Chapter Text
Rumi!
Rumi! Oh, thank god—
Wait. You’re not her.
You’re not Rumi.
Where is she?
What have you done to our Rumi?
+++
Severance, Mira decides, once she’s settled into the mundanity of working for Sunlight Industries, is an odd thing.
It’s a new fad that’s been popping up all around Seoul these days. Some sort of procedure where you go under for surgery and wake up with a split consciousness, one for work and one for outside it. At first, it was a way for companies to secure your silence out of work— company secrets, sensitive information, non-disclosures, shady bullshit that CEOs want to keep under wraps— the logic was that, if you don’t remember what you’ve done once you’re outside the building, there would be no chance of data leaks, no shifty insider work, nada.
However, it then became a standard, even in places where severance wasn’t particularly necessary. The additional costs of a mandated chip inserted in the brains of all your employees, rather than just having them sign a simple NDA and being done with it, are quickly outweighed by all the supposed benefits.
Things like, there would be no residual stress once you’ve left the office, since you would never remember what you were ever stressed about. No distractions from work either, since you wouldn’t be thinking about break-ups or hang-ups in your personal life, just complete, unadulterated focus at work. It left you much happier. No stress, no mess.
Of course, calling severance “odd” wasn’t Mira’s initial thought. Truthfully, she can’t tell if it made her any happier at all, after everything. All the perks of a one-way memory, she supposes.
She doesn’t remember anything before or even after the surgery— she’s not supposed to, anyway. The procedure’s essentially a mental snipping of thread, the scrubbing of her synapses into someone blank, something clean; she’s not supposed to feel the insertion of the chip into her brain that had fried her synapses into living separate existences.
What she does remember is the unexplainable rage that boiled up inside her when she first woke up, so detached, so vulnerable, with where the memories once lay instead replaced with an animalistic, gnawing fury that left her inconsolable for hours, despite not knowing what she’d lost.
What she was even grieving, in the first place.
“You expect me to believe that bullshit?” She remembers roaring at the red pinprick dot of the camera lens, watching her from above a reinforced door that remained astutely locked, no matter how many times she pounded her fists on its surface, or kicked at it so hard it left small dents and chips in the paint. “Fuck you! Let me out! Let me—”
Just the feeling of helplessness, the weakness she felt: it just made her so, so angry, and she didn’t know why. Still doesn’t.
She knows enough, now, not to return to that state where she’d reduced a room to rubble and broken glass. Her name is Mira. Her last name begins with a K, although the rest of the surname is up to the whims of her imagination on the slower days at the office. And that her other self, or as her coworkers so quaintly describe it, her “outie”, has reassured her that this was something they’d(or rather, she’d, it was confusing), agreed to be subjected to.
Well, reassured was a strong word. It was more so that the first time she’d tried to storm out of her new job, she found herself right back inside, with no outsider interference. She’d ping-ponged back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness every time she opened the exit door until she finally gave in rather begrudgingly.
So, she supposes that so long as her other self demands it, she’s stuck here.
Once the rage had settled into something bitter and resigned in the pit of her stomach, she found that her job at Sunlight Industries wasn't so bad. Crunching nonsensical code, copying documents, and typical crap any person would associate with white-collar work.
She finds it darkly amusing that, despite its cheery moniker, the space is sparse and half-empty, more like a medical clinic than an office, with its white walls and vinyl floors. It feels like it's almost symbolic of the minds of most who work here: people with far too much space in their heads, nonsensical and disturbing and too much, yet there was a distinct sense of claustrophobia of a mind being unable to breach the pale domes of the skull, like how they were unable to leave this… limbo.
This purgatory.
There are no windows to tell the time. Cheery posters in Korean encourage you to do your best, clothes in monotone, break times rarely go over when there’s no idle gossip, no past, no future, just present. She comes to when the elevator hits her floor, fresh and buttoned up like a good little employee, works, eats mediocre-tasting sandwiches and watery coffee for lunch, works until she feels her eye bags begin to bruise and her back feels like hell, and clocks out feeling like crap before she wakes up back in that elevator again, going back to her floor. It’s a Sisyphean routine of endless monotony, endless liminality packaged as something clean and corporate.
(Some wretched, caged thing in her head screams that it’s more than that. It’s hell.)
There are some nice things about this place that make it more tolerable, she has to admit. Bobby, the deputy manager for the Severed here, was courteous throughout her orientation process, weathering through her more violent outbursts with grace that earned him her grudging respect. He checks up on her often, bringing snacks and words of encouragement without managing to be overbearing.
