̶u̶t̶i̶f̶u̶l̶ gnarled and sharp bends before her legs try and give up on her to make her sink to the floor.
The Honmoon wails with her, acting as a cruel mirror of the etchings on her skin.
She should’ve let herself fall. She was already far too broken to be beautiful ever again.
(Was too far gone to ever be forgiven for what she couldn't be.)
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
There was once a very lonely girl, who always did as told. Who believed every word thrown her way, and never dared to ask why.
The girl was shackled by a responsibility far too great to bear alone, and so, as fate had done, time and again, it gave her a silver lining.
It gave her love, two people to share this burden with, with the condition that she could not be loved back. Not as she was.
(I can still fix it.)
The girl had made her peace with it, had told herself that it would be enough because it had to be.
The girl was born bleeding, and she would grow up bleeding, too.
She would bleed not because of sacrifice, or duty, or divinity.
(Who? Who? Who? Who are you bleeding for now, fool?)
If asked, she’d say it was love. That she bled, for love.
But this girl had also grown a clever tongue, had grown up a liar.
The truth is much simpler than that.
She bled, because she had to remind herself that she could. And as long as she did, she was welcome to stay, just a little longer.
This, was the one selfish little thing she could not deny herself.
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
Rumi knew she would die one of two ways; by a blade or by a demon's claws.
She knew that the correct choice was to die by claws, as her duty asked of her. She knew that after a songbird lost its voice, it had no purpose at all. She knew she’d rather let herself be discarded than useless.
And yet, here she was. Choosing to die by a blade she’d learned the shape of through touch. The one thing her hands could map out without breaking.
And yet, here she was. Offering it to the mother who couldn’t love her. Who she wouldn’t beg for anything, anymore, if only she allowed her this one kindness.
The mother who would not look at her. Who wouldn’t take the blade she’d seen a child carry for weeks on end until she could barely tell the weight was there to begin with.
(It never got lighter.)
(She had just gotten so good at pretending it had, hadn’t she?)
She is a songless bird, and for all it’s worth, a declawed beast.
No one will look at something as unsightly as her now that it’s so obvious.
Well, if duty would not answer her plea, then she would turn to punishment. She’d make it take her, even if she had to pry its maws open herself.
ᯓ🗡 ݁ ˖.𖥔 ݁ ˖🦇 ݁˖
If you were to ask Mira and Zoey, Rumi’s hands were calloused and full of scars. After the soot and charr were wiped clean, they simply felt like, well, hands.
It’s crazy to think that they’d been looking forward to this for years. Crazier still, that Rumi had managed to keep them from this that long. She did seem a bit uncomfortable, like now that they were running their nails through the patterns and scars, she didn’t know what to do with herself. It was like her hand had never been held at all, and now she was just confused on whether to let it flop to the side or hold it impossibly straight and still.
Zoey would’ve thought it to be a funny scene, if it wasn’t just so terribly sad in retrospect. Mira was looking far too sternly at Rumi’s palm, trying to decipher where the actual lines of it ended to ‘predict’ how many kids she’ll have –’None, Mira,’ was what Rumi had said– and whatnot. Zoey wants to argue that the patterns absolutely count, and so she’ll actually live forever and be… employed forever. Or something. She wasn’t a palm reader, sue her.
Rumi looks more and more constipated as they go on, and they decide to give the poor girl a break. Which just means they all collectively let all the blood rush to their brains by hanging upside down from their couch. Prime group activities, and all that.
“So, when did it start? I mean, the touching thing. Or did you just decide on touch celibacy one day as like, your first ever conscious thought? Since what age did you gain consciousness? I think I did at like–” She takes a second to recall the memory, her tongue sticking out in concentration brought on by the pounding in her head, probably from being upside down. No, definitely from being upside down. “...Uh… Five! I think I tried taking a sip of fountain water and just became aware mid slurp.”
Mira had been looking at Zoey with an expression that screamed ‘real smooth, Zoey’ but cut off abruptly the second she mentioned her coming-of-consciousness age. “The hell were you doing when you were three then? Not a single thought?” The visual poked at her ribs.
“Dunno, beats me. Eating my snot? Sucking on a big rainbow lollipop? Whatever three year-old’s do.”
She looks like she wants to keep arguing, but they both get distracted from their impending debate by Rumi’s less than flattering snort.
“Sorry! Sorry it's just… Ah… Nothing.” Rumi’s still giggling, which is rude because they were meant to be interrogating her! She doesn’t get to laugh and offer no answers!
Apparently Zoey’s glare is strong enough to get her to relent. She sees her close her eyes and exhale, like a weight is being redistributed around her body instead of lifted, but placed for maximum functionality and efficiency.
“I broke a vase.”
(Rumi is twenty-four years old when she learns how to let go of that sword. She is twenty-four years old, and she finds out that she quite likes the matching callouses they all seem to have.)
(Wounds slowly learn they are allowed to scab over.)
(She will never be asked to bleed for love again.)