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Rumi is backstage when she receives a call from an unknown number, and within the next hour, she’s on a plane to Jeju.
It’s times like these that she’s glad she has access to a private jet. It’s one thing to book a last minute flight, and another to book a last minute flight in the middle of an emergency, where every second she’s not on a plane is time wasted on worrying herself to death.
They land in Jeju Airport, where a car, which Bobby had arranged for her, is waiting for her. The driver rushes up to her, exchanging polite greetings with her before he moves to load her suitcase—just the one, because it was all she could pack within such short notice—into the trunk of the car. Rumi stares out the window as they drive out of the airport and to the hospital.
She couldn’t believe her ears at first. The words Celine and slipped and fractured her wrist weren’t things she thought she’d ever hear uttered in the same sentence. Realistically, it shouldn’t have freaked her out as much as it did, because Celine was—and still is—exactly like her: a Hunter. Celine has experienced far worse than a fractured wrist in her lifetime. She has the scars, now faded by time, to prove it. And yet… There’s something about this, in particular, that just… shakes Rumi. There’s something about it that feels so different to Rumi, because all she’s ever seen of those old wounds are the scars left behind in their wake, but she was never actually there to see Celine get hurt—not like how she’s here now, at a hospital in the middle of bitter winter on Jeju Island, staring at Celine, propped up in bed as a nurse attends to her, her right wrist secured in a bulky splint, in disbelief.
The only thing she can think to say is, “What were you thinking?”
Celine turns towards her, surprised. “You’re here?”
“You gave them my number,” Rumi replies, all of her frustration that’s laid dormant suddenly rising up to the surface again.
She wants to say, If you didn’t want me here, then why did you give them my number in the first place, and You scared the shit out of me, and about a million other things that have nothing to do with the matter at hand and cut much, much deeper, but it all gets tangled up into this metric ton of awfulness that’s hard to talk, let alone breathe, around.
But “I know”, is all Celine says back, her expression unreadable. Then: “I just… didn’t think you’d come.”
Rumi looks away before her emotions betray her.
It’s the first time they’ve spoken to each other in almost a year, and it’s like pulling teeth.
She waits for the nurse to leave before she approaches Celine’s bed. It’s definitely strange, being this close to Celine again after what feels like an eternity. The last time they saw each other, Rumi had begged Celine to kill her, and even without the borderline apocalyptic circumstances to take into consideration, that isn’t the sort of thing you can just hi, hello, awful weather we’re having, huh your way back from, especially after months and months of radio silence.
Rumi takes a moment to just breathe, then she says as calmly and, more importantly, as civilly as she can, “The doctor told me you waited almost a whole week before you got checked.”
“I didn’t think I needed to,” Celine says, not quite looking at Rumi. “It was only a bad fall.”
Just like that, Rumi is furious again.
“Only a bad fall?” she echoes, her hands balled into fists and shaking with everything she’s trying so hard to just hold back because the hospital is the last place she wants to be causing a scene. “Celine, you—You fell, you hurt yourself, and you didn’t even think to have it checked, and now it’s only gotten worse and you need surgery, but yeah, sure, it was only a bad fall.”
Because it’s not just the fact that Celine hurt herself. It’s that Celine is always like this. Always keeping things to herself, always swallowing it down, always just powering through the next problem, the next challenge, a fractured fucking wrist—until she can’t, and until she ends up in a hospital bed waiting for surgery because she can’t ignore how bad things have gotten anymore.
Until she can’t deny how wrong she’d been.
It doesn’t really come as a surprise to her when Celine calmly says, “I’m fine, Rumi. Everything will be fine, after the surgery,” but it still manages to infuriate her further anyway. Celine notices this, of course, and—in typical Celine fashion, again—doubles down. “It’s really not as bad as the doctor might have made it seem.”
“Yeah,” Rumi scoffs, her mouth moving faster than her brain can catch up, “because I’d trust your judgment over an actual medical professional’s.”
Celine winces like this isn’t just about her stubbornness now, her refusal to get her injury checked—and from the way Rumi feels a little guilty herself for saying what she said, she supposes she can’t really deny either that, maybe on a subconscious level, she did mean to dig at something deeper between them. Older.
Not even an hour in the same room together again after all that time apart, and Rumi feels exhausted beyond her years already.
Neither of them speak for a while. Rumi hovers by Celine’s bed awkwardly, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets because she doesn't know what to do with them. She works her jaw stubbornly, trying to keep her temper in check, and trying to think of what she could possibly say now when talking to Celine is like talking to a barely sentient brick wall.
“Look,” Rumi says eventually, feeling all of the fight leave her body, “let’s just… get all this over with, okay? Then we don’t have to—well, you know.”
Celine just nods, mouth pressed into a thin line.
Rumi heaves a sigh, then she drags herself and her suitcase to the corner, where she flops down into the only other piece of furniture in the room, a chair that looks like it’s in desperate need of reupholstery. She pulls her hoodie over her head and squeezes her eyes shut, pretending that she can’t feel Celine staring at her long and hard enough to burn a hole through her skull.
The next few hours pass by in enough of a blur that it makes it easy for Rumi to pretend like things aren’t still totally, absolutely fucked between her and Celine. Rumi is happy to just sit back in her corner of the room and let the nurses and doctor do all of the talking, only chiming in when they involve her in the discussion. Around noon, Celine is brought in for surgery, and Rumi whiles the hours away in the waiting room talking to Mira and Zoey. They check in on her, ask how she’s doing, ask how Celine’s doing, and Rumi assures them everything is fine, she’s fine, Celine is too—or, at least, she will be—and then swiftly changes the topic by asking them how things are going over there in Seoul. She left in the middle of a music show taping, in the middle of promotions, and while she didn’t think she’d be away for too long, her sudden trip to Jeju has still thrown their meticulously organized schedule into something of a disarray.
dont worry abt it rumi!!!! Zoey says in their group chat, when Rumi apologizes for all the trouble she’s—or, well, if she’s going to be really accurate about it, Celine’s—caused them and Bobby. its just a bunch of music shows anw. theres like. a bajillion of those🤷♀️missing a few wont hurt anybody!!
yeah, Mira agrees, always a far calmer texter than Zoey, it’s not like we need any more trophies either. we’ve got more than enough of those for one lifetime.
Rumi smiles down at her phone even as this strange, almost wistful feeling tugs at her heart. Even after all the time that’s passed since they defeated Gwi-ma, she still finds it hard to believe sometimes that it really is just… over. That they technically don’t even really need to push their promotions, their music, as hard as they had to before because there’s nothing—no one—left for them to fight anymore. It’s all quiet now. Peaceful. She’s glad for that, of course—she’d be crazy not to be, after everything they’ve had to sacrifice to get here, and after everything she’s personally had to go through—but the calm after the storm is always strange to navigate and get used to.
we know how hard it is for u to be there, Zoey goes on to say, and Rumi can feel her pouting even through text. we’re always just a mssg away if u need us 💖💖💖
yeah. just say the word and we’ll be there, Mira says.
thanks guys, Rumi types out, choked up and grateful. She knows they mean it, and that if she needs them here now, they’ll be here now. But… she feels that this is something she needs to do on her own, as difficult as it is. promise i’ll be back soon 🩷 love u!!