One day, he’d managed to sneak some actual ramyeon into the offices. Actual, store-bought cup ramyeon, the more expensive stuff at that, and not the flavourless bargain bin crap that came with twenty-four in a logo-less plastic bag that the employee kitchens had. And of course, he’s saved her one of the spicier ones, knowing her preference towards stronger flavours.
“I’m surprised you’re not getting in trouble for this,” She remembers saying, but her hands are already curled protectively over the styrofoam packaging like a lifeline. Bobby just shrugs.
“My subordinates, my rules.” His voice is warm like the residual heat from the cooking noodles. “And if good food equals a sufficient morale boost and higher employee motivation, I don’t think Ms Celine can complain.”
Privately, she does see him as an office guardian of some sort, maybe a father figure. Not that she’d admit that to anyone.
Then there’s this other severed coworker of hers— Zoey, a sweet and intriguing sort of girl compared to all the average joes she has to play nice with— Mira can only imagine what she’d be like outside Sunlight Industries, with all the passion and endearing spunk put into something other than mundane office work.
And then there was Rumi.
+++
It was one of those slow-going days when they’d first properly met.
See, boredom’s not something that comes easy to severed employees, due to the fact that they’ve known nothing else but the work that’s piled in front of them. What they feel instead is a kind of restlessness not so easily quelled. There are no distractions to scratch that itch, and it’s never been so prevalent in Zoey as with any other coworker Mira’s worked with.
Even though the woman’s only been in the office for two or so weeks now, Mira’s built a sufficient enough profile on her to know that Zoey’s one of the more curious ones she’d worked with—always asking question after question about the outside world as if she can answer them.
She doesn’t hate it, though. She likes hearing the girl talk, likes feeling the ebb and flow of their conversation and listening to something other than the monotonous clatter of old, clunky keyboards and the spontaneous cough or two. Zoey doesn’t seem to mind her small, clipped responses, just seeming content to have someone entertain her queries. It helps that Mira’s height lets her see over the office-mandated dividers to see her, rather than feeling like she’s talking with a particularly chatty wall, and they’ve formed quite the rapport with each other.
“Mira-unnie, why do you think your outie decided to dye her hair pink?”
Subconsciously, Mira reaches to feel for her long, hot-pink tresses— feeling their softness from what was assumedly a good wash the night before. She’s sometimes wondered why her other self had decided to keep such a loud hairstyle, but it’s always been more of a passing thought than an actual excuse to actually wonder about it. It screams of something rebellious. Something bold.
“Zoey. I’ve told you already, you can drop the honorifics. Just Mira is fine,” And while the woman in question squeaks out a quick apology, she does give it some thought.
“Maybe I’m some sort of international pop star,” She says, lips twitching into a soft, playful smile, reserved for when she’s talking to Zoey about things like this. “It seems like a thing that pop stars would do. Or maybe she just knows we’d pull it off.”
“That’d be so cool, if you were actually a famous pop star!” Zoey exclaims. “But pop star or not, you do look good with pink hair.”
A healthy smile reaches her lips. “Well, thanks for the compliment, I guess. How about you? Anything different about you today?”
Unlike Mira, whose outward appearance always seemed to stay relatively consistent, Zoey’s other self always seemed to be in a state of flux. Zoey scrunches her nose, pausing her work to examine herself more closely before her face suddenly brightens up. “Oh! I’ve got… ink smudges? Or paint? Whatever it is, it’s all over my arms and hands again today.” She beams up at Mira. “Do you think I’m an artist? Like a painter, or something?”
“I think it would suit you,” She replies truthfully. “You seem like the type that would enjoy making stuff.”
The younger woman’s smile grows impossibly brighter. “You think so?”
“Even if you weren’t, it’s fun to think about regardless, don’t you think?”
It feels so natural, so… normal. Like she wasn’t just some glorified living cog in this machine they call an office.
“It is,” Zoey readily agrees. “Just think! What if one of us was leading a super crazy double life outside of Sunlight, and we’re just all none the wiser!”
Now that warrants a chuckle out of her, low and rumble with amusement. “Oh yeah? Like what?”
“I dunno! Like… like trained assassins! Or government agents! Ooh, what if we were actually both pop stars and we were like, in a duo?”
