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Pictures of you, pictures of me
Remind us all of what we used to be
– The Last Goodnight, “Pictures of You”
믿어왔던 모든 진실이
거짓들로 나를 뒤덮었으니
All the truths I once believed in, have buried me under a heap of lies
– Dreamcatcher, “Deja Vu”
“Rumi! This came in the mail for you.”
Zoey plopped the small package on the kitchen island, before pulling a barstool out for herself. It was breakfast time at Huntr/x tower, and a delicious spread of doenjang jjigae, gyeran bap, Coco Puffs, and gilgeori toast were spread out on the counter between them.
Rumi looked curiously at the small parcel. “Oh! The photos arrived.”
Mira was confused. “From the photoshoot? They sent actual prints instead of a link?”
“No, not from Vogue,” clarified Rumi. “These are from Celine.” She pushed away her half-eaten breakfast and went to the sink to wash her hands. “I met her for lunch the other day, and she gave me an old roll of undeveloped film she’d found. I sent it away to be developed.”
“That’s cool,” said Zoey. “Any idea where it came from?”
Rumi came back to her seat, and picked up the package.
“Yeah. When I was little, Celine used to take lots of pictures with this old-fashioned film camera she had. We would walk to the convenience store to get them developed and get ice cream, it was this whole thing.”
Zoey gasped. “Shut. Up. Are you telling us these are your baby photos? I wanna see baby Rumi!!”
“I bet you were super cute,” Mira intoned, scooching her barstool closer to Rumi’s.
Rumi felt the tiniest twinge of trepidation about sharing childhood photos of herself—photos that she had never seen before, and thus had not vetted—with her two best friends. She wasn’t that worried though. Other people had embarrassing photos of themselves as toddlers running around naked in their parents shoes, or smearing spaghetti around their chests, or throwing tantrums because they couldn’t pet the tigers at the zoo; not Rumi. Celine had been in the entertainment industry since she was fourteen, and it had made her extremely cautious about public perception. The photos Celine had taken were exclusively of a clothed, happy, and 100% human-passing Rumi, usually surrounded by flowers or teddy bears or occasionally toy weaponry. They were about as dignified as photos of a small child could be, not to mention completely pattern-free.
The worst that could happen was that Rumi would look kinda stupid in some of them, and Mira and Zoey would tease her about it for a week. Big whoop, they were always finding new things to tease each other about anyway.
“Sure, we can look at them together,” she said, and peeled open the package.
Rumi opened the envelope, and the first picture was not of eight-year-old Rumi playing swords, or five-year-old Rumi holding a teddy bear.
It was of a twenty-something young woman with loose, inky black hair spilling over her shoulders. The woman was leaning back in a squishy armchair, cradling an infant to the opening in her bathrobe, and she was looking at the child with complete and utter adoration.
Time came to a stop.
“Eomma?” Rumi whispered, completely in shock.
She’d never seen Mi-yeong like this: no makeup, no stylist-approved clothes, no press-smile.
She’d never seen the way Mi-yeong looked at her.
As if she was reading Rumi’s mind, Zoey said, “I've never seen a picture of you and your mom before.”
“...I haven't either,” Rumi admitted softly.
Mira put her hand on Rumi’s shoulder. “Are you good? We can give you some privacy if you want.”
Rumi took a deep breath. “No, it’s okay. I think I want the support.”
Mira and Zoey immediately scooted even closer. Mira wrapped her arm around Rumi’s shoulders, and Zoey rested a hand on Rumi’s knee.
Rumi’s eyes raked over the photo one more time—the soft expression on her mother’s face, her arms under Baby Rumi, the warm glow of lamplight—before she shuffled the photo to the bottom of the stack and confronted the next one.
They were outside. Rumi recognized the faded old gingham picnic blanket from her childhood. It was new and vibrant in the photo, stretched out over a bed of clover, with Rumi and Mi-yeong dozing on its center in dappled sunlight. Rumi was in a onesie.
“Awww,” Zoey and Mira cooed in unison.
