Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rumi’s hands trembled as she held her sword up to Celine.

“Do what you should have done a long time ago. Before I destroy what I swore to protect.”

She knew her mother’s best friend would be unwilling to grant her the relief she was seeking, would accuse her of being a quitter and a disappointment, maybe, never out loud but always clearly conveyed in the slight tightening of her eyes and the tension in her brow. Rumi begged anyway. Celine had never loved her. Or, rather, she’d never loved her in the way Rumi had needed. What Celine considered love had always been centered on guilt and obligation. She’d taken Rumi in because it was the right thing to do. She’d kept Rumi safe and healthy because it was what Miyeong would have wanted. She’d loved Rumi because she was supposed to. And even as a child Rumi had known, on some deep and deeply ungrateful level, that love under duress was no love at all.

Celine had done her best, though. She’d held Rumi when she’d cried, had braided her hair with flowers when she’d asked, had taught her to tie her shoes and count to 10 with gentle hands and a calm voice. The two of them had danced in the kitchen to Sunlight Sisters tracks well into her teenage years. No amount of misguided comfort, of “demons are bad but you’re good”, of “fix yourself, then you can tell the truth”, would ever fully obscure those experiences for either of them, and Rumi knew this was asking too much.

But Celine was a Hunter first and foremost. Before she was a debatably unwilling foster parent, before she was a teacher or a band manager, before she was a person, really, she was a Hunter. And she would do what needed to be done.

Rumi was a Hunter too, of course, it was one of the very few things she had always taken a great deal of pride in - the fact that she could put that before everything else, just as Celine had taught her. But here and now, when it mattered most, it turned out she was too much of a coward to do the right thing herself. To turn the sacred blade in her hands and aim it back at her own traitorous body. So when Celine failed to take Rumi’s sword, she dug into her soul for the rage, for the pain, and the unfairness of it all, and her voice echoed with a demonic roar. “DO IT!”

Celine’s feet shuffled backward as she flinched away, taking in the tattered state of the honmoon around them in a paralysis of shock and horror. Rumi looked up with her ill-matched eyes and she snarled, the sound tearing itself from her throat in a way that sounded painful but felt disgustingly, hedonistically right. It felt good to bare her teeth and growl, to snap at this person who had caused her so much pain. Who had lied to her over and over again, no matter how well-meaning.

Rumi was never going to be the perfect Hunter that Celine had wanted, and her foster mother had known that from the moment that she’d learned of Rumi’s existence. But Celine had raised her with promises of love and companionship that were dependent on that impossible premise anyway. She’d told her that Rumi could have real friends, she could even fall in love maybe, just not as she was right now.

Because who she was right now was an aberration. The very essence of her being was wrong, and until she pulled off the miracle that had evaded countless generations of Hunters, it always would be.

Until Rumi created the golden honmoon, she could not exist as a thing that could be loved. Now that she had lost everything, now that there was nothing and no one left to be strong for, she could finally admit how much that had always hurt her to hear and to know.

Rumi spoke through a growl, “All demons must be exterminated, there are no good ones that can be saved or understood. Every single one is a threat to the safety of us all. Isn’t that what you taught us? Isn’t that what you told me over and over again? When I asked you about my patterns and you said they would go away, that I was a temporary exception? They’re not temporary, Celine, this is who I am. This is who I always was! And you knew that this whole time!”

Celine closed her eyes and turned her face away, as though she could will this nightmare to end if she just refused to see it. “No, Rumi, that’s not—”

“LOOK AT ME!”

Celine looked up, finally meeting Rumi’s furious gaze with her own pained and startled one. Not judgemental, Rumi noted with a sense of growing alarm, not disappointed or unsatisfied. All of those expressions were familiar to her. But this fear, this blatantly unprepared shock on her mentor’s face…she didn’t like it at all.

What would happen if Celine actually tried to grab the sword right now? Was Rumi still human enough to let her take it?

Vivid images came to mind, unbidden and unwanted. She was going to hurt Celine. She was going to kill Celine if she took the sword. She was going to slash at her with her nails, she was going to knock her down, hold her down, tear chunks out of her as she screamed. Celine never should have taken her in. She was a wild animal, she was dangerous, she was–!

A hard thump in her chest interrupted her spiraling imagination. Her heart, pounding, not fast but strong, and a cold sweat breaking out at her temples made her realize how far her panic had taken her. She tried to reign herself in.

Rumi lowered her shaking arms, bringing her sword down so that she could look at her reflection in the celestial blade. Her demon eye gleamed sickly yellow in the pale light, patterns snaking across her face like scars. Her hands didn’t match anymore either, she noticed dully. Her right hand looked the same as it always had, notwithstanding the stripes that ran all the way down to her nails and now pulsed sickly purple.

But instead of a left hand to mirror it, Rumi stared at the grotesque and unnatural talons gripping her beautiful blade. Caging the starlight between shadow-tipped points that were too long, too sharp, too obviously not human. She was an abomination, a patchwork half-breed made from everything that was wrong in the world.

She never should have been allowed to exist.

Her sword began to blur before her eyes. Not only due to her tears but because the more she tried to reject her demonic heritage, the more she fought against the parts that made her no matter how repulsive she found them, the less she was able to exist in peaceful communication with the fraying blanket of the honmoon. What should have been pure white starlight was now deeply tinged pink, and it glowed darker and darker red until the weapon finally unraveled in her hands. Rumi’s fingers – and claws – closed around empty air, then fell to the ground. Useless as any other part of her.

“Look at me.” She repeated, softer, “Look at the honmoon. You always told me how much my mother loved singing with you to keep it strong. Is this really what she would have wanted?”

Celine stifled a sob. Maybe it was cruel of Rumi to bring up Miyeong like this. Like she was using her mother as nothing more than a bargaining chip to get what she wanted. But Rumi had no memories of her. Any sense of filial piety toward the dead woman had been intensely but outwardly ingrained. All she had was what Celine had told her, and every time that Miyeong had been held up as a standard for Rumi to continuously fail to meet. Her mother had been a strong and brave Hunter and an unmatched music artist. Never hesitating to do what was right. Never showing anything but kindness and love. Never missing a note and never disappointing her fans.

Always patient.

Always perfect.

Never failing in her sacred duty except for one instance where she had been inexplicably weakened.

No matter how many times Rumi had asked, Celine had never had a satisfactory answer for her. How could Ryu Miyeong, the apparent pinnacle of strength and compassion, have fallen so far as to create some thing like Rumi?

She’d been deceived. That was all. She’d been too kind. She’d loved too much. Miyeong had given a demon a chance and she’d died because of it. The why’s and how’s didn’t matter. What mattered was that Rumi must never make the same mistake, because when it came to demons it was kill or be killed. No exceptions.

But Rumi hadn’t listened to Celine. She’d taken every bit of her meticulous instruction and had thrown it all away because somehow she — a child, a demon, an unrepentant idiot — had thought she’d known better than her teacher. Because she’d looked into the sad eyes of a demon and she’d seen a mirror instead of a bullseye.

Everything that she felt, everything that had happened, Rumi deserved all of it and more for her arrogance. For her stupidity and her naivety. For being born a disgrace to her mother’s legacy.

But soon it would be over. Celine was going to fix everything, she was going to clean up Rumi’s mess just like she always did. She had to. Because if she didn’t…Rumi didn’t know what was going to happen. She didn’t know what she would become. And that uncertainty was worse than any temporary pain that this solution might bring.

Rumi stared up at her surrogate mother, helpless and pleading as tears rolled down her face. She thought she would vomit if this tense silence went on for any longer. Her fangs felt too big for her mouth. Her skin crawled as the patterns continued to spread across her body, centimeter by smoldering centimeter. Her claws dug into the dirt beneath her. This was hallowed ground, and Rumi was disrespecting it with her presence. Every second that she remained alive in this sacred place was an insult to everything she stood for.

Celine’s sandals made a soft crunching sound as she stepped forward. She crouched to pick up the sickle she had dropped when Rumi first appeared with a delicate motion that spoke to deep familiarity with the weapon. And when she stood in front of her foster daughter her hands didn’t shake. Though her voice, quiet and hesitant, was clearly ashamed. “I’m sorry…I’m so sorry, Rumi. You're right. I made you live with this curse because I couldn’t stand losing this last piece of Miyeong.”

The plain metal blade whistled sweetly as she spun it in her hand, so that the sharpened point sat just above Rumi’s left collarbone and the curve of the blade tilted diagonally across the arteries in her neck. Arteries that thrummed as her heart pounded in fear, even as the icy trickle of relief numbed her mind.

Celine took a deep breath, and when she spoke again there was no hint of the panic from before. Only a deep and heartfelt regret. “But that was pure selfishness on my part. Miyeong is gone. And you… you can’t help what you are. It was wrong of me to think that you could ever truly fill the gaps left in our lives by her passing. I never should have let things get this bad for you. I...I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to do what needed to be done, before you had to grow up and see how terrible this world can really be.”

Rumi blinked up at her mentor from where she sat at her feet. All her fears of violent instinct proving unfounded as she waited, docile as a lamb, for the end to come. She thought about how much she had loved her work of bringing happiness and peace to all of the Huntrix fans. She thought about how she adored Zoey and Mira. How proud she was of their skill and their growth as Hunters and as individuals, and how they had shown her what it truly meant to be loved. To be cared for genuinely and honestly. She only wished she could have returned the favor. They would miss her, she knew that for a fact. They would blame themselves for not seeing this coming. But they had each other, and they were strong, so much stronger than her, and they would get over it. They’d learn to move forward. She knew that for a fact, too. And god help her — gods, ancestors, spirits, anyone who was listening — but she even thought of Jinu as she waited to die. His stupid grin when he was teasing her. The naked hope on his face as they’d sung together, daring to dream of a life kinder than the one they’d been given. All he had wanted was to be free, in the end. Was that really so evil of him? She wanted to be free, too.

With the cool touch of the scythe at her neck, Rumi's only thoughts were for her fans and her friends and Jinu. Her Jinu. The one from yesterday who looked at her like she could be something worth loving, and not the one from today who would cut out his own heart just to spite her. The illusion of the perfect life she almost had unspooled before her, bright and golden as the sun and just as unreachable. Somewhere out in the vastness of the universe there must be a world where everything went right, she thought, some other version of her who had made all the right choices, who was allowed to hold in her arms all that she loved without getting torn to shreds.

How wonderful it all could have been.

Rumi offered her mentor a grateful smile. “It’s okay, Celine. This world can be beautiful, too. Sometimes?”

Celine’s hand hesitated before she pushed through her disgust to tuck a few escaped locks of Rumi’s hair back, and she cradled her patterned cheek with a gentleness she hadn’t shown in years. Rumi leaned hard into that calloused palm, felt it tense against the impulse to retreat.

“Yes, Rumi. This world can be beautiful too.”

Rumi’s brow twitched into a frown at the unfamiliar indulgence in Celine’s voice, a pretty lie told to a frightened child. Then Celine made a small gesture – a simple tensing of her wrist like closing a door or motioning a loved one to come closer, please, a little closer – and there was a burning flash of pain as the only mother Rumi had ever known slit her throat.

Blood flowed out of the wound in a torrent. Her body seized, choking with fear and panic until the pain yielded to an aching coldness that subsumed her. Celine’s hands guided her to lay down on her side. Not necessarily gentle anymore but perfunctory, just like they’d always been, and in her final moments Rumi watched the long strips of cloth sway from the shrine tree’s branches in the night breeze. Celine’s footsteps growing quieter as she walked away from the scene of her greatest shame.

‘Good,’ Rumi thought, ‘this is good.’

It was a quiet ending to a regrettable life. An inevitable end, really, and perhaps a kinder one than she deserved. She was glad it had been Celine who had put her down, ever their pillar of strength and the embodiment of duty before love.

She was glad it was Celine and not surly and sensitive Mira, who might have done it if Rumi could have convinced her well enough that it would be a mercy, but who never would have forgiven herself. Or sweet, excitable Zoey, who never would have been able to do it at all and who would have been broken just from the asking.

If only Celine’s plan had worked. If only Rumi hadn’t screwed everything up in the end. The way she’d always feared she would. If only she could have relaxed for once and appreciated the time she had with her friends instead of always pushing for that brighter future that would never come. Maybe they could have…

Maybe she…

..

.

Rumi died on a cold winter night in the Hunter graveyard, curled up as though asleep at the base of the sacred shinmok tree that had so faithfully watched over her in life.

Though she did not stay that way for long.

One moment Rumi was floating, thoughtless and formless in the sea of oblivion, and in the next moment fire was bursting from the wound at her neck, searing the flesh closed. Her eyes flew open, her chest caved in as empty lungs spasmed around a soundless scream. What felt like a wave of burning embers rolled across the rest of her body, and she shuddered as the feeling caught the tinderbox of her heart. The pitiful organ ignited, hammering away inside of her like it was trying to beat its way out of her chest.

She took a sudden and gasping breath, and immediately choked on the burnt and congealed blood that blocked her airways.

Rolling onto her hands and knees, she spat it out in great black globs, retching, and noted with confusion that the blood landed between a pair of matching grey-ish purple hands. Bruise-dark demon patterns branched all the way down to fingers sickeningly elongated by nails that had thickened and grown out into sharpened talons.

The moonlight shouldn’t have been bright enough for her to see so well, she thought, disorientated and dizzy, she shouldn’t have been able to see every little crease of her newly cadaverous skin. She looked beyond, her nauseatingly sharp eyesight cataloguing the shadowed edges of every little pebble and every clot-like clump of dust and blood in the sludge that surrounded her.

It was still warm under her palms.

And the smell, gods, the smell. A heavy cloud of metal that settled on her tongue like dirty pennies, and within it a repulsively organic sweetness. Like rusty iron nails driven into overripe apples. Like sickness and death.

What might have been a sound of panicked confusion was instead replaced by a wheezing croak that felt like broken glass as it crawled its way out of her throat.

“No…no no no no…” she moaned in horror. Her hands flew to clutch at her neck when she heard the heavily strained quality of her voice. Where the gash had been was now a long, smooth scar that ran diagonally up her throat. Not quite perfectly healed, but more than enough to keep her alive. More than enough to serve as a reminder for how much she didn’t want to be.

A deep laugh sounded in her ear, and a voice began to speak to her.

“Surely you didn’t think it would be that easy, did you Rumi?"

Rumi stood up and spun around, searching desperately for the source of the voice. A soft murmur started whispering to her. Almost unintelligible, like the quiet susurrus of a seashell held up to the ear, but just loud enough that she could make out the words.

They trusted you.

They’re afraid of you.

You gave up.

You weren’t good enough.

The louder voice spoke again, this time very clearly coming from inside her own head. “Poor little Hunter. Disappointed your family. Lied to your friends. Failed your mission. And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, in the end, you couldn’t even manage to die properly. You of all people should know that only a Hunter’s blade can kill a demon.”

Rumi ground her teeth together, hating that he was right. She did know that demons couldn’t be killed by regular weapons, but she couldn’t form her sword with such turmoil in her heart and Celine had given up her abilities as a Hunter once Huntrix took over for the Sunlight Sisters. When she’d begged for death, she’d done so hoping that her demon half wouldn’t be able to survive alone.

She’d been wrong.

Gwi-ma laughed again, the sound booming like a bass speaker inside her skull. Rumi flinched and shook her head, trying and failing to get away from it. “Stop this, please, I didn’t…I never intended for any of this–”

“Are you sure?” The king of demons interrupted her quickly, gleefully, “Did you ever try to tell your…‘friends’ what you really are? Or were you content to let fear rule your entire life? Maybe they would have accepted you for your flaws. They’re both pretty broken themselves, after all. Hardly took any persuasion to get them to fall in line. Ah, but there’s no way to know now. Thanks to your selfish actions here, they’ll send you directly to me as soon as they see you. And Rumi, I have been waiting a long time to meet you.”

Rumi didn’t listen to the rest of his monologue. “What do you mean they were easy to persuade? Those versions of them on stage were Jinu’s demons in disguise.”

“Did you really think the plan ended with exposing you? No, Rumi, we still have much work to do.”

Darkness overtook her vision, then the red glow of stage lights and thousands of lightsticks in the shape of the Saja Boys lion began to populate what she recognized as the stands of the Namsan Tower stadium. She was watching from somewhere high above the main stage, but the show hadn’t started yet. The fans were still trickling into the stands in a zombie-like shuffle, and Rumi could see lines of them winding all the way down the hill and back into the city. Her vision sharpened involuntarily so that she could catch a glimpse of something – two somethings – glittering softly golden in the sea of red. Zoey and Mira, caught in the demon king’s trap. Gwi-ma made sure to give her time to focus on them, to really see the devastated expressions on their faces and to know that she had been the one to put them there, before he pulled her back to the Hunter graveyard.

Rumi looked around in a panic. She was so far from the tower, and her voice was so broken. Even if she could get there in time, was there anything that she could do to help?

“GWI-MA!” She spun in a circle, feeling like an idiot for shouting out loud to a being that only talked back in her head. She found a particularly nasty tear in the honmoon and she focused on the pink glow in lieu of any physical body to speak to. “GWI-MA, I WANT TO MAKE A DEAL!”

“There’s no need to shout, I’m always listening.”

“Okay, that’s…we don’t have time to get into that. I want to make a deal. You give me my voice back so I can fix the honmoon, and then I’ll willingly be banished to the demon realm.”

“You need to work on your negotiating skills, little Hunter. Why would I agree to this plan when I’m already winning?”

This was surely the worst thing about the king of demons. The fact that he was at his most effective when he was simply telling the truth. He was right, of course he was right. There was no reason at all for him to take any deal with her when she’d already lost everything. When her chance of turning things around, of righting her many mistakes was at such a low percentage that it almost wasn’t worth trying for.

But “almost” wasn’t zero.

Rumi took a deep breath and tried to force the air of confidence that she’d used as a world-famous idol into her shattered voice. “Because I’m going to Namsan Tower no matter what, and I might fix the honmoon without your help. If I succeed alone then I get to stay here. I get to kill demons and reinforce the honmoon for the rest of my life, until we find the next batch of Hunters. But if you help me then I’ll be stuck with you whether I win or lose, and the honmoon will only ever be as strong as it is tonight.”

It wasn’t the exact truth, but it was close enough that she felt confident in her pitch. Three Hunters were needed to create the golden honmoon, but two Hunters, or even a single one, could maintain the magical barrier that kept the moral world safe. It would be more difficult. Extremely so. It would take much more effort and time to stitch any holes in the honmoon back together with fewer voices, but it could be done. Celine had proven that over and over again throughout Rumi's childhood, doing the work of three all by herself for years. Rumi lit a candle in her heart for her friends at the thought of adding so much more to the amount of work that they already put in. But she wouldn’t necessarily be dooming the world to being overrun by demons, and she had to take what little consolation she could from that.

Gwi-ma’s voice rumbled in her ear again. “So you want me to bet against my own overwhelming odds of success, on the off chance that you manage to make anything resembling a harmony with that rooster crow you call a voice? A tempting offer, but I’ll pass.”

Her heart dropped into her stomach, and a cold wash of nerves traveled over her skin in a wave that felt sickeningly similar to her recent exsanguination. Rumi needed to convince him. She needed the king of demons to take this very bad deal because she couldn’t fix the honmoon with her voice as it was, but neither could she abandon it again. She needed to try, she needed to be allowed to try and save Zoey and Mira and as many innocent people as possible, but she wasn't good enough. She wasn’t strong enough and her friends knew that and they’d never loved her, no one had ever loved her because she was a liar and a demon and all she ever did was bite the hand that fed her. Rumi shook her head and forced herself not to pay attention to the whispers.

She spoke back to the magenta fire that burned the edges of the honmoon before her eyes, and tried to keep her panic from bleeding into her voice. “Are you sure? My mother was a Hunter. The other two were awakened later on, but for me? Activating the honmoon is in my blood. This is what I was born to do.”

She reached a hand out to draw her claws through the shimmering strings of the honmoon, concentrating on the feelings of serenity and surety just as Celine had taught her until the sword slowly materialized in her hand. Rumi smiled at the familiar weapon, still heavily tinted pink but with the same astrological details all down the blade that she’d loved for years. She really hadn’t been sure that would work. But she supposed now that she had accepted her demonic bloodline, now that she had no choice but to do so, her soul was no longer at war with itself.

She made herself laugh. “See? I could do a lot of damage to you, or I could do a very controlled amount with your help. I can still access the honmoon even as a demon. I think we both know I have a shot at creating the golden honmoon and defeating you forever.”

“Then why, little Hunter, are you wasting time trying to convince me? If you have such a good shot here?”

Rumi bit her tongue to keep from cursing, then immediately regretted it when she gagged on the taste of blood. Her teeth were much sharper now. “I said I had a shot, not a good one. I still…look like this… and my voice is gone.”

It hurt to say her fears out loud like this, to acknowledge them as real and to say them to a confessor who would certainly use them against her at the first opportunity.

“I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do this on my own. I don’t know if Zoey and Mira will forgive me for…for everything.” Rumi’s claws pricked her skin as she went to touch the thick scar that now bisected her neck and held her voice down at a strangled whisper “Things have gone too far, I think. But I need to try. There’s still a chance. Huntrix just broke up, so our fans want to see us back together. And if I’m not wrong, the majority of the audience you showed me came from our show. How high do the odds of the golden honmoon being created need to be before you start worrying? I just want to fix the damage that’s been done. If you take my deal you can ensure that the golden honmoon won’t happen.”

“You’re willing to give up the possibility of the golden honmoon just to fix the holes that exist right now?” The thunderous voice of the demon king was mocking, condescending even when he genuinely wanted to know the answer.

Rumi wanted to scream at her own cowardice. The golden honmoon was the only thing she’d ever wanted for her entire life, and here she was throwing any chance of achieving it away just to try and get back to her friends. Even disregarding the patterns that stained her skin, she was an embarrassment to every Hunter that had come before her. She was pathetic, prioritizing appearances and apologies over saving real human lives.

She breathed deep and exhaled slowly. “Yes. I just want things to go back to the way they were. To give Mira and Zoey a blank slate, like I was never here.”

“How noble. You know that they won’t forget, right? How you lied to them for so long.”

“I’m aware.” She bit out with a demonic growl, “look, it’s me for the honmoon. Do we have a deal or not?”

“What makes you think I can’t already pull you down here whenever I want? Why should I have to wait for your permission?”

“If you could, you already would have. You still can’t control me, can you? All you can do is talk.”

Gwi-ma was silent as he mulled it over, but his whispers kept running like a news station ticker tape through her awareness. They trusted you, you lied to them, they were going to kill you, there are no good demons. She shook her head again and tried to focus on the real problems she was facing. She didn't know how much time she had to fight what was happening, she didn’t know how far along the concert was by now, or how big her window of opportunity really was to try and fix everything. Only one of those could be dealt with right now, so she ran through the headstones to the tallest tree on the highest hill in the shrine.

She took a running leap to scrabble her way up into the branches, only realizing when she got caught in a snarl of pine needles that she no longer wore her costume from the Golden performance. Instead of a skintight white croptop and miniskirt, she now wore a hanbok that covered her from the base of her neck all the way to her ankles in black sambe hemp. The jacket was made in an incredibly old fashioned style, barely cutting off above her natural waist with loose sleeves that reached down to her wrists, and the long skirt fell limply against her legs despite the underskirt and the loose gojaengi shorts she apparently wore beneath it. The strangely funerary outfit gave her the overall effect of being a goth bamboo pole, and Rumi, who had been dressed to impress for as long as she could remember, grimaced in distaste. She kicked herself free and then hiked the skirts up to her knees to keep climbing. Once she reached as high as she could go, she peered out through the branches at the city around the shrine. Namsan Tower was a glowing beacon in the night, but it was far enough away that even her demonically enhanced eyesight couldn’t see anything more than the flashing lights that indicated the concert had started. How far along in the show were the Saja Boys? How many songs did they plan to sing? How quickly could they steal souls from the fans?

She didn’t know.

Rumi jumped back down to the ground, grumbling and picking the sticky and fragrant pine needles out from her clothes and hair as she announced to no one, “This is taking too long. I’m going.”

She closed her eyes tightly and took a deep breath, trying to visualize what she remembered of the N Seoul Tower stadium – the many twisting hallways leading into the performing area, the eerie empty spaces beneath the stage, the dark entrances that poured out fans and then devoured them again like the tide washing in and out with each show. She pictured one particular spot, focusing on it as hard as she could until she could see down to the smallest detail of where she wanted to appear, and she thought about why she needed to be there.