She does actually let slip a small bark of laughter at that. “Come on, what are the odds of that? We probably don’t even know each other out there!”
”Hey, what happened to it being ‘fun to think about’?” Zoey pouts dramatically. “Can’t a girl dream?”
“Alright, alright, my bad.” Mira raises her hands in mock surrender.
She does think that if they were friends out there, she wouldn’t mind that. But if they weren’t, well, she’s happy that she has Zoey here, and now.
Reaching for her water bottle, she’s irritated to realise that she’s already run out of coffee, and she hadn’t even clocked in for two hours. Immediately, her mind jumps to blame her other self— she’s taking all the punishment of a bad night’s sleep while her other half just does whatever. It doesn’t help that they ran out of the better stuff weeks ago, and she’s just been living on shitty coffee to keep going. She grumbles a curse under her breath, already starting to feel drowsy.
“Time out, Zo,” She says. “Gotta fill up on coffee at the break room. Want anything? I’ll grab something for you, my treat.”
“That was fast!” Zoey whistles at the fastest record time Mira’s run out of coffee in the morning, ever since she first got here. “And if you don’t mind grabbing me on those cookies that Bobby brought in this morning, that’d be great, please and thank you!”
“Sure.”
Unfortunately, the same courtesies of her height towards forward communication with Zoey don’t apply when most of the time she spends here is hunched over at her desk, tapping away at a computer that only goes up to her chest, even with all the finessing she’s done with adjusting the height of her office chair.
So when she gets up, she cracks a few vertebrae with a soft grunt while she’s at it, before she nabs her company-provided water bottle, complete with the dumb little sun logo that’s scuffed beyond recognition, and begins the arduous journey to the inconveniently far-away break room.
It’s relatively uneventful, with most of her motions carried out by rote at this point. When she reaches the breakroom, she boils herself a fresh pot of shitty coffee, drops two creams and one sugar to hopefully cover up the weird taste this time, and grabs a cookie for Zoey from the plate that Bobby’s left out for everyone, double chocolate chip. Then she heads back out in no less than 20 minutes, only because their coffee pot is old and slow as hell, and she doesn’t want to waste time rotting in there all by herself when she’s got work to do and a conversation to get back to on other lives.
She’s in such a hurry, in fact, that she doesn’t hear the clacking of heels rapidly approaching her at the same hurried tempo, so when she rounds the corner and crashes straight into someone, Mira’s taken completely by surprise.
The impact was so jarring that it somehow managed to jostle her glasses right off her face, and they thankfully got hooked onto the neckline of her dress shirt instead, avoiding what was most definitely a costly fall that her outer self would have to deal with later. Oh, and the cookie that she got for Zoey is probably now nothing more than chocolate-flavoured crumbs on the floor.
“Watch it,” She growls, breath hissing through bared teeth, even when it may have been partially her fault for not paying attention. Usually, no one walks in this area at this hour, so she usually goes on autopilot when she makes trips like this. Still, it’s the fact that she’s practically a giraffe with neon pink hair personified that doesn’t make her easily missable around these parts.
“Oh—oh my god, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there!” A surprisingly pretty-sounding voice rings out in the strange acoustics of the hallways, flighty and frantic all at once. “I wasn’t paying attention, it wasn’t on purpose, I swear— Here, your glasses!” The figure moves closer, and her senses are suddenly assaulted by the scent of jasmine perfume, with the faintest undertone of something smoky, which her mind helpfully substitutes as incense.
Through her blindness-induced scowl, she feels her dislodged glasses unhook from her shirt and makes out slender hands holding out her glasses, which she quickly takes and puts back on so she can see who exactly she’s bumped into.
The moment she lays eyes on the figure, a part of her immediately curses out how her knee-jerk reaction is always somewhat aggressive, because damn.
The woman standing before her is unequivocally gorgeous— with smooth cheekbones and sharp features, but there’s a sort of softness to it all that makes her seem all the more beautiful, somehow— almond eyes that are a warm sort of earthy brown and hair a unique shade of light purple but with the faintest hint of natural black roots coming in, tied up in a rather large and impressive looking braid that trails long enough to reach her legs. Combined with a black turtleneck, white blouse, and office pencil skirt ensemble, she seems more suited for the runway rather than a shady underground company like Sunlight Industries.
Anyway, she’s shaken out of her thoughts again when she finally registers that the woman’s still apologising in rapid-fire speech, wringing her hands together as if she’d committed an atrocious sin.