About an hour later, after the operation, Celine is wheeled back to her room. Rumi keeps her hoodie on and her head down for most of the walk back to Celine’s room; it was one thing for Celine, a retired idol who, despite being the leader and face of the Sunlight Sisters, has lived in relative obscurity for over two decades now in a secluded mountain village on Jeju Island, to be here, and another thing for Rumi, who has her face plastered all over ramyeon cups, beauty products, and the yogurt drinks she spotted in the vending machine outside the waiting room earlier, and who’s actively promoting her music now with HUNTR/X. She’s already caught a few people throwing curious glances her way, like they aren’t sure if their eyes are playing tricks on them, or if that’s really Rumi of HUNTR/X who just passed by.
“How’re you holding up?” Rumi asks Celine when they’re all alone again in the room. Not that she gets much of an answer—or just any answer at all—out of Celine. She’s too wiped, too heavily and violently medicated, to even keep her eyes open, and even the soft grumble that Rumi guesses is supposed to be an attempt at a reply, another one of her annoying and stubborn I’m fine’s, sounds like it costs her all of what little energy—life—she has right now to get out. So Rumi leaves her be, retreating to her corner of the room as Celine drifts off into deep, heavy sleep.
Not much changes, or even really happens, over the course of the next two days. They’re keeping Celine there for monitoring, mostly, and because she’s still mostly blitzed out on whatever painkillers they’re pumping her full of, the staff default to Rumi instead for all matters related to Celine’s status and recovery.
As Rumi signs off on another medical consent form, she can’t help but feel a little bitter thinking about how Celine genuinely thought she could handle all this by herself. She would have insisted on it—that she’ll be fine, that she can do it all on her own, that she doesn’t need Rumi.
So much for not needing her, Rumi thinks as she returns the form to the nurse, because unless Celine was, like, ambidextrous this entire time and just kept it a secret for whatever reason, because that’s what she does best after all—keep secrets, that is—she wouldn’t be able to do even something as simple as signing her signature because it was just her dumb-as-shit luck that she ended up falling wrong on her right hand.
Celine needs her. Rumi kind of hates that she does, after everything that’s happened between them, but there’s also a small, stupid part of her that’s almost… maybe not glad, exactly, but maybe a little relieved about it, even after everything that’s happened between them, so now the only thing Rumi can do is spend the rest of the day being indignant about it.
On the third day following her surgery, Celine is finally discharged. Rumi receives a packet of discharge papers, a schedule for the follow-up, and a supply of pre-sorted medicine packets while Celine watches on glumly, like her brain is still too fogged up with all of the medication she’d received over the past few days for her to really insist that she can handle everything herself and that Rumi doesn’t need to take charge signing off on all the documents, or paying for everything, or driving her back home.
Well—she’s mum about everything else except that.
Rumi has to whip out her driver’s license just to convince Celine she isn’t making this all up, or that she isn’t actually planning to just drive them back home, like, totally undocumented. Even then, Celine just gawks at her and at the piece of plastic she waves at her face, as surprised as she was when Rumi suggested taking over driver duties not even a minute ago.
It annoys Rumi, but… she supposes that isn’t really something Celine would know, since she never actually told her about it, and Celine’s reaction—surprised, yeah, but now also maybe a little bit sad—only makes her feel guilty about that, like she should have told her, but how exactly do you go from you should have just killed me when you had the chance, before everything got as bad as it did, because you never loved me anyway, and you never wanted me anyway, to something as painfully mundane as hey, I know we haven’t spoken in months but I finally got my driver’s license, like all of the months of radio silence between them never happened?
The answer, obviously, is you don’t.
“I can just call a daeri,” Celine says, still holding on to her car keys like the thought of Rumi driving actually terrifies her or something. “You must still be tired too, so you don’t need to trouble yourself with it.”
“Yeah,” Rumi says, offended, “sure, but no driver in their right mind is going to accept a booking out to the middle of nowhere. It might take us hours just to find someone willing to get stranded up there.” When Celine still won’t budge, she adds, “I’ll drive as slow as you want and as slow as you’re comfortable with, but just—let me, okay?”
It’s only then that Celine relents. Not willingly, of course, and she wears her reluctance openly on her face, but she turns over the keys to Rumi in the end anyway, which is all that really matters.
The drive back is quiet, but it isn’t the awkward, honestly kind of oppressive quiet she’s gotten used to with Celine at the hospital. It’s manageable, which is the best Rumi can hope for right now. Every now and then, though, she feels her annoyance flare up again just a little bit when Celine starts backseat driving, dropping a You’re riding the brakes too hard here, and a You need to ease into the turn there, and once even a slightly more exasperated, “Rumi-ya,” when she brings the car to a full, agonizing stop at an empty roundabout just to double-check a nonexistent blind spot. Which, Rumi thinks, is kind of just a load of bull because she’s being as careful as she can be for Celine’s sake, and somehow Celine’s still managed to find issue with every other little thing she does.
The only reason Rumi bites her tongue and keeps her more unpleasant thoughts to herself is because it’s hard not to feel bad for Celine, given the state she’s in. All it takes is a quick glance at her, at the way she cradles her injured hand gingerly, visibly bracing herself against every bump on the road like even the tiniest jolt is like a hammerstrike to her already very brittle bones, and Rumi loses any eagerness she might have had over picking a fight with Celine.
They arrive late in the afternoon. They might have arrived earlier if Rumi didn’t need to drive at speed that would make even a snail weep, but—whatever. Not really important right now, when all she can think about is how strange it is to be back here. It was one thing to be with Celine at the hospital for several days straight, but another to be with Celine back home, where every corner, every nook and cranny, is just… laden with history—their history—the very thing Rumi’s spent all this time trying to get away from.
Rumi drops her things off at her old room, then finds Celine in the kitchen, nursing a glass of water with her good hand. She holds up the plastic bag with all of Celine’s medication and says, “I’ll leave these here. The nurse said you have to take the ones in the clear packets thirty minutes after every meal, and the painkillers are only for when the pain spikes.”
“I know,” Celine replies, not exactly condescending, but still in that uniquely Celine way that always rubs Rumi the wrong way, like she’s instead saying, I was there too when the nurse gave those instructions, you know—I have a broken hand, not amnesia.
“Alright,” Rumi mumbles, tamping down the bitterness, “I’m just, you know… making sure.” She hovers where she’s standing for a few seconds, then finally turns to leave. “I’ll be in my room if you need me.”
Suddenly, Celine says, “Rumi—wait.”
Rumi freezes, then turns around again to face Celine. She looks… conflicted, is the only way Rumi can think to describe it. Maybe a little ashamed, though what for, exactly, Rumi can’t quite say right now. She just does as Celine says—wait—and wait, and wait, long enough that it’s starting to make her feel a little uncomfortable again, until Celine finally says, “I… just wanted to say thank you. For coming all the way here. For… staying with me. I know it’s—” She furrows her brows, then shakes her head slightly. Recalibrates. Says, with far less complicated uncontrollable feelings involved, “I know you’ve been busy with your promotions, so after my checkup two weeks from now, I won’t take up any more of your time. The doctor said I should be able to manage fine on my own by then, anyway.”
There’s a part of Rumi that wants to scoff and say that her being able to manage fine on her own is entirely dependent on whether or not Celine can take even two weeks off from being so stubborn about how ‘fine’ or ‘okay’ she is, about how it’s ‘not so bad’ even when she’s clearly in agonizing pain—but instead, all she does is nod and make peace with the fact that this is going to be the longest two weeks of her life, probably.
She just needs to survive it somehow, that’s all. Then she’ll be on her way back to Seoul, far away from here, and far, far away from Celine again.