A thoughtful hum reverberated in her head from Gwi-ma. Trying to distract her, maybe.

Rumi concentrated harder on the feelings of sorrow and her longing to see her friends again, on the guilt that still threatened to drown her for every action she’d taken. Guilt for lying to Mira and Zoey about her patterns, guilt for letting the patterns be seen at all, guilt for trying to kill herself while the honmoon was in such a bad state, guilt for not succeeding. She exhaled angrily and felt a strange sensation as she vanished into a cloud of pink sparks.

When she opened her eyes she was in the stadium, looking forward through the main entrance to where the Saja Boys were performing. Gwi-ma’s whispers in her ear sounded exactly the same, no closer or louder even as she looked at his humongous form towering over his demon performers. She shook her head again, even going so far as to try covering and then plugging her ears but nothing changed, leading to a disorientating sensation of un-reality. Like she was in some ultra-immersive video game. But as she felt the loose fabric of her skirt brush her ankles, and as she felt the aching soreness in her throat when she swallowed, she knew all of this was truly, horrifically, real.

Rumi began to walk forward. She still didn’t have any sort of plan but she knew that she had to sing at the bare minimum. Even with this harsh and scratchy voice, she had to hope that Zoey and Mira would put aside their anger for the sake of the greater good and join her. Rumi was nearly certain that they would. The two of them were much better people than she was, after all. They never ran from a fight, neither of them would have ever considered taking themselves out of the equation while things were still going so wrong.

They just needed to hear her.

She could fix this, they could fix this, she knew they could. She just needed to reach them before it was too late. The Saja Boys hovered in the air in front of the massive bonfire that was Gwi-ma’s presence in the human world, and Rumi felt a glimmer of satisfaction as she heard Jinu sing so captivatingly about how no one was coming to save them.

Gwi-ma’s bored voice spoke in her head once again. “Alright, little Hunter. You’ve convinced me. You don’t live as long as I have by taking unnecessary risks.”

Rumi blinked as another puff of pink sparks curled around her, and when she looked down her skin was a healthy peach color again, her patterns returned to their soft periwinkle color rather than the deep violet they’d become with her unfortunate transformation. Gwi-ma had cast an illusion to bring her back to the state she’d been in when Zoey and Mira and all the fans had seen her in last, back to how she’d looked before she went to Celine. Her hands went to her throat. The skin was smooth, and when she hummed to herself the note was…not perfectly clear but it seemed to be less garbled, at the very least. Her voice was still layered over itself and gravely, but she could work with this as long as she stayed in her lower register. The honmoon pulsed weakly along with her note, and Rumi noticed with confusion that it seemed to travel up and through her body, momentarily lighting up her patterns with it's lovely but muted colors before dissipating.

Gwi-ma continued to speak in her mind, “But don’t think this means I’ll go easy on you. Thanks to your own stipulations, I win either way, but you can still lose.”

Rumi steeled herself and murmured back to him, “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Just as the Saja Boys ended their performance, she opened her mouth to sing, channeling all her feelings of regret into her song. Reaching out toward her friends with all her heart. She tried to convey it wasn’t just that she was sorry for not telling them the truth before they found out for themselves so abruptly, but that she knew, now, that she could have told them at any time and they would have accepted her. Just as she had always accepted them for what they saw as their own flaws. Mira’s overly direct way of speaking, her possessive nature when it came to her friends. Zoey’s unstoppable rambling and her trillions of ideas, the way she always followed so close and hung off of her friends at every opportunity. All of it endlessly and unbearably endearing to Rumi. And when she felt them engage with her, two gentle plucks of the honmoon to harmonize with her still-growling voice, Rumi smiled wide with relief.

Gwi-ma’s voice rang out in the quiet as he bellowed to his subjects to stop the Hunters. A massive stream of demons came rushing out of holes torn in the honmoon, but Rumi felt her song strengthen with her bandmate’s harmonies and it was easy to plow through the faceless demon hoard. The three Hunters ran forward and collided in the central stage, holding each other tightly as they sang, forgiving and reassuring one another as they felt the strings of a new honmoon begin to stitch itself together.

Her patterns continued to reflect the colors of the honmoon, she noticed as the three of them pulled away from one another reluctantly. Both of her friends looked her up and down in shock at the glowing, flashing, rainbow iridescent colors that flickered warmly across her skin. All she could do was shrug and grin at them as they kept singing. Did it really matter why this was happening? Couldn’t it just be strange and wonderful?

The three of them laughed, their melody tapering off just long enough for Gwi-ma to launch his next attack. All too soon they heard the distinct stomping and shrieking of hundreds of demons crawling over one another to reach them. Rumi strode ahead, knowing Mira and Zoey could handle the weaker demons while she made her way directly to Jinu and Gwi-ma. The other Saja Boys leapt into the air and flew out over the crowd to attack the girls, but Jinu didn’t move. He only watched her approach with an indecipherable frown on his face.

Well, good. She supposed it would make things easier for her if he just stood there and let her stab him. Rumi jogged forward and spun her sword around her, the after-image from its glow blooming into flowers of light on either side of her, and when she swung the blade at him he jumped back. She smirked and swung again, the two of them falling easily into a familiar pattern of advancing and retreating. And when he caught a particularly obvious overhand strike from her, he leaned in close to look her over critically.

“Where did you go? When you left your friends?” He murmured to her, just barely loud enough to be heard over the roar of the audience.

Rumi frowned. “Oh? Now you care about me? Where was this concern when you were sending your lackeys to humiliate me in front of everyone?”

Jinu looked physically pained at the reminder. “Rumi…”

“Don’t.”

She threw off his hold and continued her attack. Belatedly realizing that Jinu was not attacking in return, only dodging and deflecting her strikes. Only letting her almost hit him time and time again as he slowly led her back down the stairs of the main stage.

Away from Gwi-ma, and closer to her friends.

It was a strange battle tactic, to be putting himself at an increasing disadvantage with every step. She hoped it was a battle tactic, at any rate, and not just some half thought out, hail-mary of a plan like she had. She hoped they weren’t both flying blind. She tried to fight harder, to swing faster, jump further, aim tighter. But Jinu always managed to dance one step away, just barely out of reach.

Rumi stopped suddenly, her breath heaving as she tried to figure out what he was thinking. Jinu waited patiently, his arms crossed behind his back like they were having a civil discussion instead of a battle to the death before an audience of thousands.

She pushed some wayward hair out of her face. His eyes tracked the motion with a calm and unabashed intensity.

Interesting.

Rumi decided to try something different. She dissipated her sword, and watched him carefully.

Jinu frowned but he didn’t move.

She began to walk closer to him, staying mindful of the battle raging around her. Wanting to see if he would maintain his defensible distance or if, as she suspected, he would allow her to get inadvisably close because he wanted to talk instead of fight now that his grand plan had failed.

His arms fell to his sides but still he didn’t so much as lean away from her.

She was a polearm’s length away, then a sword's, and when she finally stopped she was close enough that all she would need to kill him was a single one of Zoey’s knives. Jinu looked down at her with eyes that somehow still remained the rich dark brown color of black tea, of barley malt, of fertile fresh earth. The colors of home, and humanity.

She still couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

The two of them moved at the exact same time. Rumi called her sword again and whipped the glowing blade up toward his neck. Jinu shifted one foot back to dodge the strike, his hands reaching for her with inhuman speed — one to stop the forward motion of the sword by catching her wrist and one to land on her neck. His palm was warm where it touched her, halfway on her shirt collar and halfway on her skin. His thumb rested right over where her scar should have been.

Jinu frowned, “I can feel Gwi-ma’s power on you. Is this…an illusion? Are you really Rumi?”

For one terrifying second, Rumi felt the illusion flicker and Jinu gasped, his dark eyes wide with horror and for a second his grip tightened where he held her.

“No, what?! No, no this can’t…you were supposed to…” His words trailed off as his hands flitted around her with a frantic concern, clawed fingertips brushing her face, her neck, her shoulders, her face again, the touch as light and warm as a summer breeze, before settling with one covering the scar and one cradling her face. Trying to hold her together with just his two hands.

An ironic echo of how Celine had held her for the last time.

The demon king’s magic had rushed back in place before she could see what he’d seen; if it had been the black hanbok and the scar or if Gwi-ma had decided to be especially cruel and show Jinu her blood-soaked costume and the open wound – her first experience of being a full demon or her last experience of being even partly human.

“What happened, Rumi? Where did you go?”

Jinu’s soft voice, his perfect tenor pitch, washed over her with such soothing concern that she felt herself relaxing into his hold despite their surroundings. Somehow over the screams of the crowd and over the two-part harmony that her friends were maintaining without her, Rumi heard the clink of the tip of her sword hitting the stage floor. Here was someone who knew everything about her, who had seen everything that made her a monster, and who still touched her so gently. Who worried about her, and wanted her to be okay.

His concern dragged at her painfully. Far too much and far too late.

Jinu's voice took on a desperate edge as he begged her for answers, “Rumi, please, what happened? Did someone do this to you? Or did I push you to do this?”

But she stayed silent. Because he was still a demon. And she was still…pretending to be a Hunter. For now. And just as Gwi-ma could not be defeated by hatred alone, the honmoon could not be salvaged with regret.

Rumi broke out from his careful grip on her and stepped back. She brought her sword up between them. “It doesn’t matter what happened. We all have our part to play in this.”

One foot stepped back to give her a strong opening stance and she held her celestial blade in front of her, ready to lock back into their cat and mouse game.

But Jinu didn’t move. He didn't even look up to see that she was ready to fight again, too busy staring down at his hands as if they actually had her blood on them with such a wretched expression of guilt that her heart twisted in her chest. She became angry that such a miserable organ could still cause her so much grief even after everything that had happened.

Rumi snarled at him, the stitching on his clothing snapping into and then out of focus as her eyes flashed demon yellow. “WHY WONT YOU FIGHT ME?! DO YOU THINK I’M THAT WEAK?!”

His hands fell, and then he fell, too, dropping to his knees as he stared up at her with the same look of sorrowful pleading that she'd used on Celine barely an hour ago. He shook his head, his hair falling into his eyes. “I’m not going to hurt you again. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I'm so sorry.”

She shouted wordlessly as she charged at him with her sword, but still, he didn't move. Suddenly Rumi knew with a dreadful certainty that he wasn’t going to dodge this one. He was just going to sit there and die because he thought that was all he deserved. And something inside of her broke, then, surely the very last thing she had left that was even remotely whole, when she realized that, just as he loved her enough to let her kill him, she loved him so much that she was going to let him die. Because losing him was all that she deserved, too.

The millisecond before her blade touched him, however, Jinu fell through the floor and a pillar of Gwi-ma’s fire took his place. Her sword swiped harmlessly through it, and it dissipated as Gwi-ma reabsorbed his energy.

Rumi spun around to look for her friends. To make sure Jinu hadn’t merely warped away from her to attack her friends. She felt like she was watching in slow motion as Zoey fought both Baby and Mystery, but when she struck out at Mystery with her shin-kal knives, the tall demon vanished into the honmoon in a flash of pink fire exactly as Jinu had. Abby followed suit just as Mira’s spear was about to touch his precious washboard abs. Then Romance, who was almost taken out by a concussive hit directly to the face from the butt of Mira’s spear, and finally Baby, who very nearly became target practice to all six of Zoey’s knives. Both of them falling through the honmoon in a column of the demon king’s fire instead.

The fans cheered as Huntrix seemed to be winning the fight, but Rumi knew Gwi-ma was only hedging his bets again. Unwilling to sacrifice such useful pawns in a game he thought he would win no matter what. Rumi seethed and she began to sing even louder, convinced that they could still come out on top even with such bad odds, even with her bargain that was feeling more and more unnecessary the longer she spent in perfect harmony with her fellow Hunters.

Gwi-ma began to shoot beams of his concentrated fire at them, forcing them to separate and dodge the blasts while they kept up their singing, like iridescent pinballs bouncing around the stage as more and more of the fans’ energy surrounded them. They reached the bridge of the song and felt the honmoon surge with power as the audience began to join in, buoying them further and strengthening their abilities until the three Hunters were able to jump into the air and hover before Gwi-ma through the power of belief alone.

They sang to their audience and they sang to each other and Rumi felt Gwi-ma try to reach her through the protective protective bubble to try and take back all that he had given her – the illusion of normality, her old voice, this one last chance – but he was powerless in the face of so much true faith. Pride radiated out from her as she held tightly to her friend’s hands and she watched their hearts glow, felt her own heart fill to bursting as she remembered that this was what she loved more than anything. Celine was wrong. Rumi was her mother’s daughter through and through. What on Earth had she been so afraid of before? Here in this moment, she couldn’t remember at all.

Strands of the honmoon flowed out from the hearts of their audience, a great scintillating rainbow in the light of the encroaching sunrise. It swirled around the three girls until the love and happiness of the fans became powerful enough to extinguish the towering wall of fire that was Gwi-ma as easily as blowing out a candle. Rumi, Mira, and Zoey smiled at each other, and looked out at the rainbow honmoon rippling over the land like an iridescent blanket.

They’d done it. They’d pulled off the impossible. They’d come back from such a state of despair to create a brand new honmoon, just like the very first Hunters had done centuries ago, and they’d saved the world from Gwi-ma’s eternal hunger. Together. Just as they were always meant to be.

Huntrix touched down on the main stage before their adoring fans and laughed as they witnessed people ripping apart Saja Boys merch to reveal Huntrix shirts beneath them. Rumi even spotted Bobby in the crowd, smiling his goofy paternal smile at the sight of his girls together again. She grinned wide, showing off her new fangs as she waved at their manager, and for a moment she truly believed that she had managed to win. That she’d caught the tiger by the tail and hadn’t been mauled for it.

She was wrong.

A quiet hissing sound behind her was her only warning of what was about to happen, like a fuse burning up as it led sparks back to a mountain of explosives. The last little bit of Gwi-ma’s fire snaked around her feet and she heard his voice in her mind once more.

“We had a deal, little Hunter.”

Fear doused her like ice water dumped over her head. She knew she should run. She needed to get backstage, or beneath the stage, or even just into a bathroom, anywhere that her imminent descent wouldn’t be seen.

But she couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.

Mira felt her unnatural stiffness first and turned to check on her with the same worried look that she always seemed to have for her friend and leader. Mira had long suspected her of hiding something, had fretted over her constantly in that overly-observent way of hers, and had waited only a little impatiently for Rumi to see that she was safe to reveal her secrets in the presence of the taller girl. To put down some of the weight she carried.

But Rumi never had. Because she couldn’t accept that the two people chosen for her by fate to be her soulmates in this sacred mission wouldn’t turn on her in an instant if they knew who she really was. If they saw what she really was.

The guilt she felt under Mira’s evaluating gaze pulsed through her patterns, multiplying and echoing until it was her own voice she heard whispering in her ear.

You lied to them. You lied to them. You lied to them.

She felt Zoey move and her eyes darted over, her sight sharpening in a way that she knew meant her demon eyes were showing. But Zoey didn’t retreat or even look away. The younger girl only shot her a worried pout and reached to take Rumi’s hand again.

Rumi jerked back, and Zoey’s motion withered sadly.

You lied to them. You lied to them. You abandoned them.

Mira frowned. “Rumi, are you sure you’re feeling—!!! OH MY GOD!!”

Pink sparks swirled around her and suddenly Rumi was only capable of taking in the world in confusing, independent slices; Zoey screaming her name. The fans screaming again but from fear rather than love. Mira, pale and trembling, sweat dotting her brow like she was seasick. The frigid and strangely wet feeling of the morning breeze on her…stomach?

Rumi looked down to see her blood soaked costume, her arms drenched in red that spewed down her front as though the wound at her throat was still fresh. Gwi-ma had used the very last of his power in the human realm to strip the top layer of his illusion from her, to show her friends and fans exactly what she’d been driven to do.

She clutched at her neck in a truly pathetic attempt to hide the wound from view, her voice returned to the fractured whisper of the graveyard as she tried to explain, “No, this isn’t…it’s not as bad as it looks, I swear…”

“NOT AS BAD AS IT LOOKS?!” Mira shouted, her entire body tense with fear, “IT LOOKS REALLY BAD RUMI!!”

Zoey drew her knives and began looking around frantically for a demon that could have snuck through the rainbow honmoon somehow. “RUMI HOLD ON, WE’LL GET YOU TO A HOSPITAL! OR SOMETHING! WHAT HAPPENED?!”

“No! Listen to me! It’s…this isn’t,” Rumi stammered as she tried to back away, looking anywhere but the anguished expressions on her friend’s faces, “This is from before, I’m okay! I swear!”

“Stop talking, stop talking, oh my god, how are you even still talking right now. WHERE’S MEDICAL?!” Mira’s hands were buried in her hair as she paced, looking through their panicked audience to try and spot the familiar uniformed shapes of First Aid or Security. She gave up quickly in favor of lunging for Rumi with a desperate look on her face.

Rumi tripped in her haste to get away. She landed hard and when her hands left her throat to help her scramble backwards, she heard Zoey sob at the sight of the gaping hole in her throat.

“This isn’t real!” She rasped, “It’s one of Gwi-ma’s illusions! Look!”

Rumi gestured around her, intending to show that there was no blood being smeared across the clean, white stage tiles. Just the appearance of it on her person. Because how could there be? She’d bled out at the shrine, none of her blood had made it to the stadium. Everything human in her had been left at the shinmok tree. But her friends only stared at her hands, only stared at her with an exponentially growing sorrow as though they couldn’t believe Rumi would play such a horrible trick on them.

She heard herself growl at their continued stubbornness. Was this really such a hard concept for them to grasp? It was demon magic! Rumi was telling the truth for once in her short and abhorrent life and they didn’t believe her! She looked down to see what her friends were so adamant about being afraid of, but what she saw was not simply claws and patterns.

There was blood absolutely everywhere.

Blood pooled where she’d been standing at the edge of the stage, blood smeared across the stage tiles and splattered from her attempts to escape, in chunky boot prints and long swipes from her fingers, blood distorting her patterns, blood, blood everywhere. She’d even managed to get it on her friends, repulsive crimson splashed up the sides of their white, white boots, and they couldn’t help but step in it and smear it further as they tried to help her.

She felt herself laugh, breathless and hysterical, as she had the thought that there must not have been this much blood the first time she’d died. There couldn’t have been, Celine never would have allowed such a mess! She would have drowned the tree! How shameless was she, to bring out her demon patterns for the world to see and now to show off her very lifeblood? What would she do next? Was she going to crack open her skull too? And show the fans every selfish and worthless thought she’d ever had?!

Rumi closed her eyes and shook her head, hard. She hoped she was at least getting faster at recognizing Gwi-ma’s whispers, instead of just sitting around being susceptible to them. The demon king’s magic was as clever as it was malicious, she knew that already, she shouldn’t be so surprised by it. The blood wasn’t real. But it also wouldn’t go away until she did what Gwi-ma wanted. Until she followed through on their deal.

A hand touched her knee. Rumi opened her eyes to see Mira kneeling beside her, leaning over to her left side with such an expression of helpless concern that Rumi’s heart broke in two. She looked to her right to see Zoey slowly approaching with her hands up like she was trying to soothe a wild animal, lips trembling as she tried to hold back her tears for Rumi’s sake.

Mira spoke as quietly as she could in the scream-filled stadium, her words going oddly staccato in her attempt to be gentle through her panic, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry. We weren’t trying to scare you. Okay? We’re not, like, disappointed in you for getting hurt or for–for hurting yourself? I don’t know what happened. But I care about you, and I want you to be okay, so will you let us help you?!”

“Yeah, don’t worry!” Zoey dropped to her knees on Rumi’s other side, taking her blood-slick, demon-clawed hand in hers without a second thought, “We’ll totally understand! Whatever happened, happened! But we really, REALLY need to help you right now.”

Gwi-ma spoke again in her mind, somehow sounding furious and extremely satisfied at the same time. “Time’s up.”

The light of the sunrise crested over the high stadium walls, beams of golden light striking the back of her friends' heads like halos. Rumi smiled, grateful to have this last memory of them. As beautiful and compassionate as they'd ever been.

“Mira, Zoey, I'm sorry. Thank–”

The glittering strands of the honmoon shivered beneath her, and then she was falling.

Chapter Text

“–YOU!” Rumi gasped her last word as she slammed onto the blistering stone dias of Gwi-ma’s palace floor. She coughed, groaning, and rolled into a little ball, clutching at her ribs and shoulder that she swore must have broken from such a fall.

Gwi-ma’s voice rumbled all around her, inside her mind and outside until she felt like her bones were vibrating from the force of it. “LOOK HOW FAR THE MIGHTY HUNTER HAS FALLEN. A LIAR AND A COWARD TO THE BITTER END. YOU DARE TRY AND FOOL THE KING OF ALL DEMONS? TO USE THE VOICE THAT I GAVE YOU TO MAKE THE RAINBOW HONMOON THAT HASN’T BEEN SEEN IN 400 YEARS?”

For one brief and deliciously spiteful moment Rumi thought that she wouldn’t answer. She wouldn’t give the king of demons the satisfaction of an explanation. Gwi-ma’s fire shot up in temperature, and as her skin started to blister, suddenly her pride seemed like a very stupid reason to be burned alive. Rumi covered her face and shied back until she felt open space behind her. She spoke quickly, “I didn’t know! I didn’t know that would happen! I swear I thought I was just fixing it!” 

“AS CONVINCING AS A PLEA FOR STUPIDITY WOULD BE, I FIND THAT I DON’T BELIEVE YOU, RUMI.”

Rumi held tightly to her head, trying in vain to block out the omnipresent lord of the demon realm. Trying to block out the memories he blasted directly into her mind of every time she’d retreated from her friends, every fake smile and obvious lie that she could see them choosing to ignore for the sake of their friendship. Every invitation she’d turned down, every time she’d chosen her fear over their trust. She saw the cold light of their celestial blades reflected on their faces as they held the sacred weapons up at her. The anger in their faces when it seemed like she was choosing demonkind over them. She saw Jinu’s hollow eyes when he told her he’d been lying to her the entire time they’d known each other. The fear in Celine’s face when she saw what Rumi had become. The panic in Zoey and Mira’s faces as they witnessed what she’d wanted so badly to spare them from. Her fans screaming for her even as she’d failed to protect them, her fans screaming at her when they saw the true depths of her defeat.

The scar on her neck burned and all she could do was weep as every failure she’d ever experienced was thrown back in her face all at once. 

Rumi didn’t know how long this went on for, it could have been minutes or it could have been hours. Maybe this was all her life had ever been. Failure after failure. Lies upon lies upon lies. She should have ended it years ago before Mira and Zoey were even a part of it. She should have asked Celine to kill her as soon as she learned what she was. She should have hurled herself off a bridge. She was nothing. She was worse than nothing. She was a negative space in the world, a black hole that pulled everything precious and beautiful toward itself only to rip it all to pieces as soon as it got close.

As the voices of everyone she’d failed repeated themselves endlessly in her mind, she felt herself growing numb to it — any remaining will to live that she might have had slowly fading away. This was where she would die, right where she belonged. Trembling and whimpering pathetically before the demon king. But as she pulled away from the overwhelming sensations in her mind, Rumi became aware of another sound coming from nearby. More distant than the voices from her memories, but louder than her own mumbled pleas for this to end, to let her go, to let her die, please, anything but this, Rumi heard a sound that was as familiar as it was out of place.

She heard laughter.

Somewhere nearby there was a crowd of people laughing. A large one. And the more she focused, she could just barely make out the sound of her name being called. The sheer confusion that this inspired within her was enough to get her to struggle up onto her elbows to peer behind her.

A searing weight like a pillar of fire slammed into her back to keep her pinned to the ground, but it was too late. She’d seen what Gwi-ma had wanted to keep hidden from her.

Jinu, far down at the base of the steps that led to Gwi-ma’s palace ruins, his fangs and claws bared ferociously as he tried to reach her. But each time he leapt forward, one of several massive tendrils of fire caught him and threw him back down. The laughter was from the massive hoard of demons that crowded around to watch, cackling each time he hit the ground and rushing in to try and get in hits of their own.

“RUMI!!”

“J-Jinu..?” The fire on her back was so hot, and the voices in her ear were so loud, she couldn’t manage more than a pained groan. Her broken voice already cutting any chance of her words reaching him in half.

He tried again to climb the stairs, jumping and dodging and clawing his way up the gigantic slabs of stone until Gwi-ma smacked him back down again.