Mira nudged Rumi. “You always did like your sun naps,” she joked.
Rumi flipped to the next one, and the next. Rumi and Mi-yeong smiling in a field of flowers. Rumi gripping Mi-yeong’s finger with two pudgy hands. Rumi and Mi-yeong in matching yellow t-shirts with ducklings on them. Mi-yeong holding Rumi next to a fountain while she laughed and splashed. Rumi chewing on Mi-yeong’s braid. Mi-yeong and Rumi making the same grumpy face at each other. Mi-yeong trying to feed Rumi some sort of orange mush, most of which had ended up on Rumi’s face and the high chair. Rumi asleep in her cradle in a funny position.
The photos were a mixture of candid and posed, silly and sweet. Mira and Zoey coo-ed and aww-ed over each one, but Rumi barely heard what they had to say. She usually felt a vague sense of sadness whenever she thought about Mi-yeong, but for the first time in a long time, Rumi felt genuine grief for the mother she had lost.
“Sooo, are we just gonna ignore that Rumi had purple hair as a baby?” Zoey asked eventually.
Rumi sniffled.
“.... you know what, we can talk about it later.”
The next photo made Rumi pause.
Rumi wasn’t in this one…. at least not directly. She might have been just out of view, in the cradle just visible in the corner of the image. Mi-yeong stood in the center of the dimly lit room, making bedroom eyes directly at the camera. Her hand was outstretched, and Rumi realized she was holding hands with the photographer.
“Uhhh, I don’t think Celine took these pictures. Not unless she had a very different relationship with your mother than she lets on,” said Mira.
Rumi didn’t comment. With a growing sense of trepidation, Rumi flipped to the next photo.
“Oh!”
There was a man holding baby Rumi. He was tall and handsome, with wavy black hair, thick straight brows, and plush lips for a man. He was holding Rumi up over his head like she was Simba from The Lion King, and the two of them were clearly giggling and having a good time.
(The horizon was crooked, and the man wasn’t fully in frame, almost like the photographer wasn’t used to being on the back side of the camera.)
“Is that your dad?” Mira asked in disbelief.
Rumi gulped. “I don’t know.”
Zoey’s eyes were flicking rapidly from Rumi, to the photo, and back again. “He looks like you,” she declared.
Against her better judgement, Rumi continued to the next photograph:
More photos of baby Rumi: Rumi, Mi-yeong, and the man posed together in formal hanbok. Rumi pouting in a cherry red raincoat. Rumi with half her face obscured by a traditional gat hat that was much too large for her head. And then—
A mirror selfie of her mother and father. Demonstrably, without a doubt, her father, standing with his arms wrapped possessively around Mi-yeong’s waist and both his lavender hair and his patterns fully on display.
Rumi slapped the photo face down onto the counter, but it was too late.
She’d felt Mira and Zoey stiffen at her sides. They’d seen. They’d seen, and it wouldn’t be long now until they put two and two together and realized what she was, if they hadn’t already. They were going to realize that Rumi was a monster. The thought stabbed her like a knife to the chest.
“No…”
This couldn’t be happening, not now, not after she’d been so careful and sacrificed so much and kept this secret for so long.
She tried to stuff the photos back into the envelope—as if that would fix anything—as if that could turn back time—but then she felt another violent pang in her chest and she crumpled.
She couldn’t do this, she didn’t want to lose them, it wasn’t fair, this couldn’t be happening.
Rumi struggled for breath. Hands gripped at her arms and she struggled against them. She couldn’t let them see her patterns, but they’d already seen-!!!
She was on the couch. Somehow, she was on the couch, and she was hyperventilating.
“C’mon, Rumi, breathe.”
Rumi tried. The breaths all came wrong. The terrible aching in her chest grew.
“Just breathe with me jagi, please.”
If she didn’t die of a broken heart or a holy blade first, maybe she would asphyxiate to death.
“Deep breaths! In……. and out…….. in……. and out……..”
“Hhhh–Hhh–!”