It takes a lot of getting used to, being back home. Her childhood room feels almost entirely alien to her now, even if she spent a good chunk of her life in here. Grew up in here. Sleeping is another thing that suddenly feels like something she has to re-learn, somehow, because she’s gotten so used to her bed back in Seoul that sleeping on the floor again makes it almost impossible to—well—sleep. The first night is especially rough. She wakes up three times in the middle of the night, spends all the time in between tossing and turning because she can’t find a comfortable position, and by morning her shoulders and back feel annoyingly stiff.
Rumi knows it isn’t just that she hasn’t been a child in a long, long time that’s making her feel all… fuzzy and weird about being back here, though. It could never be as simple as that. It’s more than that. It’s the knowledge that Celine is just down the hall in her own room, probably just about as miserable as Rumi is feeling right now. It’s the inevitability of rounding a corner and bumping into her, or walking into the kitchen and finding her trying to chop vegetables with her uninjured hand, which is so—stupid that Rumi can’t believe her eyes when she sees it, and even wonders if she just had such shitty sleep that she’s actually starting to hallucinate things.
But, no: she’s very much not hallucinating, and Celine is very much swinging her knife down at the poor onion, with barely concealed frustration.
“What the fu—” Rumi says, stopping herself just before she drops the f-bomb at, like, seven in the morning. She looks down at the barely chopped onion, then at the knife in Celine’s hand, and then back up at Celine’s face. “What… are you doing?”
“I’m making breakfast,” Celine answers, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, only to frown down at her right arm, inconvenient and totally useless in its bulky plaster splint. “Or at least, I’m trying to.”
Rumi looks down at the onion again and wonders for a second how it hasn’t rolled off the chopping board yet. Frowns at her when she says, “You shouldn’t be. Don’t you have, like”—she looks around the kitchen groggily—“I don’t know, a multi-cooker or something? Or are those not a thing here?”
This time, Celine blinks at her, surprised.
Rumi can’t help but blush at the implication. It’s bad enough that Celine can’t seem to accept that Rumi knows how to drive now; she doesn’t need her to act so surprised that her capabilities in the kitchen now go beyond just boiling hot water for ramyeon too. “We were given one by a fan,” she explains, “You know how weird fan gifts can get.”
Celine—thankfully—puts the knife down and gestures towards the cabinet. “It’s somewhere in there.”
Rumi huffs out a breath then starts rummaging through the cabinet. She finds the multi-cooker still inside its box, clearly having never seen the light of day. She sets the box down on the table and says, distracted enough to be conversational, “You had one of these all along and you never use it.”
To which Celine simply replies, "Because I can cook.”
Rumi pauses to make a face at Celine before she redirects all of her attention back to the hefty appliance in her hands. “Yeah, well, we haven’t got much of a choice right now, do we?”
Celine says nothing in response to that.
Rumi looks around at the ingredients Celine set out on the table—the unfortunate onion, zucchini, garlic, doenjang—and then at the meat Celine left out to thaw on the counter, and puts two and two together. She moves the multi-cooker to the counter, plugs it in, and then gets to work. She’s a little self-conscious about cooking for Celine, someone who definitely has much higher standards and expectations when it comes to food compared to, say, Mira and Zoey—who aren’t exactly any better at cooking than Rumi is, with or without the introduction of the multi-cooker into their shared penthouse, so they’re in no place to judge anyway—but by the time she’s chopped up the onion and is moving on to the zucchini, she feels significantly less cagey and even somewhat confident.
That is, until Celine starts talking. Just like with her driving, Celine really can’t seem to help but backseat. “The zucchini should be more evenly sliced. This one here is too thick, and this one’s too small,” she says, followed shortly by, “The garlic doesn’t need to be that finely minced,” and then, “You’re being too heavy-handed with the knife,” and by the time she starts talking about how the beef should be handled, Rumi’s head is so hot she thinks she could actually use it to cook in place of the multi-cooker.
She puts down the knife for a second and just takes a deep, deep breath before she says, “I know I’m not, like, Gordon Ramsay or whatever, but could you just chill out? Please?”
Celine doesn’t look too happy about being told to ‘chill out’, but it does seem like she at least recognizes how obnoxious she’s being, and how grateful she ought to be that they’re going to have breakfast at all because there’s someone to make it. So, she just sighs, “Alright,” and watches on quietly, her pursed lips the only indication of her dissatisfaction with Rumi’s lacking culinary skills.
Without Celine buzzing in her ear anymore, the rest of breakfast prep becomes more manageable. Pleasant, even. She knows she’s still got a long way to go if she wants to become even half the cook Celine is, but Rumi’s begun to enjoy cooking her own meals, even if it’s only with a multi-cooker, which Celine might not really count as ‘real’ cooking but for someone who used to live off of ramyeon and food delivery entirely, a food snob’s thoughts on what constitutes for ‘real’ cooking doesn’t really mean shit. More so because said snob is injured and can’t even cook for herself right now.
Her mood seems to take a slightly more optimistic turn, though, when Rumi serves her a bowl of the doenjang-jjigae she’d prepared with the multi-cooker, all by herself. Rumi starts to worry that she’ll actually have to feed Celine by hand, but thankfully she can handle that much on her own, ladling up a good amount of stew with her spoon before she shovels it all into her mouth. The way she takes her time chewing—tasting—reminds Rumi of, well, Gordon Ramsay in all of those episodes of MasterChef that she used to binge with Mira and Zoey when they had the day off but were too tired to actually plan a trip to the mall or anything else more tedious than just some good old couch time.
Eventually, Celine says, “This is good,” without sounding like she’s being held at gunpoint to say so. But this is still Celine, after all, so she can’t allow herself to just say the food is nice—that she was wrong about whatever grudge she seems to have against, like, technology—without also adding a quick remark of, “The texture’s just not really what I’m used to.”
Rumi doubts there’s any real difference between this and the kind of stew that Celine would gladly toil over, but she’ll take a win where she can get it. Mostly, she wishes it didn’t matter so much at all to her that Celine likes her cooking.
She wishes what Celine thought didn’t still matter to her at all.
They spend the next three days getting used to being around each other again—to their new routine, their new rhythm.
Celine is still Celine, so even if she’d reluctantly conceded that the multi-cooker isn’t a culinary blasphemy, she can’t seem to keep herself out of the kitchen and out of Rumi’s way. It’s annoying, obviously, but Rumi decides to just let her do whatever she wants, because it’s easier than having to constantly argue with her, and because she knows that to some degree, it’s less about her not trusting Rumi to not fuck up dinner, and more about how she still wants to feel part of the process somehow. She wants to feel involved, and just generally not totally useless or helpless—two things Celine has never been in her entire life, no matter what else Rumi might feel about her right now. So Rumi pretends she doesn’t hear it when Celine makes another remark about her knife skills, or tells her that she really should have put this vegetable first before the other one as if it’s going to make that much of a difference, or that another spoonful of soy sauce won’t hurt, she didn’t buy the really good kind just to be stingy about it.
At the very least, Celine seems to enjoy the food in the end anyway, and even seems a little impressed with Rumi’s expertise with the machine she’d been raging against for philosophical reasons or whatever. They eat together in fairly companionable silence, until Rumi notices that Celine’s looking at her weird.
“What?” she asks, self-conscious.
“Nothing,” Celine replies, shaking her head, “it’s just… You always used to pick all the mushrooms out when you were little.”
A beat, then Rumi mumbles, “I was, like, eight—I think I hated most things,” and looks away.
Apart from saving Rumi the inconvenience of having to wash a billion pots, pans, and dishes after cooking, the multi-cooker allows Rumi to attend to other matters around the house while it does its thing.