“JINU!”

Rumi squirmed under the weight of Gwi-ma’s flames, kicking weakly, inching further away from the great bonfire so that when Jinu launched himself up again, she was able to thrust her arm out over the edge of the dias.

Jinu’s clawed hand wrapped around her forearm and he yanked her to him with enough strength that she thought he would rip her arm from its socket. She kicked toward him again, slipping out from under Gwi-ma’s hold and suddenly they were both crashing down the stairs, limbs flailing, until they landed sprawled and groaning on the dirt. Much to the delight of the demon army.

Rumi hissed out a pained breath, curling up tightly once again to try and hide her various hurts until she heard a vicious snarl above her. 

It was Jinu once again. Already on his feet, now hunched over her protectively as he eyed the demons around them. The army shifted toward them eagerly, a few of the bolder ones darting forward to try and take a swipe at him or to kick at her.

Jinu’s mouth was wide open to show his fangs, the red pupils in his eyes reduced to slits against the glowing yellow, and were those...horns? She must have been imagining it, but she swore she could see a pair of slender black horns arcing gracefully up from his forehead as he snarled at a group of smaller demons. This was significantly more vicious and animal-like than she’d ever seen him before, and she should have been frightened, she thought, but she found she was only afraid for him. A large demon holding a metal studded club came charging out of the crowd and Jinu turned to face it, knocking the club aside and raking his claws across the other demon’s face. Blood as black as ink spewed from the wounds and the larger one bellowed in anger and pain. It prepared to swing its club again, and while Jinu was distracted, one of the smaller demons jumped out to grab Rumi’s ankle.

In her panic she reached for what had always served her before. Rumi tried to summon her starlight sword, but when she reached for the strings of the honmoon, they weren't there. In the human realm, the honmoon covered every surface. It was instantly and always available to anyone who could wield it. But here in the demon realm the honmoon stretched above them instead. Far, far out of reach for even a birthright Hunter like her.

Rumi stared hopelessly at the strands that glimmered overhead, as beautiful and unhelpful as stars in the sky, until two more small demons pounced on her to begin punching and clawing at any part of her they could reach. Fear and pain compounded within her until instinct took over and then she was kicking, scratching, biting, gouging anything and everything that touched her, turning herself into a whirlwind of sharp points and jagged edges just to try and get away. All to the tune of Gwi-ma’s thunderous laughter from high above.

As soon as she escaped the scuffle of demons, she skittered back toward the Gwi-ma’s steps, crouched and heaving, desperate to have something solid at her back even if it was the demon king’s throne. A hand clamped onto her arm and she hurled her weight to the side to escape, clawing at the offending limb until she recognized Jinu’s voice speaking to her.

“Ow! Hey, ow, Rumi! Stop, it’s me! It’s me!” 

She stopped. “Jinu?”

“Yes, Jinu, that’s me! We need to get out of here! Do you have enough energy to shift?”

She stared at him blankly, her brain still trapped in the fog of survival instincts that told her that her only options were to fight or to run. She didn’t know what shifting was. She didn’t understand how that fit into anything that she needed to be doing right now. Jinu clicked his tongue in annoyance as he jumped back from another demon trying to attack him, and somehow that was what got through her haze of fear. 

“DON’T tch AT ME! I'VE ONLY BEEN A FULL DEMON FOR LIKE ONE DAY!! I DONT KNOW WHAT MMPH—!!!”

Any further complaining was muffled as he pulled her tightly into his chest. “SHIFT. NOW.”

Rumi wrapped her arms tightly around his waist and squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the strange sensation of dissolution that she’d had when she teleported from the shrine to Namsan Tower.

The two of them vanished in a cloud of swirling black sparks and reappeared on the top beam of a giant torii gate in the middle of the demon crowd. Jinu’s arms slipped down a little as he sagged into her.

He mumbled, “Oh, good. I didn’t think that would work, honestly.”

“You what?!”

Rumi wanted to be mad at him because at least that would have been a familiar mood to be in, she couldn’t manage it. He looked exhausted, beaten and singed, and the only thing she could feel was abject relief that he was still there with her at all.

The demons below them began to swarm up the standing pillars of the gate.

Rumi gripped Jinu's durumagi coat tighter. “They’re still coming! We need to get further away!”

“I don’t think I can do that again.”

She pushed him backwards so they were standing in the middle of the beam. A few of the demons were close to reaching the top but there were so many of them trying to climb that they kept pulling each other back down like crabs in a bucket.

“You’ll have to try, I don’t know where anything is here, I can’t teleport us out of this.”

“If I try again I’ll put us three feet further that way but on the ground this time.”

“Jinu!!”

“I'm sorry! I would do it if I could!”

One of the demons crawled underneath the beam they were standing on and took a swipe at her ankles again. Rumi stomped on its fingers and kicked it off. 

“Okay, okay.” She leaned harder into him as he swayed unsteadily, and her claws twisted into the back of his coat in a way that was probably uncomfortable as she held them both up, “I’ll try it. Just, uh, you think of the destination and I’ll take us there.”

“That’s…not really how it works….” His words were beginning to slur from exhaustion. It was impressive enough that he hadn’t collapsed already, she supposed. Rumi concentrated on the idea of ‘away’, trying to think as hard as she could about disappearing from here, of finding somewhere safe for them to rest.

As though privy to her thoughts, Gwi-ma began to speak again. “THERE IS NOWHERE SAFE FOR YOU NOW, LITTLE HUNTER. RUN AS FAR AS YOU LIKE. EVERYTHING UNDER THE HONMOON IS MY DOMAIN.”

“Okay on three, one, two, THREE!” Rumi teleported herself and Jinu out of the clearing that surrounded the demon king’s throne in another cloud of sparks, purple this time, with a thin wisp of black, and the two of them instantly reappeared in dark and foreboding pine forest covered in a thick blanket of snow.

Exhaustion punched through her like a kick from a horse and she gasped, swaying severely in place. Gwi-ma kept talking, blaring his voice in her head as she fumbled to hold up a now fully unconscious Jinu. “WHEREVER YOU GO, RUMI, YOU BELONG TO ME.”

“Does he ever shut up?” Rumi grumbled as she tried to keep from dropping Jinu completely, but she only managed to sort of awkwardly slide him down with her as she fell to her knees. The snow cushioned their fall as both of them fell to the ground, refreshingly cold against her skin that had been seared by Gwi-ma’s flames. 

“Oh, this is nice.” Rumi murmured to herself, and then darkness overtook her.

When she came back into awareness, she was being carried on Jinu’s back through more of the same trees and snow. Strong winds howled through the branches above them and desiccated her from the inside out with each breath, carrying with it the acrid scent of turpentine. Strange sounds from mysterious animals filled the air whenever the wind died down, yipping and screaming out in the darkness. Seeming to get closer each time. 

Jinu slogged through the knee-high snow and ignored all of it with an ease that she envied. As Rumi stirred she felt his head tilt toward hers, not enough that he could look at her but enough that she knew he was paying attention. He'd reverted back to his normal self at some point while she'd been unconscious. His horns were gone, if they'd ever really been there in the first place, and his claws didn't so much as prick her skin where he held her legs to his sides. She tried to speak but couldn’t quite manage it yet, and let out a questioning sort of noise in place of any words.

Jinu huffed out a breath of laughter. “Good morning to you too.”

She coughed, wincing at the sandpaper feeling in her much abused throat, then croaked, “...I’m pretty sure it’s still night.” 

“There’s no sun down here. It’s morning whenever we say it’s morning.”

“Sure, why not.” Rumi tightened her hold on his shoulders at a sudden loud shriek from nearby, “What is this place?”

“Dark forest.” He answered flatly and simply.

“Yeah, I figured that part out myself, actually. But why is there a tundra in the demon realm? I thought this place was supposed to be all fire and, uh, more fire.”

She could feel the vibration of his chuckle where her chest pressed into his back. “I feel pretty confident saying that most of the demon realm is not fire. That's more of a Gwi-ma thing, and he doesn't like to share. Think of the demon world like a big hotel where every room is a place like this, a personalized hell for any demons that still remember enough of their old life to feel fear and shame. Except a lot of them overlap so maybe a hotel wasn’t the best example…anyway if there’s a place that you can think of from up top that you would hate to spend eternity in, there's probably a copy of it down here.”

“Oh.” The hoarseness of her voice splintered the single syllable word into three different directions and she coughed again, tasting copper in the back of her throat. “That sucks.”

“Haha, yeah. We’re pretty lucky to be here, actually. Your crazy plan actually worked! My region is attached to this one, so we just have to get down the mountain and we’ll be at my house.”

“Great. You’re welcome.” Rumi sighed and closed her eyes, intending to go back to sleep.

Jinu jostled her.

“Mmf, what?”

“Don’t go to sleep.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“I’m serious, you’re just gonna have a nightmare and I don’t want to carry you if you’re gonna be kicking and screaming.”

“That really sounds like a you problem.”

Jinu abruptly turned on his heel and dropped her into a tall snowbank. She crunched through it quickly, unharmed but highly offended.

“HEY!!”

“Trust me, you don’t want to sleep in the demon realm. Now that you’re awake, you can walk.”

Rumi slumped backward into the snow drift instead, staring up at the perpetual dusk of the demon world’s sky. Where had he said they were going? His house? What was even the point of that? Gwi-ma was right, there was nowhere they could go where he couldn’t find them, no escape at all from his 24 hour news cycle of every shameful thing she’d ever done.

She let herself focus on the whispers, morbidly curious to see if they would say anything different now that she’d fallen into the demon king’s clutches.

You scared them. You left them. You tried to kill him. He’s lying again. He’s going to leave you again. You’re not worth the trouble. You don’t deserve his care. He doesn’t care, it’s just guilt. Just like Celine. You owe him. He hates you. 

Yeah. That sounded about right. But maybe, Rumi thought with some quietly aching desperation, maybe she’d get lucky and Jinu would decide that she was simply too annoying to drag around with him. If she was exactly as obstinate and obnoxious as she felt like being, if for once in her life she didn’t try to pretend that everything was fine, then maybe he’d leave her here and then she could freeze to death in peace. Wouldn’t that be nice? No more memories, no more pain, just the empty embrace of eternal darkness. She’d been there once, briefly. She remembered it fondly.

Jinu’s impatient voice broke through the buzzing haze in her mind, “Rumi! Come on!”

She didn’t respond. Just turned her head into the cool pillow of the snowbank and closed her eyes again.

“RUMI!” Jinu called again, definitely sounding pissed off now. Rumi felt the ghost of a smile touch her lips. What was that ancient meme Zoey always quoted? All according to keikaku?

God, she missed Zoey. And Mira, of course. She missed Mira’s mildly abrasive affection so much right now.

She heard the slogging shuffle of snow underfoot, and then Jinu was snatching at her wrist. Probably just trying to yank her back upright, but every Hunter instinct that Celine had ever drilled into her awoke at the touch. Rumi grabbed his arm and pulled down. She curled onto her side, hoisting her weight onto her free arm to sweep her legs sharply into his, knocking him off his feet in seconds.

Jinu went down hard with a wordless shout of frustration and surprise. 

She scrambled to get on top of him, holding his wrists behind his back with one hand while her other shoved his face into the snowy ground.

He snarled and jerked under her hands, embarrassed and confused, “What are you doing?!”

The fury that overcame her at his words was as sudden as it was explosive. “WHAT AM I DOING?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!! THE ONLY REASON WE’RE HERE IS BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T FUCKING LISTEN TO ME WHEN YOU HAD THE CHANCE! WE ALMOST HAD IT!! THE GOLDEN HONMOON WAS RIGHT THERE AND THEN YOU CHICKENED OUT AND NOW WE’RE STUCK IN HELL FOREVER!!”

Jinu stilled beneath her in shock. A look of barely restrained anger squirmed its way across his face. But before he said anything, the expression collapsed into one of exhausted guilt. He looked away from her, and his lack of response made her own anger feel small and pathetic, nothing more than a wet kitten that growled and hissed even while it shivered in fear.

She hated it, and her hatred made the anger coil up, pulling tight on everything inside of her until it hurt even to just sit on top of him and do nothing.

“What? Nothing to say for yourself? First you kill hundreds of people and then you want to be able to play the hero? Rescue the damsel in distress? You can’t have it both ways, Jinu.”

His eyes flicked back to hers. A deep frown marred his features, accentuated by the demon patterns that branched across his face like scars.

Good. She continued her cruel taunting. “I don’t need you. I don’t want your help. I don’t want anything to do with a murderer like you.”

“I didn’t –!” Jinu cut himself off, jaw clenched so hard that Rumi was surprised she didn't hear his teeth cracking.

“You didn’t what? Kill anyone? An entire train full of people vanished!”

He stayed quiet again, but Rumi smiled, knowing she’d found a sore spot and intending to keep pushing until it bled. Gone was the forgiveness of the sickle, gone the love in the final fight, the desperate relief at the foot of the throne. Here and now there was only the two of them and the bitterly cold wind between them. Both angry. Both hurting.

“An entire train, Jinu, one that I was standing on top of. One that I was trying to defend! Plus countless other people with families that miss them, all of that is on you. You may not have pulled the trigger, but you gave Gwi-ma the gun.”

“They didn’t die.” Jinu spoke slowly, like he was trying to convince himself more than he was trying to convince her, “When a soul is taken by a demon, the person becomes a demon themselves.”

“That’s not the mercy you think it is. I would rather die than be this,” Rumi gestured to herself, her otherworldly purple skin, her eyes that had gone from honey brown to pale yellow like a pair of half-healed bruises in her face, “and I’m pretty sure you would too. You didn’t spare anyone. You just sent them to me to kill instead.”

Jinu didn’t respond. He didn’t even seem to be upset. Between her knees she could feel his breaths, deep and even, and his brooding serenity was really starting to piss her off.

She tightened her grip on his wrists and pushed his face deeper into the snow. “You’re seriously not going to say anything?!”

At this, finally, he snapped. “What do you want me to say? Do you want to hear that it wasn’t really me? Or that Gwi-ma was forcing me to do it? He wasn’t. I volunteered for this! Every time you saw the Saja Boys, it was because I chose to send us up there. I knew I was weakening the honmoon. I knew I was getting people killed.”

Jinu paused, glaring back up at her with eyes as deep and cold as the night around them.

“And do you know why I did all of that?” He asked quietly, “Can you guess the reward I had waiting for me? I made a deal with Gwi-ma that if I succeeded, he would erase every memory I had left of my family. I tried to destroy the world just so that I wouldn’t have to think about them anymore. So don’t waste your righteous anger on me, Hunter, this is what I am. This is what I’ll always be.”

His words punched through her like the blade of a sword. Like the point of a sickle. 

Hadn’t she said almost exactly the same thing to Celine? With the exact same intent of shocking her teacher into forgetting any lingering compassion she might hold? Of frightening her into picking what Rumi had thought at the time was the only morally correct choice? What she strongly suspected Jinu, too, believed would be the best course of action for his own circumstances – to be taken out back and put down like a rabid dog.

Knowing so intimately what that tarpit of guilt and hatred felt like, what the ever loving fuck was she doing trying to magnify those feelings in someone else? In Jinu, of all people? The only person who had seen the worst of her and hadn’t flinched. Even Zoey and Mira had wavered upon first sight of her patterns, and there had been some days where Celine couldn’t look Rumi in the eyes even when she was covered from head to toe with no patterns showing at all. Jinu was the only person whose first instinct had been to embrace her, literally, at the sight of her greatest shame. And here she was hounding him for his crime of, what, not leaving her to die out in the cold?

The patterns on her hands began to glow pink as shame dripped like poison into her guts. The color spread as Gwi-ma’s whispers grew louder and louder in her ear until she could barely think.

You were going to kill him. You don’t deserve his care. You’re more of a demon than he ever was. You hurt everyone who gets close. You lied to your friends. You betrayed them. You’ll betray him too. He knows that. He knows what you are. He’ll abandon you again.

Why was she doing this? Why was she always like this? Pushing people away as soon as they threatened to become important to her, loving them deeply even so. Only ever hurting them both in the process. Jinu had told her in their very first meeting that to be a demon was to live a life of unrelenting pain and torment. She hadn’t understood what he meant back then. 

She did now.

Her grip on his wrists loosened, and her voice, her stupid, useless voice cracked pathetically as she asked, “You made a deal with me, too. So why couldn’t you have just trusted me?” 

Jinu’s eyes widened, and then he turned away from her with a sigh. He went completely limp beneath her. The patterns on his arms responded to hers with a magenta glow of their own, and suddenly she couldn’t stand to look at them.

Rumi rose onto her knees and then tipped herself over sideways to land in the snow beside him, staring blankly at the faint red glow of the clouded abyss that passed for the demon realm’s sky. An even fainter glimmer of the honmoon rippled across it. There it was, the thing that she’d devoted her entire life to. Her life, her body, her voice, her sanity, her friends, any real chance for a family, all of it sacrificed without question or hesitation for that glittering blanket that now sat completely out of reach for the rest of eternity. Cut off from her like a limb, or a vital organ.

Still, she prayed that it stayed strong. To protect her friends above, and to hold her down below. Where she belonged.

Jinu was shuffling around beside her, doing god knows what until his ruffled, frost dusted face eased its way into her peripheral vision. He had moved so that he was sitting upright, close enough that his knee pressed lightly into her shoulder as though he was worried she would vanish into the mist if he wasn’t in constant physical contact with her, and he looked…well, wretched was the only word that came to her mind. Like a dog coming back to beg for affection from the hand that beat it.

Rumi reached up to brush some of the snow out of his hair, sighing, “I don’t know why I expected anything different, though. You’re a demon. Getting mad at you for stabbing me in the back is like getting mad at a fox for killing a rabbit. It’s just…it’s in your nature.” 

The whispers in her ear crooned gently, first Zoey’s voice and then Mira’s.

How can we be together if we can’t tell your lies from your truths?

I knew it was too good to be true.

The sleeve of her hanbok slid down to reveal a few inches of her forearm; discolored skin and the thick purple marks that branched and spiraled across it. 

Her stomach turned. 

She let the arm fall to her side. “It’s in my nature too.”

Jinu frowned at her hand where it lay curled in the snow. The wind howled above them, and something out in the darkness let out a mournful cry that echoed through the spindly trees. The snow didn’t feel good on her skin anymore. It was wet, and blisteringly cold, and it soaked readily into her thin hanbok in a way that made her feel like she would never be warm again. Snowflakes piled up in the folds of her jacket, in the crook of her elbow and in the gap between her collar and her neck. They weighed down her eyelashes, turning her every blink into a test of her conviction to stay awake. If she stayed out here for much longer she would be buried alive, she thought, dimly. The weight of the snow would press down on her, hiding her, protecting her, until she finally —

“I did trust you.” Jinu broke the silence with a shameful reluctance. “On the rooftops, I trusted you. And I wasn’t lying when I said I would help you. I wanted that future you described so badly.”

He paused for a long while, and when he started again his voice was thick with guilt. “But then you were gone. And Gwi-ma’s voices were back, and he pulled me down here and I just…I wish I could say that I fought it, but I didn’t. He told me that you were lying, and that I’d never be free of him. Or of who I really am. And I believed him, because that's the only thing that's stayed true for my entire life. As much as I wanted that golden future with you, I couldn’t believe it would ever exist for someone like me. I’m sorry, I…”

He hunched down suddenly, almost kowtowing to her in his anguish. “I know this doesn’t excuse anything, but I’m not a good person, Rumi. I never have been.” 

As if to immediately dispute his claim, or perhaps to belatedly atone for it, Jinu lifted her frozen hand from the snow and brought it to his lips. He rubbed her aching fingers almost mindlessly, and let the heat of his breath puff over their skin. Warming hers along with his own like there was no difference between them at all.

Rumi watched him for a moment. His eyes were nearly closed in a half-hearted attempt to avoid hers, so perhaps he couldn’t see how his patterns flickered over his hands and face like embers in a fire as he sank deeper into his shame. 

She raised an eyebrow and spoke dryly, “We’ve been over this, Jinu, you made a mistake.”

“I made a deal.” He hurried to correct her, “There’s a difference. I knew exactly what I was doing. Then and now. When I suggested the Saja Boys as rivals to Huntrix, I knew what might happen as a result but I did it anyway.”

That stirred something inside of her, a bland curiosity that fumbled for meaning. “The Saja Boys were your idea? Not Gwi-ma’s?”

“Yes.” Jinu breathed, forlorn and near desperate for her condemnation.

“Oh.”

Rumi reached for the anger that she had before, knowing she should feel all of it and more toward the person who was apparently solely responsible for attempting to destroy her life’s work. For the one who succeeded in ruining her life. But when she searched for any feelings on the matter, there was nothing but cold ashes in her heart. They’d made a new honmoon. A better one. What did it matter who’s call it had been to try and tear the old one apart? When she was still stuck on one side while her friends grieved alone on the other?

“It was a good idea.” She mumbled, “I’m surprised it took you guys so long to think of it.”

“What? No, it…if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here! You would have created the golden honmoon, you would have been free!” Jinu stammered as he scrambled for reasons that she might hate him. 

His faith in her was unbearable, to the point that she had to look away before she could speak again, “I don't actually know what would have happened if we’d created the golden honmoon. All I had was Celine’s word that it would work. It’s not like anyone’s ever seen it before.” 

It felt wrong to speculate like that. To question her foster mother’s expertise, to go against what Rumi had always been told was her real mother’s greatest wish. But it was true, wasn’t it? She was the only half-demon in the world. As far as she knew, anyway. She was quite possibly the only one to ever exist. There was no way to know how the golden honmoon would have reacted to something like her. Rumi had never questioned the theory before because it had always stood as the foundation to her very being. The life and body she had been born into was wrong, it was a mistake, but it was one that she could fix as long as this singular fact remained true; that the golden honmoon would save her.

Except now that the worst had come to pass it was easy to see the flaws in the theory. Now that her own personal hell had become real, she could give a voice to the fear that had stalked her all her life. 

Her eyes stung with tears as she whispered, “Maybe there was always too much demon in me for even the golden honmoon to save. Maybe I would have ended up here no matter what.”

“No. No! You wouldn’t! If I hadn’t—“

“You don’t know that either." she interrupted softly, "I’ve been on borrowed time since I was born, I think. I wasn’t ever supposed to exist. But the time I had…I mean I definitely could have used it better, but…”

Rumi paused as a brittle insecurity overcame her. A familiar refrain that she had often wished she could bring up to Celine, but one that she had always feared she’d known the answer to already.  Here at the end of everything, she asked it aloud for the first time. “Did I really ruin everything? Was it really all bad?”

“No.” Jinu’s answer was immediate, “You were perfect.”

Well, that was a lie, she thought with a huff, and not even a very good one. Blatant and overcompensating. But what did she really expect from someone like him, her dumbass Jinu? Both a flirt and a martyr, at once the darkness that surrounded her and the light guiding her within. She didn’t believe him, but she believed that he believed what he said, and that was enough to make her throat constrict painfully. 

A chunk of snow sloughed off from over his shoulder, and it was only then that she noticed all his shuffling earlier had been to position himself in the way of the sharp winter wind. The snow that should have been burying her was instead piled up at his back, tall already and getting taller by the second.

Her tears, when they fell, were molten against her frozen cheeks. 

Jinu’s stoically miserable face broke at the sight, his own eyes – brown again, she noticed with a pang, they’d been brown since she’d woken up – filled and then overflowed as he made some softly frustrated noise in the back of his throat. He let go of the hand he’d been holding captive only to lean forward and pull her entire upper body into his lap, tucking her in close with a mumbled, “Don’t cry, please don’t cry. If you cry then I’m gonna cry.”

As if his tears weren’t already splattering cold onto her face and neck. What a loser she was stuck with, honestly.

Rumi let out a small hiccoughing laugh. “God. If Mira saw this she’d probably say something like ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes’. How embarrassing, crying over a demon.”

For a while there was more silence between them, then Jinu’s soft voice sounding low and sad above her. “And what would Zoey say?”

Rumi lifted her head from where she’d unconsciously nuzzled into his warmth to look at him curiously. If she’d had a hundred chances to guess what he was going to say, those words never would have crossed her mind. Jinu watched her with the same neutral melancholy as before.

“Oh, um,” Rumi started, very intelligently, “I think Zoey would probably just be crying with me, if I'm being honest. She’d say we were brave for trying and then she’d probably tell you she was going to rub fish oil all over your car so animals would come and tear it apart at night.”