This was ridiculous — Rumi was a professional singer. No, more than that, she was the lead fucking vocalist of HUNTR/X. Her body was her instrument, and she had been playing it almost her entire life. Put differently, she practiced breath control for a living, so it should not be so fucking hard for her to just breathe.
As if reading her mind, Mira suddenly sang a scale. “네 네 네 네 네 네네 네 네”
Rumi latched onto the vocal warm up like it was a life line. “네 ….네 네네 네 네”—gasp—“네 네 네.”
Picking up on what she was doing, Zoey sang “Tho-tha-tho-tha-tho-o-o-o-o-o-oh!”
Rumi swallowed. That had always been one of the more challenging vocal warm ups for her; there wasn’t a th- sound in Korean or Jejueo, only in English.
“Dho-tha-do-da-do--o”-gasp-“o-o-o-o-oh!” she attempted. It was difficult when her throat still felt like it was half-constricted.
“Tho-tha-tho-tha-tho-o-o-o-o-o-oh!” Zoey corrected, going up an octave.
“Tho-tha-dho-tha-do-o-o-o-o-o-oh!” Almost right.
“미 메 마 모 무 마 마 마 마,” sang Mira.
“미 메 마 모 무 마 마 마 마,” Rumi echoed.
“Mommy made me mash my M & Ms, oh no!”
Mira and Rumi both stared at Zoey.
“Shut up, that is not a real vocal warm up,” said Mira, voicing what Rumi was thinking.
“It is too!” claimed Zoey.
Rumi snorted. “Mommy made me mash my M&Ms,” she sang softly. “Oh no.”
Zoey went higher: “Mommy made me mash my M & Ms, oh no!”
Rumi leap-frogged over her to the next octave: “Mommy made me mash my M & Ms, oh no!”
Mira dropped to the lowest scale she could sing: “Mommy made me mash my M & Ms, ohhhh nooooo.”
HUNTR/X devolved into giggles.
“Better?” asked Mira.
Rumi nodded. She realized, belatedly, that they were each holding one of her hands.
The three of them sat together on the couch, curled together like the tails of a gumiho. For a while, no one said anything, and the only sound was Rumi’s slowly steadying breathing. Zoey continued to take exaggerated breaths, chest rising and falling with the regularity of a metronome, giving Rumi something to keep time to. Mira stroked the back of Rumi’s hand with her thumb in time to the beat.
“Listen, Rumi—I think I speak for both of us when I say we still love you and we have your back, no matter what,” said Mira, shooting a searching gaze towards Zoey.
Zoey nodded emphatically. “You’re still the same Rumi! Nothing’s really changed.”
Rumi couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Jinja? You're really okay with me being…” she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“Of course we are!” Zoey exclaimed. “We would never abandon you over something you can’t control.” She sighed and curled closer into Rumi. “I can’t imagine what a shock it must be to suddenly learn you’re half-demon like this.”
Rumi froze. Her reaction did not go unobserved.
“You knew,” said Mira simply.
Rumi stared at the floor, involuntarily tightening her grip on their hands. “Yeah, I knew,” she whispered.
“When?” Mira pushed.
Rumi’s brows furrowed. “What do you mean, when?”
“How long have you known?”
“... as long as I can remember.”
Mira stood up suddenly and began to pace, jerkily, through the living room with none of her usual grace, leaving Rumi’s hand suddenly cold and empty.
“You’ve known this whole time? Why didn't you tell us?!?” She made a series of frustrated half-movements, reaching for the honmoon only to dismiss it, then winding back her arm only to drop it. She finally settled for digging her fingers into her own scalp. “Ugh!!”
Rumi perceived the issue immediately: Mira processed strong emotions through movement… preferably, the movement of her blade. But with recent revelations, she clearly didn’t want to send the wrong message by drawing her weapon.
“It's fine,” she said resignedly.
“It’s not fine with me!” Zoey objected. “No weapons near the couch.”
Mira glared at them both, but she compromised by summoning a simple staff; her gokdo, but with the edges sawn off. She lunged into a series of violent swiping and stabbing motions.
“I’m sorry,” Rumi whispered. “I should have told you the truth about me.”