The house is in tiptop shape, of course, because Celine’s a neat freak like that and because she doesn’t really have much else to spend her time on these days than cooking and cleaning, so Rumi would be more surprised if the house were in a state of disarray than spotless. Still, she does everything she grew up watching Celine do, day in, day out, sweeping and mopping the floors, pulling weeds from the garden bed, cleaning up fallen leaves and trimming back overgrown branches, and watering plants that she honestly doesn't even know the names of.
Celine is always hovering close by, of course, where her garden is concerned. She’s constantly reminding Rumi to be more careful, or to not drown the plants in water, but other than that she spends most of that time just walking through the garden with Rumi. She goes especially quiet during those moments, and Rumi catches the way her expression softens when she’s checking on each of the plants thoroughly, patiently. It’s rare that she ever sees Celine so… content, or at peace, but mostly Rumi finds herself thinking about how irrational it is for her to feel so jealous of a bunch of plants for being so—loved.
Thankfully, by the time that thought hits her, the food is usually ready to go and Rumi can go on with the rest of her day pretending she didn’t, even for just a second there, start resenting plants.
Being here feels like a weird, temporary vacation into the past. Their past. The house feels like it’s just permanently been frozen in time, and there are moments where Rumi thinks if she just closes her eyes and then opens them again, she’ll be the little eight-year-old who used to pick all the mushrooms out of her meals again. Not Rumi the idol, or Rumi the adult, or Rumi the half-demon Hunter—just Rumi-ya, as Celine always used to call her, fond, exasperated, full of the love that she feels has gone cold between them, especially as Rumi grew older. Just the little girl who used to look at Celine like she hung the moon and the stars in the sky, and who used to think that she was invincible—that she wouldn’t do something as agonizingly mundane as fall wrong and break her hand.
She gets the impression sometimes that when Celine looks at her, it’s that little girl she sees, not Rumi. It makes Rumi wonder if that’s why it’s so hard for Celine to accept any help at all from her. Not because she doesn’t—or can’t—believe that Rumi is a perfectly functional adult, but because she can’t accept that Rumi is just an adult at all, that she can’t see her as anything but the little girl who used to follow her around the house all the time, whining about how much she wanted ice cream, or for Celine to give her her undivided attention. The little girl who still needed Celine—but, now, maybe won’t need her anymore.
Won’t want her anymore.
They don’t talk about any of it, though. Because that’s just not what they do, and because it’s easier to pretend like they didn’t just miss almost a whole year of each other’s lives, and because if it hurts Rumi—the not knowing—if she hates it, then it must be just as if not twice as bad for Celine.
So they talk about her medication, and about what to have for dinner, and about needing to go to the market to pick up supplies, and about a million other things that don’t really involve either of them on a personal level and won’t rip open their barely scabbed-over wounds from the last time they saw each other and leave them bleeding out to each other.
It’s probably better this way. Rumi doesn’t really know if she can trust herself to actually talk to Celine anyway. She suspects Celine feels the same way.
Just when Rumi starts thinking she’s adjusted to life here, around Celine, again, Celine comes knocking on her room’s door one evening and throws a wrench in that.
She’s in the middle of a video call with Mira and Zoey, catching up with them and keeping them caught up on everything happening this side of the world—which is probably a dramatic way to put it, but they might as well be on a different continent entirely, with how far they are from, like, civilization—when the knock comes. She doesn’t even register it at first, with how soft it is, almost unsure, and then it comes again, and this time Rumi sits up, says, “I’ll call you guys back later,” to Mira and Zoey, and then opens the door to find Celine standing on the other side.
“O-oh,” Rumi mumbles. To say she’s surprised to see Celine here now, wrapped up in a bathrobe, having clearly just come from the bathroom, would be an understatement. “Hey. What’s… up? Did something, uh, break in the bathroom or…?”
Rumi’s about to punctuate that with a warning that she doesn’t know the first thing about plumbing, if that’s the problem, so they’re going to have to wait until tomorrow to sort that out, but then Celine clears her throat awkwardly and says, “No, everything’s… fine in there.”
“I see,” Rumi replies, because what else could she possibly say? “So, uh… Why are you…”
“There’s no easy way to ask this, so I’ll just get straight to the point.” Celine takes in a deep, deep breath, like she’s bracing herself for something far more serious, and far more grave, than what actually comes out of her mouth: “I need your help washing my hair.”
For a moment, neither of them speak.
“You need me to wash your hair,” Rumi repeats, perplexed.
Celine glowers at her for a second, then heaves a sigh. She sounds deeply and thoroughly embarrassed when she answers, “Yes.” Her eyes flit down to her splinted arm, and then back up at Rumi. “I really didn’t want to bother you about this, but… It’s been days now, and…”
Rumi blinks at her, still unable to wrap her mind around what’s happening right now.
The more bitter part of her would probably say something along the lines of, You wouldn’t be in this predicament now if you’d just gotten yourself checked right away instead of insisting that you can just soldier on through anything, or that everything is fine, just like you always do—just like you did with me, but the more sensible and more sympathetic part of her wins out in the end, and she says, “Okay.”
Relief flickers across Celine’s face, followed by sheepish gratitude.
The bathroom really isn’t big enough for two people, but they find a way to make it work. Rumi drags in a small, plastic footstool for Celine to sit on as she leans her head back over the edge of the bathtub. They wrap up her injured arm with a dry towel then Rumi gets to work. With the sleeves of her ratty old oversized sweater rolled up, Rumi lathers Celine’s hair with shampoo. Celine is quiet the entire time, lips pursed, and as strange as this ordeal is for Rumi too, she can’t really find it in herself to blame Celine for feeling so… embarrassed about it. Knows how difficult it’s been for her to just let go and let Rumi do things for her, but this—this isn’t like letting Rumi cook for her, or clean the house for her, or even do her laundry. This is vulnerable in a way those other things aren’t. It’s two people who’ve effectively become strangers to each other, now cramped inside this small bathroom, Celine dressed in nothing but her bathrobe and exposed in more ways than one.
Something about that makes Rumi say, “Do you remember how long it always used to take to dry my hair?”
Celine doesn’t respond right away, which makes Rumi start to regret she ever spoke at all, but then she huffs a breath that Rumi realizes is a soft, almost disbelieving laugh, and she decides maybe she didn’t make a mistake after all.
“There was that one summer,” Rumi goes on to say as she massages Celine’s scalp, “and… I don’t know if you remember it, but I remember complaining a lot about how hot it was, and how I couldn’t even stay out long to play, and my hair was really becoming a problem for me but then you suggested I have it cut, and I was just—so mad about it.”
“Yes,” Celine says softly, “I remember.” A beat, and she’s smiling a little when she adds, “You wouldn’t speak to me for a whole day because of it. I had to bribe you with a trip to the ice cream parlor in town.”
Rumi huffs at ‘bribe’, but goes quiet for a moment. Then, she says, “Mom kept her hair long, so I guess I just couldn’t imagine wearing my hair any differently.”
It’s Celine who goes completely silent this time.
Rumi grew up with only old photos and Celine’s stories to get to know her mother by. She knew that she was Ryu Miyeong of the Sunlight Sisters, and she was beautiful, and could sing well, and she was brave and strong, and that she had long, long hair that she always wore in a braid. That’s why Rumi started to braid her own hair too, and why she wouldn’t let Celine tie her hair any other way when she was a child, and why the simple and honestly very practical suggestion of a haircut was so offensively unfathomable to her. It was one of the only ways she felt connected to her mom.