“...has she done that before? That sounds very specific.”

“She said it to Mira once when she wouldn’t let her put an informational segment about turtles into one of her raps. She kept trying to say the turtles were a metaphor but they definitely weren't. We’re still not sure how much she meant the threat.”

“I guess I’m glad I don’t have a car, then.”

It was barely a joke. Rumi felt her face twitch into something that was almost very nearly definitely not a smile. Just a leftover muscle reflex from her years of PR training. 

The two of them stayed quiet for a little longer, only the sounds of the wind and the trees and whatever monsters were prowling around to fill the void. Her head and torso were warming from the cover that Jinu offered but the snow that compacted over her legs tightened her joints and muscles until she felt like she was made of wood rather than flesh. Like she was some kind of horribly ironic reverse-pinocchio, a real girl of flesh slowly turning into a puppet for the crime of trying to be good. 

She’d tried so hard to do the right thing, to save people, to be a good person, and it was all for nothing . She hadn’t saved anyone on the train. The people who had been lost to Gwi-ma before she made it to Namsan Tower , the  missing people from before the Awards, all of them gone . She was supposed to be the leader of this generation’s band of Hunters, yet all she’d done was prolong the destruction of the honmoon and then get herself shunted off to hell. She’d abandoned her friends, her dearest friends and partners, to make a deal behind their backs and now they were alone, and she was alone, and she would always be alone–

“Rumi.” Jinu’s murmur gently derailed the overflow of guilt in her mind, “Will you let me take you home? You can be mad at me from inside, where it’s warm.”

She sighed heavily, her breath condensing into a great cloud that drifted away quickly on the harsh wind. A different memory flickered through her head, Jinu’s laughter-muffled voice and his eyes bright with humor. His hand tugging an invisible train whistle. Choo chooooo .

It wasn’t enough to call up a smile, but she felt her eyes soften as she looked up at his disconsolate face. “I’m not mad at you.”

He slumped even lower. “You should be.”

“I’m mad at myself.”

“I know.”

Jinu moved, then, to very reluctantly pushed her off of his lap so that he could get his feet under him. Rumi hissed at the sudden cold and quickly rolled up off the ground herself. She looked back to see Jinu still crouched where she’d been laying in the snow, arms outstretched as though he had been planning to scoop her up in a princess carry. He glanced up at her, seeming both embarrassed and disappointed as he stood up and dusted the snow off of himself.

Rumi felt herself blush as she briefly imagined taking him up on the offer of being carried. Of being held up against that broad chest, his hands holding her securely as she tucked her face into the warm hollow of his neck, the gentle rocking motion of his steps maybe allowing her to just…let go. To let it all go, for once.

There was no way she could do that! She’d never be able to look him in the eyes again!

Jinu’s own cheeks darkened as he watched the emotions play across her face. “It’s, uh…the house isn’t far. It’s this way. Are you sure you’re okay to walk? The snow gets deep out here.”

“I’ll be fine.” She croaked a little too quickly, “Let’s just get on with this.” 

“Right. Yeah, just, follow me, okay? If it starts snowing harder then grab onto my coat or something. It’s easy to get lost out here.”

Rumi nodded impatiently and stepped back to let him start walking ahead of her. 

Within ten minutes of restarting their trek, she began to suspect that she had been a little hasty in her refusal of his offer. Even with Jinu breaking up the path for her, it was incredibly difficult and slow going. Her thighs burned like she was jogging through sand, her shoulders and upper back ached from how tightly she was hunching down to avoid the wind, and the snow compacted unevenly beneath the thin soles of her shoes, threatening a broken ankle with every step. The “trail” they followed led them through seemingly endless swathes of trees followed by sudden steep drop-offs that they needed to slide and stumble down, and although Jinu led them unerringly in one direction — or, at least, he seemed to do so, if they were walking in a big circle she wouldn’t have been able to tell — Rumi couldn’t see anything resembling a destination. Only more trees and more snow, and the occasional flash of an animal darting past.

One of these instances caused Jinu to stop so suddenly that Rumi crashed directly into him, sending herself reeling backward and almost tripping into the snowbank. Strangely, Jinu didn’t move to apologize or try to help her, or even to tease her for not watching where she was going. He just stood there, staring out into the forest. When Rumi regained her footing she looked up at him, mildly offended, and then out what he was looking at.

It was a deer. Nothing more and nothing less. Not even a demonic deer, she didn’t think. It wasn’t a weird color and it didn’t have any extra eyeballs, and beyond that Rumi didn’t really know what to look for to identify demonic animals.

She looked back at Jinu, who was staring at the creature with a strange intensity. Not predatory, he didn’t seem like he was going to take off at a sprint to try and catch it or anything. But he watched the deer with a concentration that felt almost reverent, and Rumi looked between them as she tried to remember if deer had any special place in folklore or mythology that he might have been tapping into.

The questionably demonic animal pawed at the roots of a leafless tree, searching for food beneath the snow that probably wasn’t there. 

Rumi nudged Jinu, “It’s…just a deer?”

He startled, looking back at her with an embarrassed grimace, “Sorry, it’s just…”

He looked back in the direction of the deer. “My sister. She really liked deer meat. I told her it was ridiculous to have a favorite kind of meat when we got it so rarely. But she said it was even more important because of that. So that she knew she would really enjoy it when she got it.”

“Smart girl.” Rumi murmured, looking back at the deer too. That was definitely an argument that Zoey would have made, she thought with a stab of homesickness, if there had been any type of food that internationally beloved pop stars would have a hard time getting their hands on.

The deer took a few dainty steps closer, then it looked up at the two of them watching it, flicked its ears, and bounded away. Jinu breathed out slowly. Whatever tension that had taken over him seeped away as the deer vanished into the snowy haze. 

“I was worried you might try and chase it down or something.” Rumi started, trying to break the weird silence that had fallen.

He answered her distractedly, “It’s actually impossible to hunt in the dark forest. It’s like, part of whichever demon’s personal hell this is, I guess. The animals are too fast, or they’re too strong, or you suddenly fall down a cliff and break both your legs and have to just lay there waiting for them to heal enough that you can drag yourself back down the mountain.”

Rumi winced. “That sounds incredibly specific.”

“Uh, hypothetically speaking, of course." Jinu ruffled the hair at the back of his head awkwardly, " That’s definitely never happened to me. Anyway, something always happens and you can’t catch whatever you were chasing.”

“Or maybe you’re just bad at hunting.”

He looked back with an offended frown that quickly faded when he saw her attempt at a teasing smile. “Ah, that might be part of it. I’m a musician, not a caveman, you know. I’m delicate.”

He sighed dramatically, flicking his hair back in a way that showed off his long fingers and strong profile. A perfectly camera-ready pose for his audience of one.

Her smile turned slightly more genuine as she scoffed a laugh. “Come on, let’s keep going. It’s freezing out here.”

They started walking again, side by side now that the snow wasn’t piled so high. The trees around them had changed at some point from exclusively pine and cedar to include hardwoods covered in dried leaves that rattled and shivered in the wind. 

Rumi thought over his words just now, and the ones he’d said to her beneath the stage at the Idol Awards. And the ones he’d angrily thrown at her when she’d held him down and forced him to talk. 

“Hey, Jinu.”

“Hmm?”

She almost didn’t want to bring it up. He seemed so normal right now, joking with her and reminiscing about his family. But that was the issue, wasn’t it?

“Before, you said you made a deal with Gwi-ma to forget your family. I guess he didn’t follow through on that?”

She watched miserably as Jinu’s shoulders tightened. His jaw clenched and he looked away from her. When he spoke his voice was quiet. “It’s not that he didn’t follow through. I was the one who failed.”

In Rumi’s very biased opinion it was a good thing that he had failed, and she found it difficult to think of reasons why he might be upset about not destroying the world. But maybe he was upset that he still had those memories that haunted him. 

“Is that still something you want?” She asked hesitantly, her voice not much more than a breathy whisper thanks to her mangled vocal chords.

“No. I don’t want to forget.” He threw her a meaningful look that she couldn't decipher before turning back to their path, “The memories that Gwi-ma shows me…that’s not everything that they were. I guess I forgot that at some point.”

Rumi smiled, truly and warmly, and she reached out to hook her arm around his. “Good. That’s really good. Do you want to tell me about them?”

He hesitated, staring down at her arm in his with a consternation that made her wonder how he’d expected to carry her if he got so flustered by simple forearm to forearm contact. Then he seemed to realize what she said. “There’s not much that I remember. Even without Gwi-ma’s help, I don’t remember the important things.”

“Well, tell me what you do remember. I tend to think it’s all important.”

The two of them slid carefully down another steep drop that put them into yet another field of trees. The snow barely reached the tops of her shoes now, thin enough in places for the dark soil to show through in grimy looking patches. And there was even a little greenery here and there, as though making it down this far had landed them in a muddy and depressing autumn rather than the biting depths of winter at the top of the mountain. Whatever monsters roamed the snowy wastes above had also thinned to basically nothing as they descended, which had seemed like a blessing at first, but now they were surrounded by an oppressive and unnatural quiet. No birds sung in the trees, no insects buzzed, no prey animals rustled through the sparse underbrush. Just the two of them, their footsteps crunching through twigs and dried leaves, and their voices when they could find it within themselves to speak.

Jinu began to tell her what he remembered of his mother and sister in slow starts and stops. It really wasn’t much, but Rumi certainly wouldn’t consider any of it unimportant. He remembered his mother’s favorite song - an old work song about a man rowing a boat down a river and seeing many strange and wondrous things. She’d sung it to him when he was very little, he said, and he would sometimes catch her humming it while doing chores around the house. There wasn’t often much to laugh about in their lives but she’d laughed the first time he’d played it for her on the old bipa she’d gotten for him, saying she hadn’t realized he’d been listening so closely.

He could remember what food she used to make the most often. Not her favorite dish, he didn’t think, just the one she made the most. He said it was probably something Rumi never had before. He didn’t even think there was a name for something so simple. Jinu then proceeded to describe a soup that sounded so much like kimchi jjigae that Rumi could only stare up at him in confusion, genuinely unsure if he was joking or not. But when he didn’t make any follow up jokes or pull any faces at her, she let it slide and asked him to keep going.

He said he remembered his little sister’s favorite color – red, like the soft-petaled camelia flowers that bloomed each fall up by the temple. And he remembered her favorite song, too – something fun and bouncy that they used to sing at festivals. Something easy to dance to. 

“She turned everything into a dance,” he said with a fond smile, “even just carrying a cup of water across the room. Mom would get so mad because she’d spill half of it on the floor, but then somehow it always ended up being my fault because if I hadn’t been playing music then she wouldn’t have been dancing.”

“Well that’s not fair, you needed to practice!” Rumi protested on his behalf, her voice breaking with her attempt to push more emotion than she felt into her words.

“That’s what I said! I can’t help it that my music is so inspiring!”

The two of them laughed, a fragile and strenuous sound in the otherwise silent forest. She watched as Jinu’s smile slipped away quickly. Replaced by a worn sorrow. His arm curled tighter around hers, and the conversation collapsed into silence. 

Rumi didn’t push him to continue this time. No matter what he felt about it, the fact remained that the bright little girl that he spoke of so affectionately had been dead and gone for 400 years. He was the only one left to carry the memories of her and their mother. Every person who had ever met them, who had ever heard of them in passing, was long dead too. And he had been willing to give up everything just for the chance to rid himself of that burden.

Rumi didn’t even know how she was supposed to feel about him feeling all of that, much less how she would handle being in the same situation.

They kept walking through the trees. A sound like a flock of birds screeching in the distance made her look around curiously, and then all of a sudden they weren’t in the forest anymore. The trees ended abruptly at a low stone wall encircling a tiny village, maybe 12 buildings altogether, and all of them white walled and thatch roofed choga hanoks like they were on the set of a documentary or historical drama.

There was no sound here, either. Plenty of signs of living, but no signs of life. There were baskets and gardening tools laid out neatly on porches, carts and animal troughs waiting to be filled, doors open, windows open, but not a single person besides the two of them. It didn’t feel like a village that had been slowly or naturally abandoned, it felt like something had happened here. Something specific and terrible that had gotten rid of the people before they could run.

Her skin crawled in the eerie silence. Jinu tugged her quickly through the town to one house in particular. A small, L-shaped building with deep claw marks dragged through whatever clay the walls were made of. The straw roof was visibly degrading, the front door and window shutters had all been ripped off their hinges, and what looked like bits of destroyed furniture littered the area in front like a lawn made entirely of splinters.

“Home sweet home.” Jinu muttered. He dropped her arm so that he could prop the heavy wooden door up and indicated with an odd, jerky movement that she should head inside.

Rumi stared at him incredulously. “You cannot be serious.” 

It wasn’t that she’d been expecting a mansion or a luxury hotel or anything. This was still hell, obviously. But she didn’t think she was being unreasonable when she’d assumed someone as fussy and generally put-together as Jinu wouldn’t live in actual squalor.

A shockingly strong wave of mortification appeared to roll over him at her words, his patterns lighting up almost as bright as Gwi-ma’s flames themselves before he visibly worked to settle himself. 

He took a deep breath and spoke in a careful monotone. “It usually looks better than this. Please just go inside.” 

“…okay.”

Chapter Text

The front door that Jinu studiously examined the hinges of sat on the shorter segment of the L shape. A wooden porch ran along the inner face of the building with large clay pots and baskets of straw and what looked like gardening tools clustered in the corner. Beneath the porch was enough firewood to last at least a year, probably more. Rumi stepped up onto the narrow deck to peek into the front room. It was a normal sort of entryway, not remotely big enough to be considered a room by itself, but still blocked off from the main area of the house by another busted wooden door. The hallway-turned-front-room had clearly also been trashed by whatever had happened to the outside of the house, but there was so little inside to begin with that it was hardly the biohazard she’d expected given the outside of the house. A low shelf beside the door had been knocked over but it didn’t seem like there had been anything on it, and a stack of baskets had been overturned. A bucket rocked gently on its side in the cross breeze formed from the front door and the window on the far wall that had also been left open.

The wooden floor creaked loudly as she stepped inside. Next to the baskets there was a small pile of what looked to be rocks. And not even very interesting rocks either, they were small and vaguely teardrop shaped things still covered in dirt. They looked like they’d been pulled out of the ground just to be thrown into the corner and forgotten about. She picked one up as Jinu stepped into the room behind her. It was lighter than she’d expected, with a fibrous feeling to it. 

Rumi turned around and was startled by how close Jinu was, but tried to hide it by holding the little root out to him, “How did you manage to find taro in the demon world?” 

Jinu wedged the broken door firmly back into the doorframe, apparently giving up on fixing it for now, and stared at her blankly for a moment. Then he shrugged and offered a lazy smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I have my ways.”

He took the tuber from her and unceremoniously threw it back into the corner, before righting the shelf and scooping the baskets back up into a precarious tower. He kicked the other taro corms out of the way so he could reattach the window shutters using the same hook-and-eye closure that Rumi had grown up seeing in Celine’s traditional home back on Jeju Island. 

Her hanok had been much larger, of course, with every inch of the house made from the highest quality materials. Jinu’s house could have probably fit inside of Celine’s twice over. And probably three times over into the Huntrix penthouse, if only due to the open floor plan. Rumi was fairly certain that if Jinu reached both his arms out, he would be touching opposite walls no matter which way he turned. 

Once the windows were latched closed, the tiny room was plunged into a still and eerie darkness, with only thin bands of dusky light showing around the edges of the shutters. The change only hindered her sight for a few seconds as her demon eyes adjusted quickly to the dark. 

The second wooden door proved to be less of a challenge than the first, as Jinu was able to reassemble the simple hinges with a few good whacks of the heel of his palm. He tested the door quickly, swinging it a few inches open and shut a few times with some squeaking, then awkwardly bumped into Rumi with a mumbled apology as he stepped back to open it fully. He slipped off his shoes and placed them in the bottom cubby of the shelf next to the front door. Rumi quickly followed suit, and the two of them walked into the main room of the house.

While still small, this room was much larger than the front room. Though the level of destruction made it look equally cramped. There was a short chest of drawers with every drawer pulled out and thrown across the room, and a larger version of the shelf by the front door that had been knocked over. It was leaning on a long, low chest, also overturned. Clothing littered the floor in little shadowy heaps – all of it the same black hemp that they both currently wore – and miscellaneous items like pincushions and gauze rolls and calligraphy brushes and stubby half-used candles mingled dangerously on the cold stone floor with knife-like shards of simple earthenware plates. One half of a roughly hewn square dining room table had been upended and was leaning against the wall. The other half was somehow missing entirely, but if Rumi had to guess she would say it currently made up the lawn out front.

There were a good amount of books scattered around, too. Hardcover books with whole sections of pages torn out, paperbacks that had been ripped apart or otherwise intentionally crushed with dirty feet. A few cheap, flimsy notebooks in jarringly bright colors had their pages ripped out and shredded to drift like giant snowflakes in the wind that blew through the three additional windows left open in this room. 

There was no unifying theme or genre to the books that might suggest what Jinu was interested in. The only similarity to be found was the simple fact that they were all books. Rumi recognized a few from her own shelves and from Celine’s; classic literature and poetry and a couple best-selling autobiographies, self-help booklets and historical accounts of wars and politics. There was a book on the modern history of K-Pop, and at least two that she could see about the current state of the global musical industry. There were older books from the 50’s and the 70’s too, with their vintage covers and severely yellowed pages. Orphaned fantasy and fiction sequels without the rest of their corresponding series’, books on religion and outdated anthropology, and what looked like an incomplete set of encyclopedias bound in scratched up leather. And there were still older books yet, ones with no names on the covers at all, just thick ridged paper with author’s names embossed on the spines with faded gold leaf, and ones that had no covers at all because they were folded up pamphlets made from paper so old she thought it would crumble apart if she just stared at it long enough. It was as though throughout the last few centuries, Jinu would periodically decide that he needed more books and so would go out and grab the first dozen or so that he saw regardless if he had any real interest in what they were actually about.

The man in question walked through the room quickly, like he didn’t even see the damage. Hopping over and around the upended furniture easily to reach the far side of the hanok where there was another white wall separating a sliver of this room from the rest. This time there was no door, however, so Rumi had a clear view of him dropping a foot or so in height as he stepped back down to the ground level, and it wasn’t long before she heard annoyed muttering that she doubted she was supposed to listen or respond to, and then sounds of rummaging. The tock of wood against wood and the rustle of what sounded like dry grass. She felt utterly incapable of even guessing what he might be doing in that…storage room? Kitchen? She didn’t know, and she struggled to find it within herself to care.

She turned back to the mess in front of her, lifting what had to have been the bookshelf and righting it against the wall fairly easily. Beneath it were more of the cheap notebooks. Rumi picked up one of the them that had been crushed rather than torn to pieces and opened it to a random page. Inside was the slightly sloppy calligraphy of Jinu’s weirdly anachronistic handwriting – modern Korean hangul written top to bottom and right to left like old Chinese hanzi. As if he had learned to write at the same time that the country was switching from one to the other. 

Which was definitely possible. Now that she thought about it. 

But even with the strange formatting, Rumi knew song lyrics when she saw them. She wrestled with the crunched pages, trying not to tear the paper as she flipped through to find that every page was completely covered in words. It was far more organized than any of Zoey’s hundreds of notebooks, but there were similarities to be found. Angrily crossed out sections, sometimes whole pages, multiple iterations of the same chorus or verse with the occasional musical notations to indicate moods and tone. And here and there she even found little doodles. Swirly clouds and un-detailed moons, and a repeated blob that she assumed was supposed to be his tiger companion, at times curled up asleep in the corner of some pages or yowling at what Jinu seemed to think were particularly bad stanzas.

The lyrics themselves were…dark. To say the least. Most referencing feelings of being trapped between a haunting past and the unchanging future. Of wanting to escape by any means necessary. A little patch of stars hung, lopsided and ink-splattered, over a verse that felt a little familiar in its agony. Rumi read through it carefully, feeling the slow and sad rhythm of it as she mouthed the words.

There’s a hush before the heart remembers,

Where the light can’t find my name.

Half in the warmth of another world’s embers

Half where the morning came.

The ceiling breathes like a slow confession,

Floorboards holding ghosts of the night,

Something holy in the first impression

Of darkness giving way to light.

There were a few notes beside it, a possible start to a second verse and a few scraps of chorus that he had seemed to give up on quickly. She ran her fingers over the stars at the top of the page, feeling the slight wrinkle of the paper where the ink had soaked in, and found herself hoping that this notebook was distinct in its misery. However improbable that seemed.

She put the book onto a middle shelf and numbly went about picking up more of the scattered items, stacking them randomly on the bookshelf as well. Jinu could put them away later according to whatever organization system he used. If he used one at all. She had just begun to carefully and pointlessly stack crumpled book pages into little snowball-like piles on top of the shelf when she caught a whiff of smoke. 

Rumi dropped the papers and hurried over to the room Jinu had disappeared into. There were no electronics or fuseboxes that could have burnt out in this ancient hanok, she was sure, but it was just her luck to show up to a new place and then to have it immediately burn down, wasn’t it? 

She swung around the corner and dropped to the ground floor, ready to grab Jinu and run or to let him grab her and run or to do literally anything in the face of what was clearly an imminent emergency, only to find him perched on a little wooden stool. Patiently coaxing a small fire to life inside a huge boxy stove that had been built into the walls. The house’s ondol, she realized, here functioning as both the underfloor heater and a cooking appliance. Celine had one in her hanok as well, a much smaller and singularly dedicated floor heater that ran on electricity rather than something as dangerous as an open fire, but even still they’d rarely ever used it. Only on the coldest days of the year, all of which would have felt like a warm spring afternoon compared to the weather outside currently.

Rumi looked around the rest of the tiny primitive kitchen in mild shock as she waited for the adrenaline rush to fade. There was no fridge, obviously. No coffee machine, or toaster, or rice cooker, or even a sink?? There was no sink in the kitchen. Just a long wooden counter jutting out of the wall with wooden boxes and large clay jars underneath it. More wicker baskets lined two shelves installed high on both walls, and wooden cooking utensils stuck up out of a clay pitcher on the counter like alien flowers. A gritty looking cake of soap flaked itself apart in a small dish next to a wobbly stack of wooden bowls. 

There didn’t seem to be any knives anywhere. Rumi hoped they’d all been stolen. Or otherwise had been hidden so that they wouldn’t be stolen. 

She didn’t really want to think about any alternatives to that.

Once Jinu got the fire to a point where he felt comfortable leaving it to burn, he closed the little metal hatch on the front of the stove and turned to face her, long arms draped lifelessly over his knees, shoulders fallen. Resigned to wait for her inevitable questions and complaints. But Rumi had no idea what to say. It was already taking up most of her mental energy to simply not think about everything that had happened over the previous days. There was nothing left inside of her to contemplate the future.

She turned back to look at the main room, still looking decidedly marauded even with her attempts at cleaning. She cleared her throat with a wince and rasped, “I guess demons move quick. You were only gone for, what, two weeks?”

Jinu blinked up at her, then breathed out a low sound that was almost a laugh. “I’m sure this’ll be a huge surprise to you, but I’m not exactly the most popular guy around these parts. This probably happened the day after I left. Maybe the same day.”

He pushed himself up off of the stool and reached an arm out, fingertips just barely brushing her spine as he shepherded her back into the main room. “What’s weird is that I don’t really have anything that other demons would want, so…”

“So this was personal?” Rumi stared at him flatly, unsurprised and unimpressed by the admission.

“So we probably don’t need to worry about replacing anything.” Jinu finished smoothly, completely ignoring her suggestion of culpability.

She rolled her eyes and resumed cleaning. The clothing and the broken plates she left to Jinu, choosing instead to focus on matching drawers to their corresponding spaces in the chest of drawers and then stacking books haphazardly on the shelf. Jinu began tossing clothes back into the upended chest without bothering to fold them or put the chest back in place, and the tiny Mira that lived in the back of Rumi’s mind hissed at the mistreatment of such easily wrinkling fabric.

She turned to watch him for a moment. “I didn’t figure you to be the type to stick to the dress code so diligently.”

“You don’t get a choice down here,” he replied, tsk-ing quietly as one of his balled up jeogoris bounced off the top of the chest and flopped back onto the floor, “whatever clothes you were wearing when you fell turn into these, and any clothes you manage to collect after that also turn into these as soon as you put them on. One of the many fun little games Gwi-ma plays with us.”