Mira didn't let up on the one-sided battle she was waging across their living room. “It’s more than that, though,” she grunted. “Don’t you see?
“We hunt demons because they’re evil”—swipe—“monsters”—slash—“who steal people’s souls and deliberately cause human suffering.” Mira jabbed her finger at the stack of photos lying innocently on the kitchen counter. “Did that man look like a soul-stealing monster to you?
“For eight fucking years, we’ve assumed every demon we cross is bad and evil and has to die. If it had patterns, it had to die. Just like you and Celine taught us. And now, suddenly, we’re finding out that some demons are capable of good, actually? Have we been out here murdering loving fathers and patting ourselves on the back afterwards? How could you keep that from us?”
“I didn’t know he was nice,” Rumi mumbled.
Mira paused in her tirade. “What?”
“I didn't know my father was nice,” Rumi repeated, louder. “I didn't even know he was around for part of my childhood. Up until today, I had always kind of… assumed the worst about how I came to be.” Rumi gulped and fiddled with Zoey's hand in her lap.
“I'd always wondered… if my mom even knew what my father was. Or what I was going to be. I used to wonder if, given all the information, she still would have chosen to keep me…”
Zoey’s free hand clapped over her mouth.
Mira sat down heavily, her weapon dissipating back into the honmoon. Rumi winced as she remembered a late night back in their trainee days, when Mira had tearfully confessed that she'd been unwanted by her parents, both before her birth, and every day after. Rumi took Mira's hand again, and forged onward.
“I’ve never met a nice demon before, and I'm still not sure how or if my father was really different, let alone how he and my mom got together. All my life I've thought all demons are monsters, and if that was true, why should my dad be any different? Why should I?”
“Is that why you never told us?” Zoey asked softly.
“I mean, there were practical reasons, too…” Rumi prevaricated.
The faults-and-fears thing hadn't been idle paranoia; Gwi-ma’s minions were everywhere. Even for normal hunters, it was important to shield any weakness the demon king might be able to exploit; for Rumi, it had been doubly imperative that he never even suspect Rumi’s true nature, because neither she nor Celine knew just how demonic or dangerous she could potentially be, nor what influence he might be able to exert over her.
It wasn't safe for her to let her guard down around regular humans, either, even if they made lots of inaccurate assumptions about what her patterns were. There had been the Yuchiwon teacher who thought they were bruises, and asked her if everything was okay at home. Rumi, aged 5, had replied honestly that demons kept attacking her eomma, and had been submitted to psychological counseling (Celine had lied to the counselor about a supernatural movie project she’d been cast in, and promised to give up the non-existent role). Then there had been the pediatrician, who thought it might be a rare new skin condition, and wanted to have her tested, excited at the prospect of being the first to discover something (they’d switched doctors). For the first four years of her life, Rumi had worn hats and bandanas every time she was in public, and when her purple hair was accidentally revealed, the tabloids had a field day tearing apart Celine’s parenting skills.
She wasn't sure how the public would interpret her patterns now, if Dispatch ever found her out, especially now that they had grown so much. Maybe as tattoos? That would have been career-ending during Celine’s generation, but maybe it would be less disastrous now.
As for her fellow hunters, the only other one who'd ever known about her was Chaewon, and after how horribly that had ended… Rumi shuddered. She understood why Celine had forbidden her from telling any of the others, even her own partners. She’d had good reasons, reasons Rumi agreed with, at least in the beginning, before she really knew and trusted Zoey and Mira.
But now?
Rumi let out a heavy sigh.
“... But yeah, if I'm being honest, a big part of it was that I didn't want you to see me as one of them.”
Zoey pulled Rumi into her arms and squished her tight. “I promise you, even if you somehow grew horns and a tail, we’d always see you as Rumi first.”
Zoey paused. “Wait a minute. You're actually really human-looking...”
Rumi let out a small wounded sound.
“Wait, sorry! That came out wrong. Obviously you are human, what I meant was, that you easily pass for someone who is 100% human.” Zoey pulled away from the hug and looked her over carefully.