The other was—and is—Celine.
She fills a basin up with water and pours it down over Celine’s hair, rinsing away the shampoo suds. The silence is deafening, and Rumi can practically hear the gears turning in Celine’s head as she mulls over their first real conversation since Rumi flew back here—their first real conversation since that night under the tree. It’s also probably the first time they’ve even talked about her mom in years.
As if the bathroom weren’t claustrophobic enough, now it’s almost suffocating.
Rumi wrings out Celine’s hair, then wraps it up in a towel. Celine objects to Rumi’s offer to help her brush and dry her hair at first, but then quickly relents when she remembers that if it was already impossible for her to even shampoo her hair with one hand, then she’s going to face the same problem with everything that comes after it too. So she lets Rumi follow her back to her room in the end, and lets her brush and blowdry her hair for her even if Rumi can tell from the look on her face in the mirror that this is probably the last bit of indignity she can take for the night before she loses it completely.
They don’t speak for a while, mostly because trying to talk over the whirring of the blowdryer is an exercise in futility. It leaves Rumi time, at least, to just gather and then hold herself together when the past hour has started chipping away at her resolve to just… not talk, not bring up the past, or that night, or ask her the one thing she’s wanted to ask her this entire time.
Once Celine’s hair is completely dry, Rumi runs the brush through it again. She keeps her eyes glued to the movement of her own hand for the most part, but then briefly, her eyes flicker to the mirror on Celine’s vanity. Celine isn’t the loud type when it comes to her happiness, but she can tell from the satisfied, almost sleepy look on her face how she’s feeling.
“Better?” Rumi asks.
Celine hums. Rumi doesn’t really expect her to say anything, but she does: “This is one of the things I don’t miss about being an idol. We’d spend all day in rehearsals, or in the recording booth, and then at fan events that by the time we got home, all we wanted to do was get some sleep. There were days I wouldn’t get to wash my hair just because I didn’t have the time or energy for it—with or without the demons to take into consideration too.”
Her surprise over Celine’s sudden… chattiness aside, Rumi does get it. There are times she’d go several days without a single drop of water or shampoo touching her hair too, all because she’s being whisked to another rehearsal, or to another variety show taping. She understands the added discomfort of having hair as thick as Celine’s too, and why it must have been driving her crazy these past few days to not be able to do anything about it.
Before she can second-guess herself, she replies, “I’m guessing Mom must have had it pretty bad too.”
Something sad-like flickers across Celine’s face before she says, smiling, “She was always our hair stylists’ worst nightmare.”
“Been there,” Rumi says, laughing softly.
It’s been a bizarre evening, but this part is… almost pleasant.
“Thank you, Rumi,” Celine says when the lull in their conversation passes.
Rumi feels weirdly uncomfortable with how sincere Celine is being, so she just puts on as best a smile as she can as she says, “Yeah, well, I guess I learned a thing or two from our hair stylists.”
Celine gives her one of those not-quite-laughs, more an amused exhale than anything. She goes quiet again for a long, unnerving moment, then, she says, “I’m sorry.”
Rumi feels like something’s squeezing her throat.
“I know how much of your time I’m taking,” Celine goes on, sounding guiltier and guiltier by the second, until she finally gets to the core of it—the real reason she ever said sorry in the first place, picking her words very, very carefully: “And… I know how hard it must be for you to… be here.”
Rumi’s grip tightens around the handle of the brush. She doesn’t know what to say at first, or if she should say anything at all—maybe it’d only make things worse, and lead this conversation down a path she doesn’t want it going anywhere near—but in the end, she puts all those years of being an idol to good use and keeps her voice admirably level as she tells Celine, “It’s fine. I mean, it hasn’t been convenient, exactly, but we just need to tide you over until your appointment this coming week, and we can put this all behind us.”
The fakeness of it all almost makes Rumi wince. Celine sees through it too, of course, but has the decency and the grace to just let it go without remark. She just nods, and says, “Okay.”
She sees Rumi off at the door, after, when all is said and done. She looks tired again, like it took everything out of her to just… talk, even if only barely, to Rumi, and looks like an entire lifetime’s worth of exhaustion has just caught up to her.
It’s in moments like these when Rumi can’t decide if she wants to be angry, just like she believes she has every right to feel, or if she wants to just—be anything but angry. Be the bigger person, the sensible one, the forgiving one, even if it’s proving really fucking difficult to be. But whatever it is she’s feeling right now, it doesn’t seem to fall squarely into either of those categories, or just into any category at all, nothing easily recognizable and definable.
So, in the end, she says, “If you need help with your hair again, just let me know.”
It feels like the only thing she can say, after an evening like this.
Celine’s face does something complicated, but she nods all the same.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Rumi says, before she turns to leave. She feels the weight of Celine’s gaze follow her as she disappears down the hallway.
Something shifts between them after that night. Not drastically, or dramatically, but in an infinitesimal way that feels much larger than it actually is too.
They’re still not really talking to each other, but they do speak to each other more casually, sometimes even warmly, before they catch themselves and steer themselves back into something more polite, if not distant. Safe. The kinds of conversations they can have without worrying that history, sentimentality—feelings—will start leaking through the cracks again if they’re not careful.
Celine still hovers constantly, of course. Obviously. But she’s also toned it down a little, in a way that makes Rumi feel that Celine’s doing—penance or something, like that’s going to make up for how incredibly strange the past couple of days has been, or make up for… everything else. She can at least appreciate that Celine isn’t being so nitpicky about everything she does anymore, particularly where cooking is concerned. Not that she’s stopped giving unsolicited advice and opinions on things like Rumi’s knife skills, because she very much hasn’t, but now it’s less you’re doing this wrong and more you can make it a little milder by cutting it with a bit more broth, but it depends on what you prefer, or you can try adding the gochugaru at the end rather than at the start with everything else, it keeps the heat fresher, or even something along the lines of you could try making sogogi-muguk next, I’m sure the multi-cooker can handle that—you always used to like it with extra radish, turning the suggestion into something far more personal than Rumi is really comfortable with contending with right now, but she makes the sogogi-muguk all the same, extra radish and all.
“I don’t really know why I hated mushrooms so much as a kid,” Rumi says as they eat, blowing on her spoonful of broth, beef, and vegetables before she swallows it all down. “You’d think I’d find radish more offensive on the palate.”
Celine just quirks a smile at her and says, “You were always unique like that.”
Rumi blushes despite herself, but decides she doesn’t hate the teasing so much.
Even during the times they don’t necessarily need to be around each other, they are. They go for long walks together in the afternoon, because there’s only so much entertainment they can find at home, and there’s only so many ways they can keep ignoring the way all the history of that house—between them—is continuously pressing in on them. They wander the mountainside, but they don’t go anywhere near the graveyard, the zelkova tree, for obvious reasons. That’s the one place they can’t be, together. Rumi makes a mental note to drop by before she leaves, though. To visit her mom’s grave, tidy it up.
Other times, it’s a lot less scenic than that. It’s simpler. They just sit together to watch TV after dinner, catching up on the news—not that there’s much for them to really concern themselves about, not anymore—and whatever new hot and popular drama is currently airing. Celine is more enthusiastic about the weather report than she is about ye old love triangle, but she doesn’t really complain either when Rumi decides she wants to spend the evening watching that sort of thing. After, they take turns showering, and Rumi comes back a few minutes later to help Celine wash her hair again.