He picked up another pair of trousers that were exactly the same as the ones he currently wore, and then paused to look between her and them with a thoughtful expression. 

She raised an eyebrow, “You’re wondering if your clothes would turn into my clothes if I put them on.”

Jinu coughed and quickly threw the trousers at the chest before turning away to gather the last few bits of clothing. He muttered, “Well, I mean, aren’t you curious?”

“You just want to see me wearing your clothes.”

“Two things can be true at the same time.” He looked up with an armful of laundry and a crooked smirk, the dim light from outside reflecting off of his fangs and the star-shaped earring he still wore.

It was such an expression that he would have made before, back when they were above the honmoon and under the sun and far away from Gwi-ma’s cruel laughter, that her heart gave a sad, stunted little twist when he turned away.

He walked over to the chest and lifted it upright, finally, scooping up the few shirts and vests that hadn’t made it and dumping the lot inside before lifting the whole chest and sort of crab-walking it back to its place under the window with a heavy thump. Jinu then sat on top of the chest and leaned out over the windowsill with an elegant twist of his body, long legs stretching out as counterbalances. He rose back up with the window shutters in hand and began to hook them into place.

When Rumi found the strength within herself to look away, her eyes laid upon the most beautiful thing she’d seen in hours. In days, perhaps, depending on how long it had actually taken them to get down the mountain. 

It was a bed.

Or, well, it was a thin looking sleeping mat on the floor. But it had a thick duvet on top that called to her as a siren song of potential oblivion. The bed had been hidden in the corner of the room, behind the low wall of the overturned chest where the shadows pooled the darkest even with all the windows open. It had mostly been left alone by the attempted thieves. The blanket was a little rumpled like it had been kicked once and then left alone, and one of the alarmingly rectangular pillows had been dragged off to the side and clawed open to spill its buckwheat hull filling across the floor, but otherwise it was all in one piece. Her demonic dark vision allowed her to see that the comforter was a muted orange, like the color of very ripe persimmons, and the pillows were encased in a satiny gold fabric that had been intricately embroidered with red and blue thread. That were likely to be fairly uncomfortable, she thought, but everything else looked perfect.

She walked quietly over to it. 

It was beautiful. All of it. Just the thought of being able to sleep at all almost brought tears to her eyes. Rumi turned around and let herself fall backwards, just barely too fast for Jinu to stop her with his shout.

“AH, NO WAIT, DON’T—!!”

She landed on the duvet and what felt like centuries of dust was immediately catapulted into the air around her, into her eyes and nose and directly into her lungs as she gasped, and then coughed, and coughed more with every wheezing breath she tried to pull in. She rolled up into a ball, trying to hide her face in her knees to keep from breathing in more of the particulates.

Jinu rushed to hover anxiously over her, “I’m so sorry! I should have warned you about that as soon as we came in! I didn’t, I- I don’t use the bed so I forget that it needs to be maintained? I guess. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. Do you need help? Is there anything I can do?”

Rumi looked up at him in what she knew was a pathetic display. The tears that had prickled upon first sight of the bed now streamed freely down her cheeks. She could see the dust turning to a grime on her snow-damp clothes, and she knew it was probably coating her hair in a disgusting muck. 

She was so tired. She was so, so extremely tired. And now she was covered in a thin film of dirt that she could feel in the back of her throat, and the whispers in her ear wouldn’t leave her alone and after everything she’d been through the previous day – she’d died! She’d actually fucking died and she’d been dragged back just to suffer more! – now she was stuck in the goddamn demon realm with only her situationship to rely on and she had to just hope he didn't get bored of her and leave her to the many, many other demons that would probably be overjoyed to have a Hunter to torture or murder or whatever else passed for fun in hell. She was in hell and she was exhausted and now even the bed had betrayed her.

This was it. She couldn’t take anymore. She thought she should say something in response to Jinu’s questions but the only thing that came out of her aching throat was a sad and warbling whine as more tears fell. 

At the very least, her pathetic sound seemed to spur Jinu into frantic action. He darted into the kitchen and returned with the little wooden stool, slowing to tug her to her feet and drag her, stumbling, back into the tiny entry room. Rumi was plonked on to the stool and told to wait, and then Jinu disappeared in a cloud of black sparks. 

Rumi blinked and looked around. She had no idea where he went. No idea what he was doing and no way to estimate how long it might take him to come back. The whispers were loud now, and impossible to ignore when her hands didn’t have anything to do to help take her mind off of them.

Look at the mess you made, they crooned to her, you’re a disgrace, you’re disgusting. You’ve overstayed your welcome. He doesn’t want you here. He’s just putting up with you. You’re selfish and greedy and that wasn't yours to touch and he hates you, he’s going to leave you. They all leave you, in the end.

Rumi sat alone in the dark room and tried to remember how to breathe. Tried to remember that she was supposed to want to breathe. Her whole body ached, and not just because she had literally crash landed in the underworld after falling through the honmoon. It felt like everything she had lost had been torn bodily from her.

The loss of Zoey and Mira, like her heart and soul had been ripped from her chest.

The loss of Celine, like her spine had been wrenched from her back.

The loss of her comfortable life, the solace of knowing her place in the world, stripped from her like the skin from her bones.

The loss of the easy companionship that she had found with Jinu, stolen from her like the breath from her lungs. 

What could she do except sit here, cold and alone and stupid and helpless? What was left to give her strength?

One small eternity later, Jinu returned through the small door leading to the main room. This time carrying with him a medium sized wooden tub filled halfway with water, and with a few strips of familiar black cloth sewn over themselves into what she assumed were meant to be washcloths. He stopped when he saw her sitting exactly where he had left her, having made no attempt to clean herself up or even to take off the outer layers of clothes that were beginning to feel crunchy with dirt and dust.

He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, edging around her to kneel down and place the tub of water next to her. “The water is from outside so it’s really cold, I put some more on the fire. I’ll bring it in here when it’s warm. So just be careful for now, I guess. Don’t go diving straight in.” 

He smiled weakly. She still didn't move. The smile slipped away.

Jinu glanced at her hands, as though thinking about reaching for them.

“I’m sorry.” Rumi whispered.

He blinked, then frowned, “For what?” 

“You started to say something about not touching the bed. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have assumed.”

“The reason I didn’t want you touching it is because of this.” He gestured to her dusty coat, “It’s not that I don’t want you to…if you think it’ll help then I want you to use it. If I’d known I would be bringing a guest back I would have had it cleaned up for you.”

“Okay.” Rumi spoke in a soft and even tone, disbelieving but unwilling to start a fight.

Jinu seemed like he wanted to say more, but he didn’t know how, or if he should. He frowned at her for a minute longer, then unfolded the wash clothes in his arms to reveal a small and shockingly perfect little bar of soap. Pink in color, she thought, though it was hard to tell in the dark, and pressed into the shape of a moon cake. The delicate floral details on top were thin enough to edge from pink to white, catching every little bit of light from the drafty windows. 

It was beautiful. Rumi wondered vaguely where he had gotten it. Surely nothing so lovely could have originated in the demon world. 

Jinu draped the washcloths over the edge of the tub and held the soap out to her, wafting a faint smell of roses in her direction. Rumi made no move to take it.

His lips pressed together tightly, and she watched his throat move with a swallow. He reached out to flip one of her hands over and pressed the bar into her palm. Her fingers closed just enough to keep it from falling onto the floor when he let go.

“Okay, come on. Let’s get you out of these.” Jinu stood up and gave her another shaky smile, reaching down toward the stiff dongjeong collar of her hanbok as he went, “I can get started cleaning these while you —!!”

The second his knuckles brushed the skin of her neck Rumi jumped like she’d been electrocuted and kicked away from him, sending the perfect little bar of soap and the wooden stool clattering across the room.

Her hand came up to clamp over the spot he had touched and she tried to back away quickly, but her free hand landed suddenly inside of the tub of ice cold water and she yelped, almost overturning it as well before she managed to make it to the far wall to huddle beside the stack of baskets.

Rumi’s chest heaved and her heart pounded hard enough that she could see it in the corners of her eyes. One brush of someone else’s hand on her neck and she was back at the Idol Awards, being pushed and jerked around and stripped in front of thousands of fans by the only two people she’d thought she could always trust. She’d never felt more unsafe than in that moment on the red-lit stage. Never before in her life, and that was including every time she’d thrown herself into battle against hordes of monsters that would have gladly killed her given half the chance.

Some part of her mind knew that he hadn’t meant it like that. Jinu wasn’t going to rip her clothes off of her the way that the imposters wearing her friend’s faces had. All he’d done was lightly touch the dongjeong of her hanbok to remind her to take off the dirty clothing. Practically as a joke. He wouldn’t have gone any further. She knew that, mentally. But her body couldn’t comprehend such nuance. 

Every breath was a shallow and noisy thing that echoed loudly in the small space as she tried to reign herself back in. She wasn't getting enough air. Her eyes darted around anxiously, attempting to catalogue her surroundings, to prove to herself that she wasn’t on that stage. 

Two doors in the room.

Six baskets beside her. 

Four shoes on the shelf. 

Nine taro root bulbs. 

Eight planks of wood underfoot.

The wall behind her was made from rough clay and bits of straw that caught on the hemp of her jacket. Cold air snaked down from the gaps in the window shutters above her, caressing the tips of her ears and her cheeks. 

She wasn’t standing on a stage, she was sitting on the floor in Jinu’s house. He’d brought her here. She remembered that. She remembered the long walk down the mountain.

A sound came from the other side of the room. A harsh exhale with a bleeding edge to it, something almost like a whimper.

Her eyes snapped up. Jinu stood across from her in the dark room, as far away as possible, his eyes wide with panic as he stared at her unblinking. He held his arm out from him as though trying to physically distance himself from his own hand. 

“I’m sorry.” He whispered, parroting her own words back to her, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

Regret rolled off of him in waves, self-hatred obvious in every tense line of his body, in the way he seemed to slouch away from her even as his feet stayed planted on the floorboards.

She stared back at him. It was Jinu who had transformed that moment on the stage from what should have been the triumphant high point of her entire life into her worst nightmare. He had planned it. He had taken the time to instruct the demons under his command on how to use the fears that she had admitted to him in confidence against her. 

It hadn’t been a spur of the moment poor decision. 

It hadn’t been a mistake. 

And sure, maybe he had been fresh off of whatever “talk” that Gwi-Ma had pulled him down here for. Maybe he had been hurting just as much as her. But he’d still done it, knowing he would be dooming the entire world if his plan worked. Knowing his success was predicated on breaking her heart in ways that she would never recover from.

Could she hold both versions of this man in her head at once? The one who would betray her so cruelly, so personally, and the one who would face off against Gwi-ma’s army alone for her? The one who would lie to her face and the one who would freely offer his own home when she had nothing and nowhere to go? The one who would kneel before her blade as she swung it, fully intending to die by her hand for what he thought he had done?

Rumi slowly let go of her collar, tucking her hand into her lap to hide how it shook. Of course she could accept Jinu for his double nature. Just as she had always accepted in perfect clarity the fact that Celine hated demons more than anything else in the world, but that she had loved the half-demon child in her care regardless. Just like how she’d known deep in her bones that although Zoey and Mira had pointed their weapons at her as she begged them to understand, they would still come back to her as soon as she called for their help. Like how she knew herself to be little more than a revolting mistake of nature, a creature born to sin like a seal to water, but she could help people, if she tried. She could still do good. 

So too could Jinu hurt her deeply and yet love her still. If anything it only made his feelings make more sense to her. This was how love worked. Love was just two people trying not to hurt one another. It was the effort that made the emotions true, not the success of it.

Rumi took in a deep breath, held it for a few long moments, and then breathed out. Box breathing, the way Mira had taught her once, to calm herself enough that her mangled vocal cords could speak. “It’s fine. I’m the one who should be–”

“Don’t you dare apologize.” Jinu interrupted her sharply. “Not to me, and definitely not for this.”

She flinched at the anger in his tone, and then watched as some vital tension seemed to fall away from him at the sight. His shoulders fell, his chin dropped as he looked down and away. 

“I’m sorry.” He murmured once again, and he took a lurching step toward the door, “I’ll…go and check on the hot water.”

“Jinu, wait!” Rumi scrambled up onto her feet.

She knew that if she let him leave after what had just happened, he wouldn’t come back. Not really. If Jinu walked through the door right now then he’d spend the rest of their eternal damnation in a guilt-saturated orbit around her, close enough to protect but never touching her again. Supposing he even stayed at all, that is. After seeing such an abrupt meltdown he may very well decide that she would be better off without him. And though she had prayed for him to come to that conclusion when she’d been dreaming of a cold and dreary death up on the mountain, she couldn’t bear it if he decided that now. She needed him. The thought of sitting by herself in this dark little room again, with only her thoughts and the demon king’s whispers to occupy her mind made her sick to her stomach.

She couldn’t be alone again. She’d been alone all her life and if she went one more day, one more hour without someone by her side it would kill her. She was sure of it.

Jinu froze with his hand already on the door, glancing back at her with a look of guilty and almost fearful surprise.

“Don’t leave. Please, stay here with me.” Rumi begged. 

Her begging wasn’t worth much, she knew that. It hadn’t stopped her friends from turning their weapons on her, and it had only just convinced Celine to do the bare minimum of her duties as a Hunter. Rumi wasn’t worth even the pity of those closest to her but she hoped that Jinu of all people, who had always understood her to a degree that was frankly uncomfortable for both of them, would grant her this tiny request.

The solid wood of the window shutters rattled against her shoulder blades as she shifted uneasily in the long silence. Despite her words, she hadn’t moved any closer to him, and she could see him measuring the distance in his mind.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He mumbled, eyes skittering away. Hand tightening on the door handle.

“No, no! It’s fine! See?” Rumi crossed the room in three quick steps and grabbed his wrist, yanking it up to her face and dropping her cheek into his palm even as he tried to pull his hand back. 

The two of them stood in petrified silence for a moment, neither entirely sure what she’d been trying to prove or if she’d succeeded. 

Jinu’s free hand let go of the door and rose to ghost over her knuckles. “You’re shaking.” 

She pressed his hand harder to her face. “It’s fine. Please, stay.”

A pained look came over him, and he looked very much like he was going to refuse her again. 

She changed tactics. “Will you at least help me with my hair? My shoulder still hurts from the fall, I’ll need help getting it unbraided.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie. Her shoulder did still hurt, as did the long line from her hip to her knee that had taken the brunt of her weight when she’d smacked into Gwi-ma’s temple floor like a bug against a car windshield. It just wasn’t quite the debilitating injury that she was implying, and she suspected he knew that.

But his fingers brushed softly over her cheek, and he broke her hold to lift his hand up to swipe gently over her eyebrows and around the corners of her eyes. Brushing off dust bunnies, she assumed. 

Jinu reached past her ear to tug her disheveled braid over her shoulder. He ran his hand down the length of it before letting go. 

“Okay.” He murmured, still not meeting her eyes.

“Okay?” She asked, perking up immediately in a way that would have been embarrassing if she wasn’t so desperate for company.

Jinu’s lips twitched like he wanted to smile but didn’t think he should. “Yeah, okay.”

He cleared his throat, and his cheeks darkened with a blush. “Why don’t you, uh…I assume you’ll want to take those off before you let your hair down?” 

He gestured to her dirty clothes, continuing, “I’ll go into the other room while you undress. I won’t close the door! I promise, I’ll be right over there! Okay? I’ll come back.”

Ah, hmm. Right. That was why all of this had started, wasn’t it? Because Rumi needed to take a damn bath. Which meant that she’d been begging him to stay and…watch? To stay and help?? Was that what she’d been doing?? Had she gone insane?!

Her own face heated. “Right, yeah. That’s…that’s a good plan.”

He nodded and backed through the door slowly, watching carefully to make sure she didn’t freak out again, and then he was gone. 

Rumi took a deep breath and then, violently suppressing the loneliness that set in immediately, began looking around the room for the few items that she’d flung in her panic. She righted the stool next to the tub and picked the washcloths out of the freezing water to wring them out and hang them over the side once more. The pretty little soap had landed on one of its rounded corners and then bounced, squashing a quarter of the pattern on top into a flat plane and crumbling the details off of the rest. She picked it up and brought it back to the tub.

The already dim light falling through the open door halved as Jinu closed another of the windows in the main room. Rumi turned her attention to what would be the most complicated part of her outfit - the tie holding her jacket closed. It wasn’t an especially complex knot, it was just that the fabric had swollen where melted snow had soaked into it, and she still wasn’t used to her claws. But she worked through the knot of the goreum carefully until she was able to shrug out of the garment, determined not to destroy anything else today. Her skirts came up over her chest so she wasn’t really exposing anything, but she still shivered at the feeling of the cold air on her shoulders. Barely suppressing the urge to clutch at them, to cover them up like she’d always done before.

Which was stupid, she thought angrily as she peeled out of the outer skirt. She shouldn’t feel so unsettled by her shoulders being bare when her whole body was covered in these godawful patterns now. But one day of resigned acceptance was nothing compared to 24 years of hiding, and she couldn’t help but pull her knees to her chest and cross her arms tightly as she sat down on the stool once again to wait for Jinu to come back.

The room darkened fully with the last of the window shutters closing. Now the only light in the house was the very muted yellow glow from the stove on the other side of the building. 

Rumi sat in the cold silence, and realized abruptly that she couldn’t hear any sounds from the other room. No footsteps, no Jinu talking to himself, no rustle of organization like he’d been doing before. No tuneless humming like Mira tended to do when she thought she was alone, no enthusiastic acapella renditions of instrumental breaks like Zoey would do without thinking. No jabbering away on phone calls from Bobby, no sighing and muttering from Celine, not even the quiet rumble of that big weird tiger or the clicks and whistles of the hat-stealing bird.

The emptiness of the room around her was beginning to make her twitchy, as the weight of all that she had lost pressed down on her again. It was possible that she would never hear most of those sounds again, wasn’t it? Humans had never been able to travel through the honmoon the way that demons could. If she wanted to see any of her people again she would have to go above the honmoon herself, somehow. Would her friends have time to recognize her in this new form before their training kicked in? Would they want to stop at all? Now that they’d had some time to reflect on how their entire relationship with her had been built on lies from day one?

Maybe that wasn’t such a bad way to go, all things considered. To end this miserable life, to be able to start over from scratch? Yes, that was something worth trying for, she thought. Even if it came along with Zoey’s sobbing apologies, or Mira’s frustrated and fearful anger, to die by their hands would be a gift that Rumi treasured. If only she could see them one more time.

She still couldn’t hear any sounds from the other room. Maybe Jinu wasn’t even there anymore. Maybe he’d gone outside to do some other 17th century chores that her modern brain couldn’t even conceptualize. Or maybe he’d decided to leave despite his promises because she really was too moody, too difficult to figure out, and she’d flipped out when he’d touched her so why would he want to stay here when he could go literally anywhere else and not have problems like her? Because honestly she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, she couldn’t stop him from warping or even just running away, probably, and she didn’t have anywhere else to go except back to Gwi-ma, so she was entirely dependent on him. On Jinu, who she had tried to murder on stage in front of thousands of people. Who she had attacked for no reason up on the mountain after he’d saved her and he’d brought her back to his home and she’d freaked out for no reason and he was gone, he’d left her here ALL ALONE. SHE WOULD BE ALONE FOREVER.

A loud shoving sound startled her, like furniture being moved, and her mind suddenly quieted as Gwi-ma’s voice slipped away. 

“J-Jinu?” she called out nervously, halfway convinced he really had abandoned her entirely and that this was the attempted robbers returning to finish the job. She stood up quickly and looked around the room for potential weapons. 

“Yeah,” his familiar voice called out, “just a second!”

She heard footsteps heading away from her, and then footsteps again coming toward her accompanied by a growing brightness. Rumi didn’t relax until she saw Jinu step through the door, a half-used candle in one hand and a bundle of black in the other. The candle performed a minor miracle as he placed it carefully on top of the shelf by the door, shining brightly to banish the gloom and transform the cold white walls and bare wooden floor of the entry room into something warm and inviting. Turning it into a place she was no longer desperate to escape even with the cold seeping up from between the floorboards. She could only imagine how quaint the main room of the house could be if it was lit by something other than the eternally dusky light of the demon realm, where time seemed to have stopped at the exact point where the sun had gone down completely but there was no nighttime beauty to admire yet.

Jinu gestured back to the stool and knelt behind her when she carefully sat down again. She heard the soft rustle of his overcoat and then he was very carefully lifting her heavy braid up from where it lay limply on the floor. He undid the hair-tie and passed it to her over her shoulder, finally meeting her eyes again as she looked back to take it.

“I brought you a change of clothes,” He said as he began to draw his fingers through the weave of the braid, “figured mine might be a bit more comfortable for you since they’re not all wet and dirty. And they’re…you know…pants.”

Rumi turned back to face forward. “I still think you just want to see me wearing your clothes.”

“Three things can be true at the same time.” he spoke softly, but she could hear a smile tugging at his words, “I just wanted to keep your modern sensibilities in mind. I’m a gracious host like that, you know?”

“Oh, of course. You know I’ve worn skirts before, right? Even dresses, sometimes.”

“Yeah, but you wear pants more. At least, you always did around me.” His voice became hesitant at the end, like he suddenly realized that he might not know her as well as he thought. 

While loath to lose any argument, even one this small and unimportant, Rumi really didn’t like this newfound insecurity in him. She murmured under her breath, words for him that she almost hoped he wouldn’t hear. “You’re right, I do prefer them.”

Jinu let out a pleased little humm, so quiet that she probably wouldn’t have heard it if he wasn’t sitting directly behind her, and Rumi felt herself relax a little.

The combing of his fingers moved steadily up the braid, the gentle tugging sparking a buzzing eagerness in her chest for when he would finally reach her scalp. Eagerness, or maybe anxiety. It was difficult to tell. As his fingers got closer to the base of her head, she noticed him slowing down. Still trying to only touch her hair and definitely not her neck again. The concern was appreciated, but the constant sensation of almost being touched was going to drive her insane. With each pass of his fingers running gently through the braid, her thoughts ran themselves in circles like water down a drain.

 ‘Almost there. Maybe this time. Urgh, stopped short again. He’s close, he’s almost, TOO MUCH!’

She jumped as his clawed fingertips softly scratched against her skull, and cursed herself when she felt him jerk back.

“Sorry!” She burst out, trying to get ahead of his own apology, “It’s not you, I swear. I’m just not used to it. Please, keep going.”

Rumi truly did not care how pathetic that made her sound. She had an eternity of damnation ahead of her to be prideful. For now, while everything was new and terrible and she’d just had the worst day of her entire life, she was going to take what scraps of affection she could get. 

Jinu’s hand hovered behind her head. She could feel it bumping into her braid as her head moved incrementally with her breathing.

“Didn’t I tell you not to apologize to me? You didn’t do anything wrong.” He said, his voice low and sad. 

“Right, I…” she trailed off, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond to that without apologizing again. Please just keep going.” 

She leaned back into his hand to try and encourage him to continue. Jinu’s fingers stayed put for one awful minute as he thought things over, but then she heard a puff of air escape him, and the sharp tips of his claws splayed out across the back of her head.

He spoke with a curiously flat tone of voice, “Well, if you insist. Please excuse my forwardness.”

When he resumed his unbraiding, he was much less careful with his touching. Even going so far as to dig one hand into her hair and massage her scalp while the other was occupied in following the woven knots all the way down to the ends. His hands in her hair, the warmth of his body behind her, the way he braced her before tugging another segment of braid undone, like he knew she was well on her way to boneless-ness, if Rumi could purr, she would have done so in that moment. 

Jinu rose up onto his knees to reach the very top of her braid, and she must have been a little too wobbly because his hand moved around from massaging the back of her head to hold her chin steady while he carefully unpicked the tight braid right at her crown. She tried to glance up at him but he stayed just barely out of sight. Focused intently on the task before him. Rumi let the weight of her head rest in his hand, fighting a smile as he hummed above her, that pleased little sound again.

His thumb tapped her chin a few times, a warning that he was going to let go. The disappointment was short-lived, however, as she felt both of his hands bury themselves in her hair again, loosening it from the tight shape of the braid with quick scritching motions that sent shivers down her spine. He was saying something to her, but she couldn’t focus on anything other than that feeling of physical contact, the voluntary press of someone else’s hands on her, not to hurt or to correct or tease, but just to offer relief. Nearly a foreign concept to her. She honestly couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done anything like this. Or the last time she’d let anyone close enough to try, anyway. Zoey had always cooed over her hair, and Mira’s was long enough that she probably could have offered assistance like this if Rumi had ever felt comfortable enough to ask.