“Okay, okay. Wait.” The woman’s mouth clamps shut as she brushes off the mournful remains of Zoey’s cookie from her pants. “It’s—it’s whatever. You’re fine. I just got caught off guard.”
“Are you sure? I can go back and get you a cookie, if you want—”
Mira holds her hand up tiredly. “Seriously, drop it. It’s not a big deal. I can grab another one myself, okay? You’re acting like you’ve lied to me for years about something or whatever, jeez.”
What she thought was an excellent way of defusing the tension only seems to backfire when the purple-haired woman seems to flinch, before she laughs, high-pitched and nervous, just a moment too late for Mira to pass off as a fluke. “Right, right. Yes. I—I’m sorry, I’ll get out of your hair now.”
Then she hurries off before Mira can even blink, leaving her with nothing but cookie crumbs all over her outfit and the lingering scent of jasmine and smoke trailing in her wake.
Huh.
That was really fucking weird. Like… really, really fucking weird.
Mira never even caught her name. Well, to be fair, the woman never threw it to begin with, seemingly actively avoiding doing so.
Weird.
+++
The whole interaction miffs her enough that she spends the rest of the way back to her desk stewed in contemplation, and when she sits down in a daze, Zoey looks back up from her monitor to give her a look.
“Whoa, what’s with that look? It looks like you got hit by a dumpster truck or something, not that I’d know what that feels like. Hey, where’s my cookie?”
She goes to speak, but her mouth feels strangely numbed up, and her head is hurting a little, so it takes her a moment to find the words. “I think I just had the weirdest moment of my life, that’s all.”
Zoey squints, not quite buying her shoddy explanation. “You know that’s not exactly satiating my curiosity, right? You usually don’t forget stuff like this.”
Mira runs her fingers down one of her long, pink ponytails— an involuntary calming motion that serves to ground her when her thoughts get all scattered like this. She’s not supposed to get so worked up about a weird, one-time encounter, but it feels as if the purple-haired woman was a proverbial iceberg that she’d crashed into, and now she’s left unmoored and off-kilter, and she doesn’t like the feeling at all.
”Zoey,” She starts in an attempt to cut the conversation off, but it sounds shaky even to her. “Really, it’s nothing—”
“Hey, everyone!”
Mira looks up at the sound of Bobby’s voice. While the rest of their coworkers let out half-mumbles of acknowledgement or simply turned their attention to him, she and Zoey gave him their typical joint greeting of “Hi, Bobby!” because he deserved more than just a lacklustre response to his enthusiasm. He did seem to appreciate it, so they just made it another part of the routine.
Bobby looks as cheery as always, but her attention doesn’t linger long on him, because her eyes are instead drawn to the young woman standing a little ways behind him. A very familiar-looking woman, in fact, one with an incredibly distinct purple braid.
Oh, shit.
”Everyone, this is Rumi!” Bobby continues, completely oblivious to Mira’s gawking. “I know she’s completely new to everyone, but starting from today, she’s going to be your department head!” The woman in question gives a graceful bow, and automatically, everyone in the office dips their heads in respect.
Double shit.
Rumi’s her boss? And she’s finding that out now, when she snapped at her the first time they met for a petty reason before Rumi ran away? She is literally the worst.
“Rumi’s been personally trained by Ms Celine herself, and she’s considered one of Sunlight’s best employees to date…”
Mira’s caught staring when she feels the sensation of eyes on her, and before she can even think twice, she’s already locked gazes with Rumi. The latter looks as unsettled as Mira feels, brows pinched and eyes strangely glossy as if she were an enigma that she couldn’t seem to solve. That’s also when Mira notices her stealing a look at Zoey midway between their impromptu staring contest, and something in her expression just seems to… crumple.
But it’s just for a moment. Bobby’s list of her achievements finally comes to an end, and her features quickly steel into paper-thin professionalism as she turns to face their office as a whole.
“Bobby speaks too kindly of me,” She says humbly. “I was the department head of another regional branch of Sunlight Industries before I transferred here. To say I’m the best would discount the work of others done before and with me. But just know that I’m pleased to be working with you all. If you have any questions about me or need my assistance, my office is just down the hall.” Rumi bows again. “Thank you for having me.”
There’s the usual fanfare of clapping and genial smiles before Rumi excuses herself, slipping back into the hallways like a ghost. It’s then that Bobby turns to Mira and Zoey, brow crinkling up with concern.