She wouldn’t say things are ‘better’ between them exactly, but with each day, each second, that passes, it does become easier and easier to just… be around each other again. To exist with each other the way they used to for years, before reality caught up with them, before life happened, before that night under the tree. It’s not lost on Rumi that given the circumstances, their roles have been reversed, with Rumi doing most of the cooking, cleaning, driving—another thing that, thankfully, Celine has eased up on when it comes to the backseating—now, at least until Celine’s been cleared by her doctor, but it still feels like treading old, familiar paths again, just… in different shoes, maybe.
They live with each other again, until the remainder of the two weeks that had felt impossibly long to Rumi before, practically an eternity to her, pass by so fast it doesn’t even register.
The night before Celine’s post-op follow-up, she comes knocking on Rumi’s door again at around the time Rumi would normally be setting up and preparing dinner. She was on the phone with Bobby just seconds earlier, making arrangements for her return to Seoul. Now, she shoots Celine a confused look, unsure of why she’s barging into her room now, until Celine says, “Here,” and tosses her the car keys.
Rumi catches it with her free hand, phone still clutched in the other. “Where, uh, are we going?”
She isn’t sure if she’s more surprised at the fact they’re going anywhere at all, this time of the day, or at the fact that Celine just tossed her the car keys now like she wasn’t far more willing to entrust her car and her life to a total stranger than Rumi, when she first arrived.
“Out,” Celine answers, like that’s helpful, “for dinner.”
That’s how Rumi knows Celine must be in a good mood. Celine isn’t the kind of person who does takeout, or orders in—not that anyone in their right mind would actually deliver, like, pizza all the way out here anyway. They rarely ever ate out when Rumi was growing up, and any time they did, it was for a special occasion, or to get Rumi to stop throwing a tantrum over a throw-away suggestion about haircuts with the power of ice cream. Rumi knows Celine must be ecstatic about tomorrow—about finally getting her life back—if she’s willing to actually drive into town just to have dinner.
So, she throws on a jacket and her sneakers, and drives them to town.
They end up at an unassuming, hole-in-the-wall restaurant where Celine is apparently a regular at, from the way the elderly couple who run it greet her. They’re shocked by her injured hand, and ask a lot of questions about it, only for that shock to be redirected at Rumi, whose face the ajumma says she recognizes from TV and from the posters in her granddaughter’s room, but she doesn’t really seem to know much else about her or HUNTR/X, or even that Celine was ever a celebrity at all, because she says, candid and blissfully oblivious, “I didn’t know you two were related! If I’d known, I would have dedicated a special dish here to little Rumi.”
Little Rumi, as if she isn’t at least a whole head taller than this woman. But Rumi just smiles politely, thanks whatever higher power is up there that they’re the only people in the restaurant right now, and lets the I didn’t know you were related comment slide off her back, just like Celine is opting to do now too.
Pretends that it doesn’t sting, even just a little, to know Celine’s never mentioned her once to these people who apparently see her here often enough to be so chummy with her.
With all of that out of the way, they’re seated in a cozy, more private corner of the restaurant, far enough from the hustle and bustle at the front as more and more people file in for dinner. They both order jeonbok-juk, some vegetables to share, and a can of soda for Rumi. When Celine cocks a brow at her, Rumi huffs and defensively says, “Come on, I haven’t had soda since I flew in from Seoul. The sweetest thing I can have at the house is, like, a glass of water with a spoonful of sugar,” and Celine just sighs like Rumi’s sugar intake just isn’t worth sermoning about right now.
When they’re all alone again, Rumi asks, “How’d you even find this place?” This is the kind of place you’d drive right past if you didn’t know to look for it, tucked behind a bend in the road and marked by nothing more than a small hand-painted sign out front.
“I discovered it a few months ago, after a trip to the market,” Celine explains, scooping up some kimchi with her spoon, “I was quite hungry already, and I hadn’t set out and prepared anything for lunch, so I decided to drive around and find somewhere to eat. I stumbled upon this restaurant, and the rest is history, as they say.”
“Maybe if you weren’t so stubborn about the multi-cooker, you wouldn’t have run into that problem,” Rumi says, teasing, testing the waters a little, and—thankfully—Celine breathes out a soft laugh.
“Maybe,” Ceilne agrees, “but I wouldn’t have found this place either.”
Rumi hums, happy to concede that point, but she goes on to ask, “Why do you have one anyway, if you’re so hell-bent on, like, never using it?”
Celine slants her an amused look, like she can tell that Rumi’s been thinking about that a lot. “I wasn’t really planning on ever getting one, but it seemed to be all the craze with people these days, and the one I got was on sale anyway, so…” She shrugs, like that isn’t an absurd reason to spend thousands of won on a kitchen appliance. “I just never got around to using it, that’s all.”
Since Celine is being pleasant tonight, Rumi decides to let her have this one. Just shoves some more kimchi into her mouth instead.
“What about you?” Celine asks, suddenly.
Rumi pauses mid-chew. “What do you mean?”
Celine looks like she’s going to tell her that talking with her mouth full is barbaric, but stops herself before the words leave her own mouth. She just looks back at Rumi unsurely for a second, before she says, “You finally got your driver’s license.”
“Oh,” Rumi says, intelligently. She continues chewing on her kimchi, buying herself time to think of what to say, then she explains, not quite looking at Celine, “I just, you know… thought it was time. You were always telling me that I should take up driving lessons sooner rather than later, but we never had the time, and… Now we do, so.” She gives Celine a small smile that just tugs at one corner of her mouth. “I just went for it, I guess.”
Celine gets this funny look on her face, before she composes herself and says coolly, “I’m glad to hear that.”
Rumi doesn’t know why that stings, but decides she’d be better off not trying to unpack it.
Their food is served a few minutes later. There’s no room for talking when they’ve got their mouths to stuff full of mouthwateringly delicious food, which is a kind of relief in and of itself. She helps Celine mix some of the vegetables into her jeonbok-juk to make it a little easier for Celine to have a taste of everything, and then thinks, why not, and mixes some into her own bowl. By the time she’s slurped the last drop of her jeonbok-juk, Rumi is so full she starts to worry that she might not be able to drive them back home without falling asleep at the wheel. But it’s still a good kind of full, of course, and she feels… warm too. Happy, even.
After paying for their meal, and after being pulled into another long but not at all unpleasant conversation by the ajumma, who sends them off with a big smile and a request to Celine to bring little Rumi again with you next time!—and Rumi has to duck out of the restaurant here, at the loud-enough-to-cut-through-restaurant-buzz mention of her name, pulling her cap low over her eyes—they go for a stroll around the neighborhood. They pass by a small but charming coffee shop, and a refurbished appliances store, and a pharmacy with a HUNTR/X makeup ad taking up half its window, Rumi's face smirking back at her from the display. It’s simultaneously funny and embarrassing, so she can’t help the way she snorts out a laugh. Celine chuckles softly too, because if anyone would understand how obnoxious and silly it is to come across one of your own ads out in the wild, it’s her.
They pass by a convenience store too. Celine just walks past it without sparing it a glance, but Rumi stops in front of it for a second, almost mesmerized, and says, “Wanna get some ice cream?”
Celine stops, and turns around to face Rumi.
She probably shouldn’t be so shocked when she was the one who suggested it in the first place, but she’d expected at least an earful about how she just had soda and a big meal besides that, how on earth does she even have room for ice cream, before Celine agrees, and not just a simple, almost nonchalant, “Sure.”