But she never had. Always too afraid that it would feel too good, afraid that it would be too much of the sort of closeness she so desperately wanted that she wouldn’t be able to control herself. One of them might catch a glimpse of something they were never meant to see, or Rumi herself might become loose-lipped in such a blissed out state. Might tell them something they weren’t ready to hear.

And she’d been right, in the end. Look what had happened when they’d learned the truth. Sure, they had come back when she’d called for them, and they’d seemed accepting in those final moments before her fall, but if Rumi could have just kept her shit together for one more day then none of this would have happened. If she’d just done what she had been born and raised to do, no one else needed to have suffered. Not Mira, who Rumi had always known would break before she would bend. Not Zoey, who so willingly gave away her whole heart only to have it shattered on the floor time and time again. Certainly not Celine, who had only ever done her best with a child she had never wanted, and maybe not even Jinu, who had been broken long before Rumi had ever met him, but who always held her with such gentle hands. Like she was the one who needed protection, rather than the thing everyone else needed to be protected from.

Jinu’s fingers reached the base of her head far too soon, and then he was standing up, and his hands were untangling from her hair and he was stepping away, and Rumi almost tipped over backwards from the sudden loss of support. She only flailed a little bit before rebalancing on the stool, glaring at his back with great offense. A tactic that was admittedly ineffectual, but about as satisfying as anything could be at the moment. He’d gone over to where he’d placed the pile of clothes for her and was now rifling through them as though he’d forgotten something.

He pulled something out of the bundle, though it was small enough that she still couldn’t see what it was even after he turned around to walk back toward her. Jinu noticed her eyeing his loose fist with caution as he knelt behind her once more, and he opened his hand to reveal a small wooden comb delicately carved with a branch of bell flowers along the top edge. Another terribly lovely little thing he apparently just kept in his house for some reason.

“Was that your mother’s?” The question slipped out before she could stop it, and then it was too late to take it back.

“Ah, yes and no.” Jinu answered carefully, looking down at the little wooden art piece in his hand, “I…got it for her. But she never had the chance to use it.”

If the subject matter were anything else, she would have pressed him for more information. But as it was, Rumi only nodded and watched as he reached for her hair again.

She spun around on the stool to pull away from him slightly as she realized what he was planning. “Oh, you don’t have to…I have so much hair, it’ll take forever. I can—“

She moved to take the comb from him, but as soon as she met his eyes again she stopped in her tracks. Sitting this way, with him on his knees and her on the stool, she was looking down at his big brown eyes. Sinking into them, really. Because he was staring up at her like the suggestion that she might brush her own hair was akin to finding an eviction notice on his door. 

His hand tightened on the comb, and he glanced at her outstretched hand warily. 

“Or, I guess, you could…do it?” Rumi stammered weakly. 

Jinu breathed out a heavy sigh of relief. His face softened with a smile, like she was doing him a great favor by allowing him to keep waiting on her hand and foot. Rumi’s face burned with a blush and she spun around to face the wall again, tense and awkward once more.

The soft sound of his laughter didn’t help her emotional state in any way.

His fingers combed through the mass of her hair to separate it into two halves, and she heard the quiet prickling sounds of the wooden teeth running through the ends of her hair. If it had been a long time since she’d let anyone help braid or unbraid her hair, it had been a lifetime since she let anyone brush it for her. Not since she was a child, she thought. Her arms were still crossed over her knees, still holding onto her shoulders in a habitual attempt to hide the patterns that now stained her skin from head to toe, and as the silence stretched on she felt herself getting jittery.

Rumi’s taloned fingers tapped against her skin. She wanted to run them through her hair but that would mess up Jinu’s work. She wanted to get up and pace the room, she wanted to put her jeogori back on no matter how crusty it was. She wanted to get the hell out of here but there was nowhere else to go.

She settled for conversation, her rough voice shattering the serene quiet that had fallen over them. “So why do you even have a bed if you haven’t used it in 400 years?”

When Jinu didn’t answer immediately, Rumi panicked and threw out some more questions. “And why do you have a kitchen? Don’t demons just eat souls? You don’t need to cook souls, do you?” 

A brief and horrifying mental image of using a human soul as a cooking ingredient came over her and she shuddered. How sentient was a soul to begin with? Was it still alive when it was taken from its body? Was it tangible? Would it…bleed? If it was cut?? Why had she never thought about this before?

Jinu’s laugh interrupted her spiraling thoughts and she frowned. Surely it wasn’t that strange of a question.

“Demons don’t eat souls.” He spoke softly, levity coloring his tone as though he’d guessed where her thoughts had run away to, “When we pull them out of a person, we sort of just hold onto them for a little while. And through us they’re sent back to Gwi-ma. I don’t know exactly what he does with them, just that he collects them and he always wants more.”

Rumi frowned deeper. “He doesn’t eat them?”

“He can’t. Not completely, anyway, since the soul disappears when you kill one of us. Gwi-ma wants them because having more of them makes him more powerful, but they’re not technically a part of him. They’re like batteries, kind of.”

Rumi pulled a face at the comparison, but she let it go. “So that means he still has yours, then? He’s just been holding onto it all this time?”

Jinu didn’t respond, but she felt the comb running through her hair pause before continuing.

Rumi kept talking, babbling inanely to fill the tense silence. “He has mine too, now. Obviously. Maybe that’s kind of nice. That we’re together out here and they’re together in- inside of him? Nevermind, I don’t like that.”

Jinu laughed quietly again, but still didn’t say anything. He had reached high enough that he couldn’t keep her from feeling each tugging draw of the comb through her thick hair by holding above the section he was brushing, but he ran his palm over the back of her head with each pass, like he was trying to make up for the fact.

“I thought it would feel different.” Rumi mumbled, “Not having a soul. I thought it would be an emptiness that was more noticeable, I guess. But I kinda just feel the same. I’m sad about the things I lost, I’m sad about being in hell, obviously, but other than that…”

She tried to joke weakly, “Maybe that doesn’t say very much about my life before, huh?”

“You don’t feel it as a lack of something you had before,” Jinu answered quietly, “it’s more like the presence of numbness. Like there’s something inside of you that’s blocking what you know you’re supposed to be feeling.”

“Well, I’m definitely feeling that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what? It was my choice to make the deal. I knew this was what would happen.” Her claws tightened on her shoulders. Yes, she’d technically known that making a deal with the king of demons would cost her soul, but knowing and understanding were such different things. Nothing could have prepared her for how it actually felt to lose everything.

“I’m sorry you have to feel this at all.” Jinu’s voice came from above her head again, as he reached to brush back the shorter locks and baby hairs that framed her face.

“Oh. Me too. About you, I mean. I’m…you said I can’t say I’m sorry but I am. For you.” 

“I, uh…thanks? I think.”

Rumi wanted to slap herself. How was it fair that she had lost all of her friends and family and had fallen into the demon realm and yet she still had to deal with her own social ineptitude?

She buried her face in her arms, “You’re welcome, I think. Ugh. I made that weird.” 

Jinu gently twisted the mass of freshly combed hair around his hand, coiling it into a loose rope before reaching over her shoulder to deposit it into her lap as though submitting it for approval. “Only as weird as it needed to be.”

He sat back on his heels and started from the beginning on the other half of her hair. Rumi had the awareness that the conversation had wound down to an acceptable stopping point, that if she just kept her mouth shut then at the very least she would know that this interaction had ended on a mostly positive note and that she hadn’t inadvertently laid any emotional booby traps for either of them to fall into later.

But acting according to what ‘should be done’ had never been one of her strong suits, unfortunately, and she felt some kind of reckless exhaustion compel her to speak again.

“Okay, well, you still haven’t answered the bed question. Why do you keep one if you have no plans to use it?”

Jinu stayed silent for a moment before answering in a tight voice, “A house is supposed to have a bed, isn’t it? My mother taught me to keep a proper home.”

Something about that twinged painfully inside of Rumi. Something about it rang insincere and ungrateful and it pissed her the hell off. Maybe it was the way his voice was entirely absent of the warmth he’d had when talking about his family on the mountain, or maybe it was the way that the word ‘home’ fell from his lips the way a blackened bud fell from a frost-withered stem. Like for him the very concept was something that had died before it ever had the chance to bloom.

“Your mother isn’t here,” Rumi informed him, unnecessarily, unkindly, “you can do whatever you want.”

The silence stretched in the cold little room, tense and heavy, but the sound of the wooden comb brushing though her hair didn’t falter. Just as Rumi was gearing up to try and take back her bitter words, Jinu took a deep breath in, and let it out slowly.

“There’s been…many times in my life where the only thing got me through the day was pretending that I hadn’t left my family behind. Even with Gwi-ma’s whispers in my ear, I would make myself imagine that I wasn’t really in the demon world. That any minute now my mother would walk through that door to scold me for ‘sitting around playing music while this poor elder is out working the fields’. Or that my sister would come jumping halfway through the window to show me some slimy little frog she’d found in the mud. And then she’d ask me to play her a song. Like she always did.”

He swallowed audibly before speaking again in a thick voice. “But in 400 years that never happened. And I know that I should be happy about that. I shouldn’t want to see them because this is the demon world, and I would hate it more than anything if they ever became demons like me, but…I guess…there’s just some stupid part of me that never learns. I keep thinking they'll come in and see me here, so I have to do my best. I have to keep things nice or else I'll have wasted my afterlife just like I wasted the first one where I had them there with me.”

Something in the candle’s wick popped and the room flared with brightness before settling back into the comforting low light. 

“That’s why I asked Gwi-ma to take the memories from me.” He mumbled, “Because I was too weak to accept the truth on my own. That the moment I abandoned them was the last time I would ever see them again.”

Considering Jinu had forbidden her from apologizing to him, there wasn’t anything that Rumi could think to say.

“I think they would have liked you if they could have met you.” Jinu’s voice, suddenly bright and filled with a desperate sort of levity, startled her. “I mean at the very least my sister would have loved you immediately. My mom would have come around eventually.”

He spoke with a confidence she was sure he didn’t really have. But that was alright. It was a strange enough idea all on its own. Zoey never really talked about her parents, and Rumi had only had the genuine displeasure of meeting Mira’s parents once in passing. She almost wanted to joke that her own parents had barely even wanted her, so his mother ‘coming around eventually’ was the best news she’d heard all day.

Except that his mother would never come around. She would never do anything. Because the only place she existed anymore was in Jinu's memories.

“When I was younger I used to go to my mother’s grave all the time. Sometimes multiple times a week.” Rumi spoke to the wall slowly, “I would tell her everything I had learned that day, or I’d bring her flowers I’d picked, or I’d sing her a song that I’d made up about bumble bees or whatever. Just little things like that. I’m sure I seemed like the perfect dutiful daughter. Except, I only did it because it made Celine happy. To me, it only ever felt like I was talking to a rock.”

Rumi paused, not entirely sure where she was going with this but feeling obliged to continue. “Celine always kept this huge stack of photo albums that I was allowed to look through whenever I wanted. It had pictures of the Sunlight Sisters practicing for their performances and hanging out and going on vacations. Some official prints of them and magazine and newspaper clippings. And she had tapes of their shows and interviews that I would watch over and over, just trying to get a feeling for who my mother was as a person because all Celine would ever tell me was that she was perfect and the best of them and that’s not…that didn’t tell me how she would have reacted to me summoning my sword for the first time, you know? Celine had just nodded and said ‘good. Do it again’. Would the Miyeung that I watched in those interviews have said that? Would she have cheered for me? Or would she have said nothing at all? She seemed kind of shy but maybe that was just for the cameras.”

Rumi’s jaw snapped shut as soon as she realized how much information she had just rattled off to someone who hadn’t asked for any of it. Gods, what was wrong with her? Or what wasn’t wrong with her, rather? Surely that would be the shorter list. She let her head fall to her arms again, and felt the tug of her hair slipping through Jinu’s fingers. 

“Hey, come on, help me out here.” There was a slight hitch of laughter in his voice as the rounded edge of the comb tapped the corner of her jaw, prompting her to lift her head up again so he could keep brushing. 

Rumi looked up at the wall again, at the flickering shadows from the candlelight, and she sighed. The unilateral ban on apologies was making it difficult for her to communicate. Maybe she really did apologize too much. She should probably work on that. But when things went wrong it usually was her fault, and even if it wasn’t, someone had to take the blame. That was what leaders did. Celine had taught that to her from a very young age, had shown it to her frequently as she’d grown up under her tutelage. She’d even tried to take the blame as Rumi had terrified her and begged for something she hadn’t wanted to give. Rumi remembered it in crystal clarity, she’d never forget those words.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Rumi. That was pure selfishness on my part.

Jinu, miraculously, managed to intuit her problem. He prodded the conversation along manually, like a shepherd with a particularly stubborn flock, “Do you have any memories of your mother at all?”

She shook her head. “No, just the pictures.”

She didn’t bother trying to fully convey the emotions associated with one of her earliest memories, knowing that she would fail if she even made it through the story in the first place.  She remembered being held up to a warm and static-y TV screen, pouting in frustration as she watched tiny figures twirl and skip around in front of her. Her little hands had slapped softly against the screen, trying to grab them to make them stop so she could figure out what they were. And behind her Celine’s voice, crying, telling her to say hi to eomma. 

Jinu stayed quiet as the comb crept higher. She ran her fingers over the coil of hair he’d dropped into her lap, and thought about how she appreciated that he didn’t offer false platitudes about how her mother would have been proud of her or was looking down at her with a smile or anything stupid like that. But it made sense that he wouldn’t, since he obviously wouldn't want anyone saying the same about his own mother.

A strong wind ruffled the grass roof of the house, and air shot up through the gaps in the floorboards in thin, blade-like slices. Rumi shivered, and her hands returned to her shoulders as she hunkered down. 

“Sorry, I’m almost done.” Jinu murmured.

“Why is it you can apologize but I can’t?” She shot back at him bitterly.

“My house, my rules.” Jinu said flatly. He didn’t bother giving any further justification for the blatantly unfair ruling. The comb had reached the back of her neck at this point, and she felt him rise onto his knees again to be able to reach properly. Felt him sway closer to her and felt the warmth of his chest whisper over the bare skin of her shoulders. 

“So,” He continued in a more cautious tone, “your mother died before you got to know her at all, and then this Celine person took you in. What about your father? Where was he that he couldn’t take care of you?”

Rumi’s claws tightened on her shoulders, digging painfully into the skin. This was not a conversation she had much patience for. 

“I don’t know. He was a demon, so, probably dead. Most likely by Celine’s hands, or my mother’s.”

“A demon had a child with a human?” Jinu asked, incredulously. 

“Not just a human, a Hunter, remember? My existence goes against everything I was ever taught.” 

“A demon…had a child…?” Jinu murmured to himself again.

“I feel like you’re getting stuck on the wrong part of the story, here.” Rumi snarked over her shoulder, “Are there rules against that sort of thing?”

“Well, no, not exactly.” Jinu’s voice was a comforting rumble that surrounded her as he leaned forward to draw the teeth of the comb through the hair at the very top of her head. 

“Gwi-ma doesn’t really care what we do, as long as we answer when he calls. It’s just…” He paused, seeming unsure how to word his thoughts, “...ah, there’s really no good way to put this. I would imagine it’s hard to be in the mood when you have a voice in your head constantly reminding you of everything you’re afraid and ashamed of.”

He used a lock of her hair to brush over her ear for emphasis, the gentle bristling sound blending into the demon king’s whispers that were, in fact, still looping themselves in her mind.

You lied to them, you abandoned them. You frightened them. He left you, he’ll leave you again.

Jinu hummed thoughtfully, “Your father must have had a truly indomitable spirit. I suppose that’s where you get it from.”

He grinned down at her like he hadn’t just done irreversible psychological damage to her poor, already grief-addled mind.

Rumi stared up at him, mouth agape in horrified shock. “Don’t say it like that! I don’t want to think about that!!”

Jinu laughed, a rich sound that echoed joyfully off of the clay walls around them. It wasn’t hard to imagine how a house like this might have sung once upon a time, with a musician’s skilled playing and a child’s laughter, and a mother’s soothing voice.

“Joking aside, though,” Jinu lifted the half of her hair that he’d passed forward to her and rejoined it with the other half, combing them back together with long strokes, “I wouldn’t have thought that kind of thing was possible.”

“It shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t exist.” 

“Don’t say that.”

“But it’s true!” Rumi protested, agitated by his refusal to see the truth, “I…I wasn’t born with these patterns, you know? We had a few baby pictures of me and I was a perfectly normal kid! I mean obviously I had purple hair and that was kind of weird, but otherwise I was a normal baby! I was human, I was fully human for a little while. In the pictures, anyway.”

She swallowed thickly, painfully, as though the scar across her throat had tightened into a leash to keep her from talking about such unpleasant topics. Of course, she had never been fully human. She knew that. But for a little while she had looked like she might be, and the difference in Celine’s attitude toward her before and after this incident were like night and day. She remembered it distinctly even now. It, too, could be seen in the pictures of the two of them. If anyone knew to look.

“I was a normal kid.” Rumi emphasized, “And I asked a lot of questions, just like any other kid. I knew that my mother had died and that I needed to be respectful about that, but that didn’t explain why I didn’t have a dad either. One day I asked Celine one too many questions about it and she yelled at me. Or, I mean, Celine never really yelled, but she got mad. She told me that I did have a father, of course I did, but that my father was a demon and he was never coming back for me, and that I should just be grateful for that instead of always bothering her by asking after him.”

Jinu murmured her name softly behind her. Pity in his voice, or something worse, something more tender, and Rumi had to ignore him or else never make her point. 

“She apologized immediately, but she didn’t take it back. She just said that if I was careful and good and listened to everything she was teaching me, then I would grow up to be a hero like my mom. And not a monster like my dad.”

Rumi’s hands clamped down even further where they sat on her shoulders. An instinctive response to stress after so many years of living with the fear of being seen. “She promised me that I wouldn’t be like him, but the next day I woke up with these stupid patterns on my arm. I didn’t even know what they were at first, I thought I was sick or I had worms or something, so I went to Celine and she told me what they meant. She told me I had to keep them hidden forever. ‘Our faults and fears must never be seen’, that was always her favorite thing to say.”

Rumi paused, trying to think of how to explain what this moment had meant. Beyond confirming fears for herself and Celine, it was something more.

“I was so young,” she murmured, “couldn’t have been more than 6 years old when the patterns first appeared. Up until then I’d never thought about it before. It was only then that I realized that I had a body, and that it was separate from the world around me, from other kids, from Celine. And that it was wrong. The first time I ever…conceptualized myself as an individual, I guess, was in the process of understanding that I was bad and wrong, and that I needed to fix myself but I didn’t know how. And then that feeling never went away. Every time I thought about the patterns too much they would grow bigger until I couldn’t wear anything except turtlenecks and I couldn’t do certain photoshoots without extensive makeup, and I just, I know it sounds stupid but it was so uncomfortable to be so covered up all the time! And to be terrified of ever being seen, even in my own home because my best friends would kill me if they ever saw me without a sweatshirt on?? What kind of life is that? Who would ever want to live like that? I didn’t…I never should have existed at all. I wasn’t made to live in the same world as them.”

The more she spoke, the tighter her grip became, left hand tighter on her right shoulder, less comforting and more guarding. Or perhaps punishing, for the place on her body that had first borne the marks she hated so much. Her hands tightened but she’d never had claws before and her nails pressed deep into the skin there. 

The little wooden comb made a hollow thunk where it hit the floor, and then one of Jinu’s claws was hooking under hers. Gently tugging her hand away from her shoulder before she could do any damage to herself.

He pulled her hand up and back towards himself as he leaned closer to her. Rumi tensed, not knowing what to expect. If he would berate her for turning on herself like this, the way Celine had when she’d caught a gangly preteen Rumi in her one and only foray into trying to cut the patterns off of her skin? Or would he ask more questions? Making her clarify things she already didn’t want to think about? She’d given him so much more than she’d ever told anyone else, what was even left to ask about?

But Jinu didn’t do any of that. He leaned closer, to the point that his chest bumped up against the bare skin of her upper back, and brought her hand to his face, pressing her vile demon claws to his mouth in something that was frustratingly both a kiss and not one at all. He held them there for a few long seconds before he began to speak, letting his breath curl hot around her fingers just like he had up on the mountain.

“I’m not the one to ask about who should or shouldn’t exist,” he began, “but…I’m glad that you’re here. Who else would have stopped me from destroying the world?”

It was a ridiculous question, and one that he was asking without a hint of irony. Rumi rolled her eyes, trying to hide her sniffling, and the way that her heart lurched at his words. “Well duh, whichever Hunter would have been chosen instead of me. Some other girl who wouldn’t have screwed everything up for everyone.”

Jinu shook his head, dislodging his lips from her talons and relocating them to press two heavy kisses to her knuckles. “I wouldn’t have listened to anyone else. Especially not some close-minded hero who wouldn’t listen to me either.”

“I didn’t want to listen to you.” Rumi whispered. 

He kissed her hand again. “But you did. You heard me, and you saw me. You reminded me how lucky I am to have the memories that I do. To have had a family that loved me so much that they cried when I left them, and to have seen you looking at me like I was someone worth saving. Even if you don’t believe it anymore. It’s because of you that I don’t want to forget. If you weren’t there, I would have been lost forever. I would have hurt so many people. So please don’t say you shouldn’t exist, because, if nothing else, I need you here.”

Rumi turned her head toward his voice but found his face much closer than she’d expected. Instead of being able to look him in the eyes, all she could do was press her patterned cheek to his and feel the strangely hollow and intimate sensation of sharing a breath while she tried to think of something to say.

She supposed she understood why he might think that she didn’t believe in him anymore, considering her every word and action since arriving in the demon realm. And maybe it was true that she no longer held such blinding convictions as ‘all hunters are always good’ and ‘all demons are always bad’ and ‘the golden honmoon will fix everything’. But to say that she had ever considered, even for a moment, that Jinu was not worth saving would be a baseless and outright lie. 

From the very first time she’d glimpsed his true self under that cocky, candy-colored mask that he wore for the public, she had known that he was a good person who had been hurt terribly. Who was hurting, still, and whom she could help if only he would let her. How could she call herself a Hunter if she hadn’t at least tried to banish the darkness from inside his heart? How could she allow such wrongness to exist, that someone as kind and gentle as Jinu would believe he was beyond saving, without making the barest attempt to reach out to him? To pull him back, to show him that a mistake he made out of pure desperation did not equate to the eternal suffering he found himself in.

Saving was the very least of what Jinu deserved, and Rumi wanted to tell him that. She wanted him to know that what he was worth encompassed love, and laughter, and music, and everything bright and beautiful in the world. But when she tried to find the words to say it here in this frigid and silent room, in a hell made especially for him, under the ever-watchful eye of the demon king, her voice withered in her chest. The words of affection and gratitude she had thought to choose from like glittering jewels in a case suddenly seemed as small and ugly as ornamental fruit shriveled on the sidewalk. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say that didn’t sound inauthentic or placating. 

“I still believe in you,” she muttered, looking away from him as she cobbled together some scrap of sentiment, “if that’s worth anything at all.”

Jinu leaned back, bending to the side as he now tried to catch her eyes. Rumi let herself glance at him once and then looked away again, embarrassed by her feeble attempt at comfort.

He’d looked genuinely surprised.

When she refused to look at him again he let out a quiet laugh and sat back on his heels behind her, still holding her hand in his. 

“That’s honestly more than I’d expected.” He said quietly, rubbing his thumb over the backs of her fingers before letting go, and then he continued in a louder voice, “I’m sure the water is boiling by now so I’ll bring that in, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Jinu picked up the comb as he stood and deposited it back on top of the clothing pile he’d left by the door, and then he slipped back into the main room of the house. As promised, he was back within minutes with another wooden bucket. This one releasing great plumes of steam into the cold little room. He placed it next to the larger bucket of cold water and picked up her dirtied outer clothing.

“I’ll get started on these.” He murmured, mostly to himself, she thought, and then turned to head back into the house again.

“Jinu, wait.” Rumi called out before she could stop herself.

He froze with his hand on the door once again, looking back over his shoulder with wide eyes and a dark flush on his face as he stammered “Oh, sorry, did you actually want me to stay here? The whole time? I figured…I mean, I guess I could…close my eyes? I’ll stay, if you need that.”