Rumi could see the gears turning in her head, and she feared the question that would come next. She ran the tip of her tongue over one overly-sharp canine anxiously.
“How did you even know you were half-demon if you don’t remember your dad?”
Oh… that wasn’t the kind of question Rumi had been expecting. It was kinda worse, actually.
“Celine told me, eventually. But also, I have naturally purple hair and…” she gulped. There was no good reason to conceal this any longer, just her own fears and self-loathing. Mira and Zoey had been so understanding throughout all of this; she owed it to them to finish sharing the truth. “... and patterns,“ she finished.
Mira sat up. “You have patterns?” she asked in horror. Her gaze snapped to Zoey.
“Holy shit. Holy shit.”
Tears sprang to Rumi’s eyes. She couldn’t blame them, though. It was one thing for them to accept that their friend was half-demon in theory, but it was another thing to confront them with actual, disgusting demonic traits like patterns.
She tried to pull away, but Zoey and Mira pulled her right back in.
Mira cupped her cheek. “Don't you see we could have lost you?”
“We were like one wardrobe malfunction from fucking skewering you!” Zoey cried. She scrabbled for the hem of her hoodie. Rumi was confused as Zoey looked at first her tummy then her lower back frantically, apparently finding nothing.
“Where are they? Show me right now.”
Surely she wasn’t actively seeking…?
“You want to see them?” asked Rumi.
“Yes!” Zoey hiccuped. “I need to memorize them in case you’re ever impersonated.”
Rumi hesitated.
“Please,” Mira pleaded.
Rumi couldn’t say no to them. So, in spite of her trepidation, she pulled her hoodie up and over her head, revealing the horrible proof of what she was. They stretched sinisterly across her collarbones and twisted tightly around her arms like barbed wire.
Zoey sobbed. “Did you know zebras have unique stripes?” she blubbered, tracing her fingers over the jagged patterns, tears flowing freely down her face. “Every zebra looks different, that’s how they can recognize each other and form close family groups called harems. We’re gonna learn your stripes because you’re part of our harem, Rumi.”
Mira choked.
“Um. That’s, um, not how I would have phrased it, but yeah. You’re family, Rumi. With or without patterns.”
For the second time that morning, Rumi’s chest ached and her lungs seemed to rebel. This time, however, she wrapped her arms around her friends and pulled them closer, toppling the three of them onto the seat cushions.
An overwhelming wave of relief crashed over her, and Rumi sobbed as it washed through her. Zoey and Mira held her through it, crying and making gentle shushing noises and telling her everything was going to be alright. They lay there like that for a long, long while.
The sun had changed positions in the sky by the time anyone felt like returning to the hard conversations.
“... we still need to figure out what to do about nice demons,” said Mira.
“Right!” agreed Zoey. She sat up (much to Rumi’s dismay), then she fished a notebook out from between the couch cushions and started to scribble in it, using Rumi’s ribs as a desk. “We need to know how common they are, how to tell nice demons from evil demons, what makes them able to resist Gwi-Ma in the first place…”
“We can ask Celine about it,” Rumi mumbled. “Later, though. I can’t handle any more big revelations or emotional conversations today.”
Mira jerked. “Ssibal!”
Rumi cracked open one eye. “What?” she asked wearily.
Mira paused. There was still so much left to unpack—particularly around Celine, holy fuck—but Rumi was tired. And so was Mira, if she was honest with herself.
“Nevermind. It can wait until tomorrow,” Mira conceded.
Rumi kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you, jagiya.”
Zoey squirmed. “Hey! Me too!”
Rumi puckered her lips and waited until Zoey had leaned in close to pull her back down, so she was once again laying flush against her and Mira like a very warm and wiggly blanket. The notebook slid to the ground, but Zoey just kissed the closest part of Rumi—her collarbone—with an exaggerated smack and accepted her fate. The mid-morning sun slanted through the windows and shone peacefully on the three hunters braided together on the couch.
For the first time in decades, Rumi started to purr. She’d always enjoyed her sun naps.