They grab their ice cream and head to the nearby park to enjoy their spoils. There are perfectly fine benches all around them, but they settle on the empty swings instead. Rumi wanted a whole pint of ice cream, but it would have been difficult to share with Celine, and even without a broken hand to take into consideration, Celine isn’t Mira and Zoey, who could body a pint each themselves, and just thinking about it makes Rumi miss them more. Regardless, Rumi is very happy with her popsicle, and Celine seems to be enjoying hers too.
Enough, it seems, to start feeling a little nostalgic and say, “Our sunbaes were really particular about our diets. Ice cream was definitely out of the question, more often than not—but we found our ways.”
Rumi huffs a breath, smiling imagining Celine, younger, around Rumi’s age maybe, sneaking a bag of chips here or a candy bar there under the watchful eyes of their sunbaes. She’d met them once before and while they were generally quite nice to Rumi—mostly because of the dead mom card, in retrospect—they were some of the only people she’d ever seen put Celine on the receiving end of a good nagging.
“I guess we got lucky with you,” Rumi says before she can think better about it.
If the sincerity of Rumi’s remark surprises her, Celine does an admirable job of not letting it show. She just bites a chunk off her popsicle and says, “It’s important to eat healthy,” glancing pointedly at Rumi, “but it doesn’t mean you need to deprive yourself of the things you enjoy either. It’s all a matter of balance.”
“Having a can of soda or two at home would have been pretty balanced,” Rumi says, taking a light jab at Celine, who gives her a flat and unimpressed look before she falls into quiet, easy laughter with her.
For a while after that, they just sit together on the swings, the quiet of the neighborhood settling around them. The park is empty save for the two of them, and the only sounds are the distant hum of the occasional car passing and the soft creak of the swings shifting under their weight. Rumi finishes her popsicle in two big bites then folds the stick between her fingers.
The past two weeks have been strange, and honestly just kind of surreal, but there’s a part of her now that can’t really believe—or accept—that tomorrow, it will all effectively come to an end. That she’ll be on a plane back to Seoul, and out of Celine’s life as much as Celine will be out of hers, again, and it’ll be like none of this ever happened because they won’t ever talk about it again, and maybe won’t ever talk to each other again like they’ve been doing tonight, and over the past few days. All this will ever be is a—blip, an anomaly. A dream to wake up from.
Only now, Rumi isn’t sure if she still wants to wake up from it. To leave.
She doesn’t know if she can bear the thought of Celine not needing her anymore, because even when she didn’t hear a single word from her in almost a year, and even when she waited and waited, clinging on to the hope that Celine would just say something to her, anything at all, even if it was just to get mad at her or nag at her, or tell her that yeah, she didn’t love her, never did, how could she when all Rumi’s ever been to her is a disappointment, a failure of a Hunter, and a failure of a daughter—even when just thinking about Celine made Rumi so angry to the point of tears sometimes that Mira and Zoey would spend hours having to console her, or distract her with food, with video games, with another one of those boring documentaries that Zoey adores and so Mira and Rumi make themselves sit through, for Zoey’s sake—even then, Rumi needed her. She still needs her now, and even though Celine’s right here with her, Rumi still misses her.
Maybe it’s that part of her—that part that’s been angry at Celine for so long, and has missed her for so long, and wishes she’d pick a fight with her now, get angry right back at her because at least that means she still cares enough to yell at her—that pushes her to say, “Why didn’t you call?”
Celine actually recoils, like Rumi’s slapped her. “Rumi,” she says in that tone she always uses when Rumi’s said or done something that’s out of line, or when she wants her to just drop it, whatever it is she’s asking of her.
But Rumi can’t, not this time. “Why?” she asks again, eyes stinging already. And she knows she’s one to talk—knows it goes both ways, that she could have just as easily called Celine instead of waiting for her to pick up her damn phone and just tell Rumi she’s sorry, and that she could have just as easily told her that maybe she hasn’t forgiven her yet, exactly, but she sure as hell would like it if Celine would just give her the chance to. “I waited, Celine. Everyday. And you never—” The words catch in her throat. Tears too, fast. “You never called.”
“Rumi,” Celine says again, pained, “I…”
She looks away, and something about that almost breaks Rumi.
“I just wanted to give you the space you needed,” Celine says, quiet, almost like she’s speaking the words into the night air and not directly at Rumi. Like it scares her to. “I know that I… failed you, Rumi. I spent all my life trying to protect you, just like I promised your mother I would, but I—I never imagined that I would be the one to… to hurt you the way I did.”
Rumi can’t breathe around her ache. “Celine—”
“I didn’t call,” Celine says, looking straight at Rumi now, sad in a way that Rumi’s never seen before, “because I wanted to give you the space you needed. I didn’t want to… impose myself on you, not after everything—,” her voice catching, and the unspoken not after everything I did, hangs in the air between them. She swallows back down whatever great surge of feeling has swelled up inside her, risen up her throat, close enough to come bleeding out of her mouth, and looks away again. “You deserve better than I’ve given you, and… You deserve better than me, Rumi.”
Rumi feels something crumple in her chest.
Rumi feels furious again.
She gets up so suddenly, so violently, that even Celine staggers backwards a little, entire body jolting in surprise. “R-Rumi, are you—”
“You keep doing this,” Rumi explodes, chest heaving, eyes burning from the tears that won’t stop coming now that she’s been broken down completely, devastatingly. “Y-you keep—you keep pulling away, and you keep telling me how I feel, what I need—keep deciding for me—”
Celine rises to her feet now too, alarmed. “Rumi,” she says, reaching for Rumi with her good hand, “please, just… Just sit down, okay? Just—just talk to me, please.”
“I am,” Rumi says, rough and angry and just—so tired, pulling away from Celine, “I am, and you aren’t listening.”
Celine flinches back. She looks like she’s about to cry too, but she works her jaw and settles back into herself. “I was only doing what I thought was best for you,” she tells Rumi honestly, and Rumi knows she means it because even if that’s the last thing she wants to hear right now, there’s an urgency to it, something almost manic, that means she’s dead serious about it, and dead honest. “I—I can never forgive myself for making you think that you were never loved—that I never loved you—and for pushing you into—” She screws her eyes shut, inhaling sharply. “You don’t know how it destroyed me, when you asked me to… I couldn’t, and I’d never. For the longest time, after Miyeong died, I’ve wanted to, but I—I couldn’t, not when I had you, and not when you still needed me, and to have you ask me to—to kill you—” She breathes out, ragged, heavy; an entire lifetime, in one breath. “Killing you would have been killing myself.”
Her words hang heavy between them, like stones.
“I’m sorry, Rumi,” she says at last. Tired, defeated.
And Rumi, feeling sick with everything she’s had to keep bottled up inside her these past two weeks, the past year—all of the anger and the longing and the loss—all of the people they’ve lost, and all of the time they’ve lost between them—says, “You’re right. I do deserve better,” and she can see it, the way her words strike Celine so viscerally even if she was the one who uttered them first anyway, “but you don’t just get to decide that I’ll be better off without you. I—I don’t care that there’s better. I don’t want that. I want you in my life. I… I need you, Celine, and it hurt me that you never even tried to reach out, to talk to me, and yeah, I know—I know I could have said something too but I was angry, and—”
Rumi frowns, then shakes her head.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, feeling just as tired now. “You don’t need to keep trying to protect me anymore, Celine. I don’t need you to, and… I don’t want you to. Not when it’s just hurting you as much as it’s been hurting me.”
Celine says nothing for a long, aching moment, and then, finally, she breaks too.