He took one step back toward her and Rumi scrambled to finish her thought, “No! Nope! That’s not, I just…can you make some kind of noise while you’re back there? Just so I know you’re still here.”

“Oh. Right, yeah, I can do that.” Jinu visibly relaxed, but also seemed a bit disappointed which, just for a moment, made her want to chuck the little bar of soap at his head.

Then he stepped through the door and was gone. Rumi waited, twisting one of the washcloths between her hands and doing her damndest to think of nothing at all until she heard the faint sound of water being poured and sloshed around outside. And then, fairly soon after, the resonant twang of a bipa being played in the other room. 

The notes grew softer and louder as Jinu walked around the room. Whenever he came close to the door she could hear the timbre of his voice softly singing, though she couldn’t quite make out the words and the melodies were tantalizingly unfamiliar. The music stopped every so often as, she supposed, he put the instrument down to clean the room some more. But it always started again before her catastrophizing had time to gather any real momentum. 

Rumi exhaled, and looked down at her dust streaked arms, knowing she couldn’t put this off any longer without being unreasonable. The hot water was cooling quickly, and Jinu was waiting, however patiently. She let the washcloth fall to the floor with a quiet splat and stood, knees and hips creaking in protest from sitting crouched and tense like that for so long.

She tried not to think about what she was doing as she stripped out of the last few layers of clothing – the loose underskirt and boxy gojaengi shorts, both garments still made from the gloomy black sambe hemp – and then knelt by the buckets of water. She dumped the hot into the cold with another billow of steam, and began to lather the sweet smelling soap into velvety suds.

This was the part that she always hated most. Having to look at the disgusting markings on her skin, having to touch them, to care for them as any other part of her body when all she wanted was to ignore them completely until they went away. Sometimes she would distantly marvel at how the patterns felt the same as the rest of her skin when, in her mind, they were something that should be completely separate from her. 

They ought to feel like nothing. If she dug her nails into them, she ought to feel nothing at all. If it was possible to grab the end of one and pull, the color should simply peel away. Like stripping the skin from a piece of fish. 

It would be easy, wouldn’t it? It should be. And then her real body beneath would be revealed, the normal body she was always meant to have. Perfect as a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. All Rumi had to do was to get the patterns off first.

She rubbed the soap over her sickening purple skin with a gentle hand. She wouldn’t do any of that. She shouldn’t. She wasn’t supposed to. 

Celine’s voice from over 10 years ago still played on repeat somewhere in the back of her mind, reprimanding her for trying. And logically Rumi knew that it would hurt terribly if she tried to dig the stripes out of her skin. She distantly remembered the fact that it had hurt last time, if not the sensation itself. Somehow the more she tried to imagine it, the less she was able to actually envision the pain. The closest she could get was that it would probably feel hot.

“Hot” felt very manageable right now.

But it would be messy, too. That part, she remembered very clearly. How much blood had welled up under the knife blade, and how quickly. This wasn’t her house to go around bleeding in. This wasn’t her bathroom that she could wipe down with bleach and pretend nothing horrifying had ever happened in.

Rumi dragged the scrap of fabric passing for a towel over herself firmly, as though she had moved on from wanting to rip the patterns off of her skin to wanting to exfoliate them off instead. Obviously that had never worked in the past and it didn’t work now, leaving her only with patterned skin that stung and flushed dark purple in the cold air. She tried to focus on the repetitive notes of the bipa playing from the other room instead of thinking about it, and bent down to coil her hair into the warm water to wet it down for washing. The music sounded further away, and it hadn’t come closer in a little while. Maybe Jinu was staying in the kitchen where it was warmer. Maybe he would let her join him when she finished here.

‘That could be nice…’, she thought vaguely, working harder than was entirely reasonable to lather the waxy soap into her hair. Rumi let her arms fall and took a moment to mourn the neat rows of hair and skin care products she had left back in the human world. All the pretty little bottles that left her so soft and sweet smelling, a cozy reward for having successfully disassociated her way through another shower. 

‘But,’ she thought with a sigh, ‘having dry skin and split ends will be the least of my problems from here on out.’

When she finally finished sudsing her miles of hair, she stood and picked up the tub, and then poured what was left of the water directly over her head to wash it all out and to catch any patches of soap that might have lingered on her body. The water flooded the center of the room before it began to drain through the small gaps between the floorboards, and Rumi had approximately 2 seconds of warmth and comfort before the chill set in again. 

All of the washcloths were still wet from use and from when she’d freaked out earlier, and they were too small to function as body towels anyway, so Rumi resigned herself to using her snow-damp underskirt to dry off. The hemp absorbed the water easily enough, but it never seemed to get any warmer so she was shivering by the time she called it quits. She dressed quickly in the spare clothes Jinu had left, and tucked the little wooden comb safely into her pocket. Rumi then spent a frustrating few minutes trying to figure out how to pick up the mostly burnt candle without burning herself along with it. Eventually resorting to blowing it out and leaving the wax puddle to cool on the shelf.

Crossing the threshold back into the main room felt like entering another world, not only because it was much brighter from the other candles Jinu had lit, and nice and warm from the ondol, but also because as soon as she opened the door Rumi was hit with the aroma of rice and herbs and stir fried vegetables. So similar to the way that Celine’s house had always smelled when she was growing up that her first breath felt like a kick in the chest.

Rumi padded across the room quietly, skirting around the circular table and stepping over the corner of the bed to peek into the kitchen. There she saw Jinu standing in front of the stove with his bipa. A large dented wok sat on one of the firepit burners with a small steamer basket in it, and on the second burner was a smaller pan with some green lumps on it that he stirred every so often in between sections of whatever song he was playing. The notebook she’d left open on the bookshelf sat on the counter beside him, and he was quietly singing something that she recognized as the fragmented chorus to the verse she’d looked at earlier. She watched him frown as he started over once again, clearly stuck on a particular line.

“I’ve braved the dark where wild things play, where the night don’t give, it takes. Fought my way through darkened flame, just to wake and lose my way. Don’t know what I…”

He paused, the descending notes ringing with unresolved tension as he stopped in the same place once again. Rumi almost laughed at the familiar look of frustration on his face as he laid the bipa onto the counter to toss the veggies in the pan with a few lazy motions. Whatever it was sizzled loudly and sent another wave of bittersweet garlicky aroma wafting out of the tiny room.

He picked up the instrument again. “Fought my way through darkened flame, just to wake and lose my way…”

“Don’t know if I’m lost or found, just that I’ve made it through the fray.” Rumi suggested, her rough voice sounding entirely out of place compared to his smooth tenor and the graceful resonance of the bipa.

Jinu startled with a harsh twang of strings. He spun to face her with his mouth open to speak, but whatever words he’d been planning to say died in his throat before he made a sound, and he stood gaping at her blankly. 

She probably made a pretty pathetic sight. Even though she’d wrung her hair out and dried it as well as she could, it was wet and still dripping onto the stone floor. And his clothes — already a loose fit on his larger frame — absolutely swamped her in a way that she was sure left her looking like nothing so much as a drowned rat. She crossed her arms self consciously, and stared expectantly until Jinu cleared his throat and lifted the bipa. 

He started over from the top of the chorus. “I’ve braved the dark where wild things play, where the night don’t give, it takes. Fought my way through darkened flame, just to wake and lose my way. Don’t know if I’m lost or found, just that I’ve made it through the fray…”

He slowed again, thumbing the same chord as he thought through the next lyrics, “Chasing down the edge of time, to stand between the dream and the day.”

The resolved note hung pleasantly in the air around them for a moment and he smiled, despite the rather miserable sounding lyrics they’d pieced together. 

“You’re pretty good at this.” He teased, placing the bipa back down onto the counter and kneeling to pull a pair of bowls out from one of the boxes underneath, “I’ve been stuck on that line for a while.”

Rumi hummed like a sputtering motor, then coughed, trying to clear the strangled quality from her voice. “I don’t mean to brag, but I used to be a pretty big deal when it came to these kinds of things.”

“With the amount of records Huntrix broke? You’ll be a big deal forever.” Jinu spoke over his shoulder, lips still quirked in a grin.

The yawning pit in her chest that held all her memories of her old life made itself known, sharp and heavy like a blanket of broken glass settling over her insides, and she looked away. Back into the main room where, now that she was thinking about it, there definitely hadn’t been a table before.

Jinu nudged her with his elbow to usher her back to the dining room, both hands occupied with bowls of fragrant vegetables and rice. He set them down on the bamboo table, and sat on the side that was closest to the door. Rumi sat across from him, settling to the floor with the warmth of the kitchen at her back in the hopes that it might dry her hair faster.

“Where did this table come from?” She asked, remembering the heavy wooden and definitely square table that had been broken in half when they’d first arrived.

“I uh,” Jinu hesitated, and looked at her a little guiltily, “I stole it from one of the other houses. While you were in the other room. It’s not like anyone was using it.”

He looked down at his bowl, and then seemed to realize he hadn’t brought them any utensils to eat with, and so scrambled to his feet with a muttered apology to dart back into the kitchen. He returned quickly with two sets of steel chopsticks and a plain, unglazed tea set on a tray. The sides of the pot were damp with condensation, and when he poured them their cups, it turned out to be filled with the same cold water from outside that he’d brought for her to bathe with.

Rumi lifted her cup and eyed it surreptitiously, taking a small and bracing sip as she wondered vaguely about germs and whether or not that was a reasonable concern in hell. The water had a strong mineral taste, but otherwise seemed fine…?

Jinu interrupted her thinking, speaking without looking up from his food. “Sorry, I’m not really used to having guests anymore. I know this probably isn’t what you’re used to eating. But every harvest is bad here, and hunting is…inadvisable. So this is all we’ve got for now.” 

Rumi looked down into her bowl, recognizing the green mush of young mugwort leaves clinging to the thin stems of wild onions. Dark spots of chili flakes and red chili oil decorated the vegetables rather festively, and beneath it all sat a pillow of brown rice that gave off a nutty scent. She took a moment to feel the warmth and the spice glide over her palate with the steam.

Jinu continued, “I should be able to make better stuff later, once we can get a hold of more ingredients. Although that presents its own problems…“

He trailed off, looking genuinely troubled at the thought of obtaining new ingredients for future meals. Rumi had no idea how to even begin that process, as she doubted there were any restaurants or grocery stores in hell and that was about where her expertise ended when it came to getting food. She shoved the thought to the very back of her mind and shrugged.

“This is fine.” She said, quietly, “Really, I don’t mind. This is honestly very similar to the food I grew up eating.”

Jinu frowned with blatant, almost offended confusion. “Weren’t you like, pop star royalty? Why would you be eating sad peasant food like this as a kid?”

Rumi waited to answer his question, her eyes skipping impatiently between his face and his bowl as she waited for her senior by several centuries to take the first bite. The last thing she’d eaten was a hastily scarfed cup of ramyeon before the Idol Awards show, pressed into her hands by a soft-eyed Zoey when it was clear that Rumi was too busy anxiously pacing the room to sit for their usual pre-show feast. 

She should have eaten more while she had the chance, she thought. Being hungry hadn’t saved her from her fate, and all her worrying could never have prepared her for what had actually happened.

Jinu apologized again, apparently working double time since she was still banned from saying the words for the foreseeable future, and shoved an over-large bite of food into his mouth. He seemed to immediately regret it, though he still nodded at her to either continue talking or go ahead and eat. She wasn’t quite sure which. 

She went with the eating option.

The rice was hot on her tongue and the hulls on the grains burst pleasantly under her teeth. The onions had been pickled and tasted strongly of garlic and vinegar, and the mugwort had been dried and then rehydrated in the pan and so tasted more of the spicy oil everything had been cooked in rather than the earthy and bitter flavor she was expecting. 

The food didn’t taste very similar at all to Celine’s cooking now that she was eating it. She didn’t mind, though. The smell and the appearance by themselves had given her a significant boost to her emotional wellbeing, and though she felt a little bad about thinking it, this demon realm stir-fry was a lot better than the bland plates she remembered eating as a kid. Rumi sent a silent promise to her foster-mother that it was just her hunger acting as the secret seasoning, she didn’t really think a demon was a better cook than her.

Jinu swallowed his massive bite with a wince and sipped his water, staring at her over the rim expectantly.

Rumi took another bite before answering. “You know, in the modern world, real farm-to-table food like this is sometimes more expensive than the fancy prepared stuff.”

Jinu scoffed. “Even if that were true, no one would mistake the patch of mud out back for a farm. And I didn’t even grow the vegetables, they were all foraged.”

Rumi gasped and held her bowl up off the table like an offering at a shrine, announcing, “Small batch grown, hand foraged, and sustainably harvested?! It would be less expensive if we just ate gold!”

Thankfully, her words had their intended effect and Jinu laughed, shaking his head. It didn’t matter if he believed her, she just wanted him to stop apologizing for taking care of her far beyond what she deserved.

“Okay, fine,” he said, waiting for her to take another large bite of the stir fry, “maybe you were allowed to eat sad peasant food if some salesman lied to you at some point and told you it was better. But did you really not get anything fun to eat while you were growing up? Even I got sweets sometimes.”

She nodded, swallowing, “We would get takeout occasionally. Like when Celine would be out late hunting demons and she knew she wouldn’t have the energy to cook when she got back. She’d bring tteokbokki and mandu and gimbap home for us to share, and we kept popsicles and hotteok in the freezer so I could have them as a reward for doing well at training or practice. But other than that she was very into simple and clean eating like this.”

Rumi dangled a limp onion from her chopsticks for emphasis, before dropping it back into the bowl. She scooted around the table toward Jinu quickly, trying to hide a smirk as he looked on curiously.

When he was within reach she spoke again, “And when I would complain, she would always say…”

Rumi trailed off as she reached for him, poking him in the stomach as she said, “healthy gut,” she poked his forehead, “healthy mind,” and finally she booped him on the nose, “healthy Hunter.”

Jinu scrunched his nose at her, just like she remembered doing every time Celine would run them though this odd little ritual, and Rumi laughed.

She turned back to her food. While it hadn’t been a lie to say that this was the sort of food she ate growing up, she decidedly did not mention that her plates had always come with a rainbow mosaic of banchan dishes on the side. The bright and juicy cucumber salads, the crispy fried vegetable fritters, the mysterious steamed broccoli that always made an appearance no matter how much it didn’t match the main dish, the sour tang of the kimchi that Celine made by hand every few months. Jinu’s spicy stir fried onions had similar flavors to kimchi with their pickled vinegar and garlic flavor, but they were missing the fermented depth of flavor that a properly made kimchi would have brought, and Rumi found that she missed it terribly. This table was very bare in comparison. He didn’t even have the barley tea that was so ubiquitous in every home and hotel, Rumi had completely taken it for granted until now when all she had to drink was cold water from a questionably sanitary source. 

Had this come from the river she’d glimpsed on their way down the mountain? Surely not. Surely she’d be able to taste fish piss if she was drinking it…right?

She stared into the little ceramic cup. The water looked clear, not cloudy or silty at all. Maybe Jinu had some kind of old timey water filtration system? 

“So, just to be clear,” Jinu suddenly put his chopsticks down and spoke carefully, “who is Celine, exactly? You talk about her a lot. I've gathered that she’s your foster parent or guardian or something like that, but is she actually related to you at all?”

Rumi took a sip of the stone flavored, probably not fish-marinated water as she thought through his question.

“No, Celine isn’t technically related to me. She is…she was a Hunter with my mother, and she took me in when my mother died. Being a Hunter...it's a bond that’s closer than family, really. If either Mira or Zoey had a kid and then couldn’t take care of them for whatever reason, I’d do the same without question.”

Her hand drifted up to touch the scar on her neck unconsciously, stroking the smooth and slightly raised skin there tenderly as she mused. “She had to do it all alone. She never told me what happened between her and their third Hunter, but whatever it was must have been bad because I’ve never seen her around, not even when I was old enough for Celine to take me on hunts with her. God, I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for her. Especially in those early years when I was a baby. Having to raise a kid she never asked for and be the only Hunter keeping everyone safe and keep running what was left of the Sunlight Sisters? Without her other Hunters she couldn’t repair the honmoon, so every time a demon came through, even if she killed it immediately, it meant it would be that much easier for the next one. To be honest I’m surprised I ever saw her growing up.”

Rumi stared into the bowl of rice and vegetables in front of her, the colors blurring as tears threatened to fall again. “But she always made time for me. She trained me as much as possible, she gave me a safe home and a good life. She would have given me a bright future if it hadn’t been for…everything else. And she gave me Mira and Zoey, which I’ll be grateful for forever even if I never see them again. I don’t know how she did it all, and I’ll never–”

A hiccuping sob cut her words off, and she couldn’t do anything but cry into the over-long shirtsleeves of her borrowed jeogori. 

How could she have ever thought that Celine didn’t love her? That a love based in longing for someone who wasn’t coming back was any less real or tangible than a love derived from the accident of one’s birth? Celine had given her everything. Celine had given up everything for her. And Rumi had thrown it all away.

Celine loved her, of course she did, that was all she did. She loved Rumi even knowing what she was. She’d protected her, provided for her, offered the shelter of her arms until the very last moment when Rumi wouldn’t let her anymore. Every time Rumi had thought her callous it was only that she hadn’t understood that this was love from the one person who had always stayed by her side. So what if Celine couldn't look at her sometimes? She loved her. It was Rumi who had gotten it wrong. The fact that she was even capable of believing such slander in her heart was a sure sign that this nightmare realm was where she belonged.

She heard Jinu moving, and then his warm hand landed on her shoulder and he murmured close to her ear, “You don’t have to explain if it’s too much. I shouldn’t have asked–”

“No,” Rumi sniffled as she interrupted him, her already hoarse voice gone completely gravelly from crying, “I…I pretty much said everything anyway.”

She took a deep breath and spoke again, “Celine was my honored teacher, she was my guide, and my…mother. She was my mother in every way that counted. And now she’s gone.”

Her voice broke again at the end, the scar tightening her vocal chords painfully as another round of tears splattered onto the table.

“What do you mean she’s gone? What happened to her?” Jinu asked quietly.

Rumi’s fingers at her neck stopped their mindless petting and moved to cover the scar completely. 

“I drove her away.” She whispered, “Just like everyone else. Just like I always do.”

Jinu’s fingers gently wedged between her hand and her neck to pull her hand away. Probably afraid she’d start clawing at herself again, she thought, but she didn’t resist his efforts. He squeezed her hand in both of his. Promising that, at the very least, he was still here for her. When she looked up she found him staring at the scar with unfathomable sadness in his eyes.

“Rumi, please, will you tell me what happened after the Idol Awards? Where did you get this scar?” 

She tensed in his hold at the reminder of the disastrous show, her breath coming faster for a moment as flashes of the night ran through her mind without permission. The red stage lights, the fake Zoey and Mira smiling cruelly at her, the real Zoey and Mira finally seeing through all her lies. The rustle of the dried grass in the Hunter graveyard, the glint of steel, the deep coldness as everything human drained out of her. Gwi-ma’s voice oozing around inside her head. The fall.

Rumi blinked hard against the onslaught and made herself focus on what was around her instead, laboriously replacing each memory with something more pleasant and grounding. The smell of the food, the heat radiating up from the floor, her damp hair curling at the ends as it dried, the colorful rows of books on the shelves beside them. The sound of Jinu's breathing, the way he leaned in close, his hands on hers. His palms were warm.

She’d survived. Mostly.

She was safe. Or, at least, she was as safe as she could be in a place like the demon realm.

“Rumi?” Jinu prompted her again with a regretful tone, as though he didn’t want to be asking but he felt he needed to know.

But Rumi just shook her head. It was too soon after the event in question for her to be able to talk about it. To describe it in words rather than a series of heavy silences, which was all she felt capable of right now.

Jinu nodded, clearly disappointed but not willing to press. He shuffled closer to her so that the side of his body was pressed to hers, and he let go of her hand to go back to his bowl.

Rumi picked up her chopsticks again and scooped up another mound of rice and vegetables. A small one, since she didn’t think a larger one would go down without a fight. Without any further conversation, she finished her food quickly and moved on to stealing bites from Jinu’s bowl. He offered her the rest of his, but she shook her head and pushed it back to him, and then stole another bite about a minute later. 

Jinu rolled his eyes, but let her continue this strange game of hers until they’d cleared his bowl too. Despite the hot stone floor, when he stood up to take the dirty dishes back into the kitchen, Rumi felt a cold wave roll over her at the sudden lack of his body heat and she contemplated laying down right there in the middle of the room to try and make up for it. 

Jinu called out from the other room before she came to a decision, “Come sit in here to keep drying out. Your hair is making the whole place humid!”

Rumi followed him wordlessly, sitting on the step and repeatedly combing through her damp locks to dry them faster while she watched Jinu wash the dishes in the remaining warm water. With the roaring ondol stove, the kitchen felt like an oven and it didn’t take very long for her hair to dry enough that she would have normally felt comfortable rebraiding it. But she was far too tired to do the full high and tight french braid tonight, and it felt deeply wrong to do anything else, so she left it down.

Rumi stood up and offered the little wooden comb back to Jinu but he didn’t take it. Once again he just stood there and stared at her in surprise without moving.

What had he thought she was going to do with the comb if not give it back to him? Maybe he’d meant it as a gift to her? That did seem like something he might do, but she didn’t want to assume since the only thing he’d said about it specifically was that it both was and wasn’t his mothers. Rumi stepped closer and slipped the comb into the V of his overcoat, catching a few of the teeth on the edge of the fabric so it wouldn’t fall straight through. She patted his chest where it sat.

That seemed to shake him from his stupor and he blinked down at the comb in confusion before looking back at her. “You, uh, you’re welcome to rest on the bed. If you want. I beat the dust out of it while you were washing up so it’s as clean as it’s going to get.”

Rumi nodded, and stepped back up into the main room. Intending to go straight there. But Jinu suddenly caught her wrist.

“Hey but, remember, don’t go to sleep. There’s no such thing as good dreams in the demon world.”

“Right. Of course.” Rumi rolled her eyes, “And what are you going to do if not-sleeping isn’t your plan?”

Jinu gestured back to the bipa that still sat on the kitchen counter. “I’ll get some more practice in.”

She nodded again and slipped out of his hold to make her way around the side of the sleeping mat. It was tucked into the corner of the room that shared a wall with the kitchen, so the whole thing was toasty warm when she bundled up under the covers. The thin looking mat she’d identified earlier was, indeed, very thin. It may as well have been a single sheet of fabric between her and the hard stone floor. But the floor was warm, and the duvet on top of her was light and airy and smelled like the same cedar and straw that the rest of the house smelled like. The pillow that had been ripped open had vanished in Jinu's cleaning efforts, so she pushed the other one to the side and bundled the blanket into a makeshift pillow instead, and felt that it was probably more comfortable like this anyway.

It was nice, she thought. If she’d been asked yesterday what she thought the demon world was like, Rumi didn’t know what she would have said except “firey” and “probably painful”, so this cozy domesticity was a very pleasant surprise. As she shifted around, she could feel the occasional tiny jab of a feather quill sticking through the orange fabric. She pulled one out carefully to look at it. The fluffy little strands pulsed in the air like a tiny jellyfish with every minute movement of her hand, and she marveled once again that something so delicate and perfect could exist in a place like this.

She let it fall into her palm and then blew on it, hard, sending the little white puff sailing across the room to where Jinu sat against the far wall. Which was not very far at all, considering the size of the house. The feather tumbled through the air and stuck to the fabric covering his knee, and he looked down at it, unimpressed.

“You know,” Rumi announced conversationally, “in the modern world, feather blankets like this are also something of a luxury item.”

Jinu peeled the little feather off of his trousers and placed it carefully onto the table beside him, then went back to his playing, muttering petulantly, “Yeah, yeah. You lived in opposite-world, I get it. Now get some not-sleep while you can.”

Rumi chuckled under breath and relaxed again into the warm cocoon of blankets. She closed her eyes and thought about how she wasn’t supposed to go to sleep, which turned out to be quite a soothing lullaby, until Jinu stopped playing with a sharp exhale. 

“Does no one keep geese anymore? Geese are easy to keep! You don’t even–! No, you know what? I don’t want to know.”

Rumi smiled as Jinu continued grumbling under his breath. His strumming resumed, and she let her thoughts be carried away by the music.

_____________________________

The crowds along the wide pedestrian walkway were thick. Thicker than usual by far, and Rumi huffed in annoyance as she tried to squeeze through them as fast as possible. She held her phone to her ear as she went, listening to the endless ringing on the other line. 

“Come on, come on! Pick up, pick up, pick up!!” she murmured, almost tripping over a snotty child and then more or less bouncing off of their mother in her haste to skirt around them. 

She threw an apology over her shoulder as she stabbed another number into her phone. She’d been calling Zoey because the younger girl was constantly on her phone and was always the most likely to answer, but now Rumi tried to reach Mira only to meet similar results.

Her girls weren’t picking up their phones. Which meant they were otherwise occupied, which meant Rumi was already late.

The crowd around her surged with bland-faced salarymen and tourists and giggly friend groups, all of them moving in the same direction like the torrent of a river trying to push her downstream. Rumi gave up on her phone and tried to jog forward, but after bumping into three more people and barely squeezing through a cluster of old ladies who tsked and squawked at her in offense, she was forced to return to her hurried and frustrated walking speed.

The honmoon pulsed an angry pink beneath her sneakers. Her breath quickened. She was running out of time.

Zoey and Mira had been out on a shopping trip when Rumi felt the first shockwave of distress ripple through the glittering blanket, alerting her to a breach. Even though she had sprung into action immediately, she knew from the direction it pointed her in that her friends would get there before she did. Assuming they’d gotten there immediately, they would have been fighting on their own for nearly 20 minutes now. And according to honmoon, the job still wasn’t finished.

The magenta waves directed her toward the dark mouth of a small underground train station. Rumi let out a quick breath of relief to be out of the crowd and threw herself down the stairs, skipping the bottom 5 with an impatient jump to take the tight corner and continue down into the industrially lit depths. A short line of toll gates blocked her path but she leapt over them easily and ignored the angry bellow of the station guard.

The honmoon no longer thrummed but shrieked under her feet and her hands as she caught the sharp stone corner of the wall to rush down yet another flight of stairs. Her heart pounded in her chest. A cold sweat broke out across her body, and she knew immediately that something terrible had happened. One or both of her Hunters were hurt and she didn’t know how badly because she wasn’t fucking there with them. She still hadn’t even seen the tear yet, she didn’t know how big this station was. She didn’t know where they were and she was late and they were hurt and there was nothing she could do but keep running further and further down.

After several more turns of the dark and narrow staircase, finally, the path opened up and Rumi was spat out onto the sparsely lit platform. The arched roof of the station was high and deeply shadowed, and the whole place had a claustrophobic, cave-like feel to it that made her skin crawl.

She looked around desperately. 

There! At the far end of the station and on the other side of the tracks, there were her fellow Hunters! 

Rumi sprinted toward them.

They were fighting a large flock of vulture demons, each disgusting bird-monster armed with mismatched weapons stolen from battle grounds and previous victims. She could see 5 of the beasts harrying the quick and lithe form of Mira, whose movements were graceful and deadly as ever despite the exhaustion that must have been dragging at her. At least 10 more demons hovered in the air above the fight, cackling and waving their broken weapons eagerly as they waited for an opportunity to strike.

Rumi pushed herself to run faster when she realized she couldn’t see Zoey anywhere.

Why weren’t they singing? Their voices made them stronger, made the honmoon stronger, even one voice would have been better than nothing but Rumi couldn’t hear either of them and she was breathing too hard to start singing herself.

One of the demons rushed in, a chipped and rusted sword in its wrinkled talon, outstretched to block Mira’s spear as its grotesquely elongated neck and beaked face snapped at her neck. Mira spun beneath the ancient sword and dissolved the demon instantly with a swipe of her spear. 

Rumi was close enough now to hear her voice calling out hoarsely, “Hold on Zo! I’m coming!”

There was no answer, except the horrible cackling and cawing of the vultures. As Rumi got closer she saw a few of the buzzards separated from the rest, hunched over a small dark form that lay motionless on the ground. Pecking and clawing at it like it was some bloated cow corpse in a field.

Her heart turned to ice in her chest. 

That tiny shape couldn’t be Zoey, not Rumi’s Zoey who was so full of joy and laughter that it felt like the sun had left the sky to take up residence inside of her every time she walked into a room. That larger than life girl couldn’t have been reduced to a smear of black and blood-stained-green on the platform floor. That girl who bounded through every fight with a grin so wide it looked like it hurt couldn’t be simply laying there, letting vulture demons of all things jab at her. 

Zoey hated vulture demons. They all had one type or another they hated above all. Mira despised the slimy catfish demons that would lay in wait in fountains and canals to try and swallow up any children who wandered too close, and Rumi herself always held a particular distaste for the ogre-like giants that she’d once seen gang up on Celine back when she was old enough to go with her on hunts but not old enough to be of any real help yet. Watching her proud and strong mentor skittering around like a frightened mouse between their wild club strikes, listening to the monster’s booming laughter at her child-self’s screams of fear, the experience had shaken her to her core in a way she had never been able to outgrow.

Zoey always said the vulture demons were the most disgusting. That they had to be covered in demon germs, that their wrinkled yet crusty skin and the mange-like bald patches on their heads and wings made her want to puke whenever she saw them. She hated how their human faces twisted and stretched into the hooked bird beaks, how their tattered wings should have been too small to carry something as big as a human-type body and how it wasn’t fair that they could fly anyway through demon magic like a bunch of cheaters.

All of which was to say that it couldn’t be her there, laying so still as the awful human-bird monstrosities stabbed at her so cruelly.

“Zoey? ZOEY?!” Rumi screamed, gearing up to leap over the sunken tracks.

“Rumi?” Mira called out desperately as she exploded two more demons in a puff of white sparks that dissipated quickly as 4 more demons swooped down on their ratty wings.

“Mira! I’m here! I’m—“ Rumi’s words were cut off by the blaring of a train horn, signaling its imminent arrival. 

The train burst out of the tunnel just as Rumi was about to jump and she was forced to stumble back. She watched through the windows that sped past as Mira’s spear drooped as she looked around for her leader.

Her leader who was late, who hadn’t been there when they needed her. Who stood uselessly on the other side of an impenetrable wall and could do nothing except scream as another vulture dropped from the air with another broken sword aimed at the join of Mira’s neck and shoulder. Left wide open in her exhaustion, in her grief and her confusion.

“MIRA!!” Rumi summoned her own sword and rushed the still-moving train when she saw her friend — her immovable shield, her lionheart, her beautiful dancer — go down with a scream and a grotesque spray of blood as the buzzard’s chipped blade bit deep into her shoulder.

Rumi used a boost of the honmoon’s power to vault herself up and over the train. But as it roared through the station, the single step she would need to take off of the top of it to fully bridge the gap shot out from beneath her and she tumbled onto the opposite platform with a sickening crack. 

Pain shot through her spine like a lightning strike as something vital in her snapped. She tried to stand but her legs refused to obey her commands. She could do nothing except lay on the cold cement floor and watch Mira’s spear wink out of existence beneath her impossibly still hand.

The vultures circled above them, screeching as laughter tried to escape their warped throats and faces. Rumi reached out and tried to drag herself forward, weeping. “Mira, Mira please you have to get up!” she sobbed, “We have to get Zoey! Please, I can’t do it alone!”

But Mira didn’t move from where she’d fallen. She just lay there, blood seeping out of her to stain her lovely pink hair a deep scarlet Rumi knew she would have hated. Rumi propped herself up with difficulty, pain spiking up and down her torso, and looked back to where the demons had dragged their maknae off into the shadows. Their thin necks strained as they pulled long strands of flesh or guts from her stomach, filthy hands clawing at her neck and chest to try and create more openings to feed from. As the train finally thundered all the way through the station, in the ringing quiet left behind, Rumi could hear the the squelch of meat tearing, and the snap of the smaller girl’s bones breaking.

Zoey, her sweet, brilliant Zoey, was gone. There would never be a post-show movie marathon/3 hour video compilation again, no crazy ideas thrown out with an ease that was genuinely startling at times, no soft sympathetic smiles as she innately understood the fears Rumi couldn't say out loud. There would be no more bucket hats and colorful jackets in their shared closets, no warm weight hanging off of Rumi’s arm, no soft little body sneaking cuddles from Mira. There was no longer any joy in the world because Zoey was dead. Rumi had failed her. She hadn’t been there when she needed her most, the way she’d promised she always would be.

“Zoey…Zoey, I’m sorry…” She groaned as sobs racked her body painfully.

A clatter of talons on stone drew her eyes back to Mira. The demon that had struck the final blow was still in the air, busy fighting off a few others for the chance to get to her, and in their distraction a smaller demon had shuffled in to try and drag Mira away. 

“Stop, please…” Rumi struggled to move again and threw herself forward with a pathetic heave to grab Mira’s wrist. The vulture cocked its head at her, and for a moment as she stared into its glowing yellow eyes she thought it might let her have this. It might let go, and let her pull her friend close to her so she could hold her in her arms until all the warmth left her body, and even beyond that. Rumi had no plans of letting go until some terrified civilian found them and called the police, and their bodies were taken away. And even then she would demand that whatever was left of Zoey be brought to her so that all three of them could be buried together. Inseparable in death as they should have been in life.

She stared at the vulture demon and the vulture demon stared at her, and then its face made some horrible contortion that Rumi realized was it trying to smile at her. It opened its beak and plunged it into the wound on Mira’s shoulder to begin eating her right then and there. 

Mira’s arm twitched in Rumi’s hold. 

Rumi yanked her friend as hard as she could, trying to pull her away from the monster as she shouted, “NO! GET AWAY FROM HER!! MIRA WAKE UP! PLEASE, MIRA!!”

The hand that didn’t hold Mira’s thin wrist swiped across the ground to try and summon her sword again, but the honmoon was silent and still beneath her. It didn’t respond to her like it had all her life. Rumi’s failure was so great that even the honmoon had abandoned her.

A weight crashed into her back and a four-fingered, bird-like hand covered in blood clamped down on her outstretched arm. It seemed that one of the demons that had been tearing into Zoey had decided it wanted something a little fresher, and Rumi howled as a viciously hooked beak tore into her shoulder.

~

She jerked awake to the sight of a demon staring down at her, and the feeling of a clawed hand on her shoulder.

Rumi cried out and threw herself to the side, her hand automatically dragging against the warm stone floor to try and summon her celestial weapon. But, just like in the dream and at the foot of the demon king's throne, nothing happened. The honmoon wasn't there.

She looked down at her hand, her purple striped hand with black claws that clashed horrendously with the deep orange color of the thick blanket she was tangled in, and her heart rate began to slow as she remembered where she was.

As she remembered what all had really happened back in the human world.

She looked back up and this time recognized Jinu’s narrow face behind the patterns, and she realized that he was also staring at her hand on the floor. The one that had been trying to summon her demon-vaporizing sword. She couldn’t quite figure out what expression he was making. It was guarded, but not at all nervous or angry like she might have expected. 

“Sorry.” Rumi murmured, and she tucked her hand back into her lap. 

“Don’t be. Trust me, I understand.” Jinu spoke quietly. He gave her a look that she definitely recognized this time, a very sad version of the smug ‘I told you so’ that Mira so often wore when Zoey was goofing around and wound up breaking something or burning her food or tripping over her own feet.

The thought of her friends threw her back into memories of the dream and Rumi shuddered, pushing her hair out of her face as she tried to play off her lingering terror. “Gwi-ma’s really not messing around with those nightmares, huh?”

Jinu reached out toward her face slowly, giving her plenty of time to react before his hand just barely brushed her jaw to catch a tear before it fell. “No. He's not.”

When she didn’t pull away he turned his hand to rest his palm on her cheek, and the pad of his thumb softly wiped away the wet tear tracks beneath her eye. His claw didn’t touch her. None of them did.

Rumi feared she was not nearly as careful when she grabbed his wrist and lifted it from her face so she could flop back down onto the bed. She was sure her claws pricked him as she cuddled his hand beneath her chin – glad for the warmth, glad for the company – but he didn’t say anything or flinch away so she kept holding his arm hostage as she stared blankly into the middle distance. Trying to forget the horrors her mind had created.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jinu asked softly.

“No.” Rumi answered immediately, “It’s enough to know that it wasn’t real.”

Jinu made some quiet noise of agreement and settled down more comfortably beside her.

Rumi considered trying to relax again. She wanted to, really she did, she was so very tired, but even just blinking felt dangerous right now. Like if she closed her eyes for one second too long she would be plunged back into that cold and dim train station. Back into that world that may as well have been drained of all color now that all the happiness and beauty had been ripped from it.

She exhaled angrily, and with a wordless cry of frustration, she let go of Jinu’s hand to roll onto her stomach and bury her face into a pile of the duvet again. 

“I want to sleep! I WANT TO SLEEP! HOW DO DEMONS LIVE LIKE THIS?!”

Jinu's hand rubbed her back comfortingly, “Demons get tired, but we can’t sleep without having nightmares. Just like we get hungry but there’s barely any food anywhere. The point is the suffering. Gwi-ma wants us to be half crazy when he lets us go up above.”

Rumi whined, “But I slept on the mountain, when we first got here. I didn’t dream then.”

“Well, yes and no.” Jinu said, infuriatingly, “We were unconscious, but it’s not really restful, right? And it’s not good to be completely out of energy like that. We really got lucky that nothing found us before we woke up.”

Rumi grumbled to herself under her breath about how every goddamn thing in the underworld was an “it depends” type of bullshit situation. How everything was conditional, and the condition was always a matter of what would suck more for any living being that had the misfortune of being stuck down here.

Jinu’s hand moved to scoop up the mass of her hair again, running his fingers through it to make sure it was all out from where it had begun to tangle around her body before he separated it into three sections. 

He murmured sadly as he started a low braid from the base of her head, “I’m sorry that you’re stuck down here now. If I hadn’t–”

“Let’s not start that again.” Rumi interrupted him as soon as possible.

“Okay.”

The braid formed quickly under his hands, he was too afraid of pulling her hair to be able to form a proper one, and soon he was standing up and she could hear him digging through one of the small drawers on the top row of the chest. Then he was back at her side. Jinu rebraided the end where it had started to unravel and he tied it off, and then let it fall with a soft thump onto the blanket.

Rumi rolled back onto her side and pulled it over her shoulder, eager to see his work, and then pouted at the perfectly adequate braid she found. She’d wanted it to be terrible so that she could tease him, but the braid was even and symmetrical, though it was far looser than she’d ever worn it before. Not since she’d tried to copy her mother’s hairstyle from one of Celine’s hundreds of photos. When she’d called for her guardian to come and see her work, Celine had taken one look at her and had hurried out of the room.

She’d never attempted the style again.

Rumi continued examining the braid down to the end. Jinu had tied it with a silk ribbon that was old and fraying at the ends, in the familiar loop and tail of a daenggi just like she’d always worn before. The color was faded in a few spots but most of it shone a deep ruby red in the candlelight, and Rumi wondered if this had actually belonged to his sister and he’d somehow held onto it all this time, or if it was like the comb and he’d picked it up in the centuries after losing her simply because it reminded him of her. She didn’t know how to ask without stirring up his painful memories again.

The soft sound of Jinu laughing drew her thoughts away from where they threatened to tip back into the deep well of regret and misery that half her mind had become. She glanced up at him.

“Well? How did I do, braid-master?”

Rumi looked back down at her hair, this time with an exaggerated expression of consideration on her face.

She hummed thoughtfully. “...It’s acceptable. I’ll keep it.”

“That’s high praise.”

“You’re free to take it as you wish.” She said archly, tossing the braid over her shoulder.

Jinu laughed again. “Then I’ll take it wholesale.”

Rumi scrunched her nose at him, laughing, “What does that even mean in this context?”

“It means I’ll take it in any way that you meant it. If it’s from you, then I want it. I don’t care what it is.”

She flushed through her smile at his surprisingly serious answer and tried to deflect. “So if I gave you my empty ramyeon cups?”

Jinu closed his eyes and placed a hand over his heart, “I would treasure them forever.”

Rumi rolled her eyes so hard that her head tracked with the movement. She reached out to softly smack his leg, the only part of him within easy reach, and she laughed again quietly. “Alright, weirdo. I’ll remember that. Don’t think I won't."

Jinu opened one eye to look down at her. “I would never.”

“Well, good.”

She pulled her arm back into the warm blanket, and watched his smile dim as he looked around the room. His eyes landed on her again, this time with some conflict clearly running through his head.

“Is there anything you need?” He asked quietly, “There’s not…I don’t have much that I could offer you but I’m sure it must be difficult for someone like you who’s always had all the modern conveniences to have to live somewhere like this all of a sudden. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you. Anything at all, I mean it.”

Rumi stared up at him, noting the soft flickering of pink over his patterns as he spoke about his home. He'd probably lived in this little house for centuries, keeping it neat and tidy as his mother had taught him, yet he spoke of it like it was a garbage heap he was forcing her to live in rather than a warm and safe place to rest in the middle of a cold and frightening land. She’d been allowed to wash off the grime accumulated from the worst days of her life, she’d been fed – with good food even! – and she now had a bed warmed from a roaring fire. What more could she possibly want? A lamp, maybe? So she wasn’t always a little bit on edge waiting for the whole place to catch fire from all the candles? But it wasn’t like there were shops in hell where they could go pick one out, and there were no sockets to plug it into even if they did find one. And anyway, Jinu had been living perfectly well with candles for over 400 years. Was she really such a baby that she couldn’t go without electricity or tea or hair conditioner for even just one night? 

Rumi smiled at him and hoped it was convincing, “I’m fine, I promise. You’ve been an excellent host. The best one in the whole demon realm, probably. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“Ah, well,” Jinu started as he stood up to blow out the candles he’d placed around the room, “whether or not I need to, I’m still going to.”

Rumi tried to think of something to say to reassure him that everything he’d given her in these last few hours was significantly more than she’d ever expected to get, but her thoughts stalled when Jinu stopped beside the bed and shed his heavy durumagi. 

“What are you–?” She murmured, squinting up at him in the darkness.

He shook out the coat and laid it down on top of the duvet, and then any words or ideas that had lingered in her brain were obliterated when he unceremoniously lifted the covers to lay down beside her.

Rumi squeaked and scrambled away, “Hey! What are you doing?!”

He looked at her curiously, like there was nothing strange at all about his behavior. “What? I’m tired too.”

“Oh, uh…right. Yeah, obviously. This is…your bed. In your house.” Rumi thought for a moment about offering him the bed and saying she could go somewhere else, but there was nowhere else in the tiny room and she really was very cozy under the feather stuffed duvet. 

A dark blush spread across Jinu’s cheekbones and up to the tips of his ears as her words seemed to remind him what position he’d put them in. 

He leaned away from her, “I…sorry. I just thought–or no, I mean, I wasn’t thinking, I just–”

Rumi rushed to interrupt his babbling, “Ah, no, it’s fine! We can share! It’s fine.”

She reached out blindly beneath the covers and snagged his wrist to hold him in place. She was absolutely not going to kick Jinu out of his own bed after the day or possibly days that they’d just had. Maybe they could work something out in the future, but right now they were both so tired and miserable and this little island of fabric seemed like the only comfortable place that existed in the entire world. Rumi wasn’t so prudish that she would deny him that for her own sake.

Jinu slumped against the warm stone floor, cushioned minimally by the sleeping mat. “Okay. If you’re sure.”

“I am.” 

She smiled at him and he nodded weakly. He rolled onto his back and clasped his hands over his stomach, the very picture of relaxation.

Rumi’s smile vanished quickly once his eyes were closed. She bit her lip nervously, eyeing his posture. Was that the way to be comfortable in a bed like this? Was she resting wrong? She rolled onto her back as well, letting out a soft exhale of pleasure at the warmth that radiated through her whole body once it was fully pressed to the floor. Yes, this seemed correct. 

Though, he had the single pillow. She hadn't tried to use it, but laying on the floor like this was probably going to leave her with a sore neck in the "morning" or whenever they decided to get up. 

She awkwardly bundled more of the duvet under her head to support her neck, then peeked at him again. What was he doing with his hands? Her hands moved to copy him as well, fingers interlocking over her stomach.

This wasn’t very comfortable. It wasn’t bad, but she thought she’d rather have them at her sides. She let her hands fall.

Oh, but now her arms felt weirdly stiff and unnatural. There was nowhere else she could put them that wouldn’t be much weirder, though. What did she normally do with her arms when she slept? She couldn’t remember.

She rolled back onto her side. 

Was it weird that she was facing him? Neither of them were actually asleep and they both knew it. She quickly turned around so she was laying on her other side and bundled the excess duvet into her arms just to give them something to do. 

It was such a weird feeling to share a bed with another person. It had probably been 20 years since she’d done it last. Back when she was young enough to start wailing if Celine tried to send her back to her room with a curt “recite a meditation” after she’d had a nightmare. Rumi tried to relax into the warmth of the bed but her hip twinged. She was laying on the side of her body that had hit the ground when she fell.

She rolled onto her back again.

“If you’re going to keep flopping around like that, we might as well just get up, since clearly you’re not really tired.” Jinu’s voice was quiet but the reprimand felt loud in the otherwise silent room.

Rumi’s head whipped around to glare at him. He hadn’t even opened his eyes, the absolute prick!

“Of course I’m tired!” She hissed at him, “It’s just, this floor is so hard it’s hurting my shoulders! My back will never be the same!”

At this, Jinu did open his eyes. He turned his head to stare at her disapprovingly. “Sleeping on the floor like this is good for your spine. You probably need it after sleeping on those mattresses that feel like they’re trying to swallow you for your whole life!”

Rumi dragged her hands down her face and groaned, “Uggghhhhh, you’re so old.” 

There was a rustle of the blanket and suddenly Jinu was propped on his arm and leaning halfway over her with a smirk. Before she could gather the energy to push him away, his arms wrapped around her and crushed her to his chest.

“Ooof! What-?”

He ignored her and rolled back so he was laying on his back with her on top of him.

“JINU!! WHAT THE HELL?!” Rumi scrabbled at his chest, squirming as much as she was able with his arms locked around hers.

He blinked up at her with exaggerated innocence. “You’re not on the floor anymore, is this any better?”

“YOU–!!” She managed to wiggle one of her arms loose and smacked the palm of her hand over his face, pushing it to the side so he wasn’t staring up at her with those big, stupid brown eyes anymore. 

He dropped the act quickly, and her face burned with a blush at the feeling of him snickering beneath her. His arms loosened and slid down until only his hands remained on her, settling heavy and warm just above her hips, and Rumi knew that he was letting her go. She could slip away, back down to the mat beside him, and he wouldn’t stop her. He probably wouldn’t even bring this up again. Any choice she made here would be fine and correct as far as he was concerned.

“You’re so stupid.” She mumbled, crossing her arms over his chest and laying her head down on top of them because this was, in fact, significantly more comfortable than the hard ground. His body was just as warm as the floor had been, but it was delightfully cushioned by his relaxed muscles and what little fat a long life in hell had granted him. Her thighs straddled one of his so the only parts of her still on the stone floor were her knees as she hooked her ankles around his.

She felt him tense beneath her as she got comfortable.

“R-Rumi…?” There was a quiver of nerves in his voice, like he couldn’t quite believe that she’d actually decided to stay like this.

She smirked at the immediate reversal of the power dynamic. “Hmm. You shouldn’t have offered if you weren’t serious about it.”

He laughed a little awkwardly, his head falling back onto the stiff pillow as his hands smoothed upward along her sides and then back down again to stop at her lower back. “Trust me, I wouldn’t have. Stay as long as you like.”

He closed his eyes again and relaxed. This time Rumi followed suit, letting her eyes close and trusting that the steady rise and fall of his breathing would keep the memories of her nightmare at bay. 

She tried to think of something else. A different memory, a much better one. 

An early summer day from a few years ago, the first time Huntrix had gone down to Jeju island for a show. She’d been so excited to show her friends all her favorite places, the beautiful flower gardens for her own enjoyment, the creepy lava tubes for Mira, and the sunny beaches for Zoey. She’d been lucky enough that her patterns hadn’t spread so far that she could no longer wear mid-sleeved shirts, so she’d actually been able to sunbathe with them at least a little bit. It hadn’t been too weird, and anyway Mira was the only one who had the attention span to sit in one place and toast herself for hours. Rumi and Zoey had abandoned their towels after about 10 minutes to poke around in the tide pools, Zoey rattling off facts about every crab and snail they found and Rumi darting happily back and forth to show off their finds to Mira who recoiled every time but indulgently poked at the little creatures with Rumi’s gentle encouragement and Zoey’s distant heckling.

Rumi smiled at the memory and let herself sink into it.