“I’m sorry,” Celine sobs, and Rumi pulls her close, into her arms, mindful of her injured hand. “I’m sorry,” she says again, and again, and now that the floodgates have opened, all either of them can really do now is cry together, to let out everything they’ve kept in for so long. And maybe it isn’t enough to make up for all the time they’ve lost, or all the things that’d been left unsaid, or even for all of the other ways they’ve hurt each other, and it doesn’t even feel great—it feels awful, objectively—but it’s something.
Something that feels a lot like hope.
When they’ve both wept themselves hollow and dry, they settle back onto the swings. Rumi’s eyes, her head—her everything is aching from how hard she’d been crying, and she feels parched besides that. She doesn’t even think she’s capable of speech right now. She just feels wrung out, somehow feeling both like complete and utter shit, and the lightest she’s been in forever, all at once.
Celine doesn’t seem to be faring any better herself, but she says hoarsely, “You never owed it to me, to… call me, or reach out to me.”
Rumi just shoots her a look, like, Come on.
Celine just smiles back at her, like a sad wet dog. “I know,” she says, even if Rumi didn’t even say anything, not really, “and… I just wanted you to know that it’s okay. I understand why you didn’t want to talk to me, or—couldn’t get yourself to. Honestly, sometimes… Sometimes I think one of the reasons why I couldn’t get myself to talk to you is that I was afraid you just… wouldn’t want me to. Or that you wouldn’t pick up the phone.”
Rumi wants to say: I would have picked up the phone in a heartbeat, and Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to talk to you, but I still would have wanted to hear your voice anyway, and You might have caused most of it, but you’re also still the only person I want to run to when I feel this way, and If you hadn’t fractured your wrist, I would have spent my entire life waiting. But she doesn’t. What she says instead is, “Yeah, well,” tired.
“Yeah,” Celine agrees, just as tired.
They fall quiet again, and for some reason, the next time Rumi feels okay enough to speak again, she says, “You never told the ajumma about me.”
Celine looks back at her, bewildered to the point of forgetting how sad they both are right now, before she looks away again, up at the sky this time, and replies softly, “I guess I just didn’t feel like I still had the right to talk about you to anyone.”
Sniffling, Rumi mumbles, “And I just assumed most people would be proud enough to brag about it if their kid was the biggest pop star in the country.”
Her response takes Celine by surprise enough to actually punch a laugh out of her. Rumi laughs too, as much as she can when she feels like a husk of herself the way she always does after a good, hard cry.
“I am proud of you,” Celine says, more seriously this time. “Always. I know your mother would be too, if she could see the woman you’ve become.”
Suddenly Rumi feels like crying again. She hopes it isn’t obvious, but from the way Celine is looking at her right now, it probably is. This is why all the acting gigs go to Mira, and not her.
Thankfully, Celine doesn’t say anything about it directly, and reaches over to cup Rumi’s face in her hand, brushing her thumb against the curve of Rumi’s tearstained cheek. When she pulls back, she offers Rumi a small smile, and asks, “Would more ice cream make you feel better?”
“You already know the answer to that,” Rumi says, smiling a little now too.
“Good,” Celine says, rising to her feet. “I think it would make me feel better too.”
They both look like they’ve been run over by a truck the next day at Celine’s post-op appointment, and the doctor is kind enough not to comment on it. The x-rays are good, and the stitches come off. The bulky splint that has been the bane of Celine's existence for the past two weeks is finally replaced with a lighter velcro brace, and the difference is visible on her face immediately. The doctor runs her through a few more tests, including a grip assessment, before he clears her for driving too, among all of the other things she’s been cleared to do again. Cleared, essentially, for the return of her own life—and Rumi doesn’t think she’s seen anyone so happy to simply be able to hold a ballpen and sign documents on her own again in her entire life.
Rumi watches all of this from the chair in the corner of the examination room and feels something complicated move through her. She’s happy, of course, and relieved, but she can’t deny that after their conversation last night, it’s become hard for her to just leave again.
She wants to stay and just make up for all of the lost time, to catch up on everything they’ve missed about each other’s lives in the time they weren’t speaking to each other, and to annoy each other the way only family knows how and the way only family can. She would rather not have Celine anywhere near the ER again, but she’d gladly sit through every doctor’s appointment, every trip to the market, every painfully mundane moment.
But she can’t. She knows that. She has a life to get back to in Seoul. Responsibilities, fans, and a family that she, Mira, and Zoey have built up from scratch for themselves. She can’t stay here forever, even if it’s what her heart wants most right now, and she knows Celine wouldn’t ever keep her here either, even if it’s what her heart wants most right now.
To celebrate, they have lunch at the jeonbok-juk spot again, and this time the ajumma manages to convince Rumi to take a picture with her—something she can hang up on her restaurant’s walls and brag about, like HUNTR/X RUMI WAS HERE!!! After lunch, they drop by the same convenience store from the night before and sit at the park again, popsicles in hand. This time, it’s Celine who suggests the pint, but Rumi steers her back to the popsicles because the last thing she needs right now is for Celine to somehow hurt herself trying to scoop out ice cream with a cheap plastic spoon. She’s had enough fractured wrists for one lifetime.
“What are you going to do now?” Rumi asks Celine.
“The same thing I’ve always done, I suppose,” Celine answers, almost mechanical, as she chews on her popsicle. Then, more jokingly, she adds, “Maybe I’ll finally give the multi-cooker a try.”
Rumi snorts. “I don’t wanna say I told you so, but…”
Celine just hums, letting Rumi’s teasing slide.
They go quiet again, and this time, it’s the kind of silence that Rumi is happy to inhabit. It’s the kind of silence that reminds her of all of the times as a kid she’d spend hanging around the kitchen, waiting for Celine to finish washing the dishes or preparing the ingredients for their next meal, hours in advance sometimes, kicking her feet back and forth happily, contentedly, as she filled in her coloring books.
She never had a shortage of those—coloring books, that is—almost like Celine knew they were her favorite way to pass time waiting for her, so they could go visit Miyeong’s grave together, or go play outside together, or go for a drive to town together. She found a whole box of them in the storage room the other day, when she was looking for something else; it doesn't surprise her that Celine kept them all, but it still makes her heart ache something fierce anyway.
It makes her admit, “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” Celine says back, sounding just as awkward about it as Rumi feels right now.
Rumi thinks, they really are alike. To their own detriment, more often than not, and maybe they wouldn’t have gone almost a whole year without talking to each other if they weren’t they way they are, if they weren’t each other in all of the most awkward, clumsy, uncomfortable ways—but this time, it comforts Rumi. It’s something she can bring back with her—a piece of home, and of Celine—when she returns to Seoul tomorrow.
They walk back to where the car is parked after they’ve run out of ice cream. Rumi fishes the keys out of her pocket and holds them out to Celine. “Here,” she says. “You must be itching to drive again.”
Celine just looks at the keys for a moment, thoughtful… then she walks around to the passenger side.
Rumi stands there for a second, keys still suspended in the air, before something warm and quiet settles in her chest. She follows after Celine and gets in the driver seat.
Celine looks pleased with herself, comfy in the passenger seat in a way Rumi’s never seen her before.
“I think you’re starting to like having someone drive you around,” Rumi says as she starts the car.
“You could use the practice,” Celine answers plainly, leaning back and letting her eyes slip shut. “New drivers need all the road time they can get, and I doubt you drive yourself to your schedules back in Seoul.”
Rumi scoffs. She looks over at Celine, smiling to herself.
Then, finally, she drives them back home.