“What’s wrong, Mira? You look pale. Oh no, are you sick?”
“That’s what I’m saying!” Zoey butts in. “She’s been off ever since she got back from the breakroom!”
“No, no, I’m fine.” She does not need to be sent home like a sick child. “I’m okay, I swear.”
Bobby doesn’t push, swiftly moving on, much to her temporary relief. “Okay. Well, I just wanted to ask you girls a few things. See, Rumi’s still quite new to how things work around here, since protocol was a little different to how it was in her branch.” He pauses dramatically. “And since you girls are about the same age as her, I think it’d be good for the two of you to buddy up with her for the next few days!”
Ah. There goes the relief.
“Sure!” Zoey smiles easily. “Mira and I would be happy to show her around for the next few days! Right, Mira?”
No, not really. She doesn’t say that, though, instead putting on the approximation of a smile, but it ends up feeling more like a grimace than anything, not that Bobby seems to notice that.
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“Great!” Bobby looks pleased. “I’ll quickly go tell Rumi about the arrangement. I won’t keep you two from your work any longer!” And then he’s gone too, leaving Mira and Zoey to their own devices. The latter’s attention immediately snaps back to the former.
“Mira, seriously,” She actually sounds stern, devoid of her usual chipper tone. “What’s up? And don’t tell me that it’s nothing again, because—”
“I’m the worst.”
“What?”
“I’m the actual worst,” Mira groans, slumping forward onto her desk, her ponytails fanning over her face like a waterfall. “I ran into her, snapped at her for no reason when she was just trying to be nice, made her uncomfortable enough to run away, then Bobby tells us she’s our boss, and now I have to show her around like it never happened. I totally messed up.”
Zoey blinks once. Twice. “Oh,” she says. “That’s it?”
Mira’s head snaps up so quickly she knows she’s going to regret it later, but she can’t bring it in herself to care right now. “What do you mean, that’s it?”
“I mean like, can’t you just go and apologise?” Zoey adds hurriedly, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “I mean, yeah, that’s super embarrassing and a really bad first impression, but it just sounds like you just need to clear the air with her, right? Rumi-seonbaenim said her office was open for everyone.”
“You wouldn’t be this confident if you were in my shoes,” She grumbles.
“Well, no. But it’s never happened to me, because I just so happen to be a delight.”
Mira goes in for a half-hearted swat, but Zoey dodges it easily. “Dork. But that did make me feel a little better. So thanks, I guess.”
“No problemo,” Zoey holds the “o” longer than she should have. “Okay, now that you’re feeling better, there’s no time like the present! Go and apologise to her!”
She immediately blanches.
“Wait, now?”
“Mira, it’s just gonna fester if you leave it! You gotta rip the bandaid off!”
No, Zoey’s right. She just needs to get this over with.
Mira gets back up, and Zoey cheers loudly in encouragement.
She’s going to do it now.
She’s going to do it now—
Mira spends at least three minutes pacing outside Rumi’s office, hands hovering over the doorknob and dropping back to her sides over and over again. Zoey watches on, having volunteered as moral support, but now she just looks completely unimpressed.
This is stupid.
This is so stupid.
“Mira,” Zoey grumbles. “Just get in there already!”
Why is she so nervous? It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get there—”
“Nope! It’s now or never!”
Zoey marches up to the door, smacks it open like it’s personally offended her, shoves Mira inside before she can protest, and shuts the door with a click. Mira sees Rumi immediately startle at the sound, eyes growing wide at the sight of her.
Okay, so she might kill Zoey later.
“M—Mira-hubae?” Rumi looks like a jackrabbit about ready to bolt when she strides up to her desk wordlessly. “Can I help you?”
“Mira is fine,” She automatically corrects, and she immediately wants to kick herself for being disrespectful, but surprisingly enough, Rumi doesn’t get angry. She just gives a faint nod.
“Okay,” Rumi says. “How can I help you, Mira?”
It also takes Mira everything in her not to run out of Rumi’s office herself, but she forces herself to dig her heels in, and she bows quickly, deep enough that her ponytails almost brush the floor. “Look, about earlier,” She grinds out, as if it were physically painful for her to do so, “I’m really sorry. That was really uncalled for, for me to snap at you like that, when you were just trying to help. And if you’d let me, I’d like to make it up to you.”
A pathetic little “please” almost wheedles its way up her throat, but she tamps it down. She waits like a dog ready to be scolded.
”Mira.”
She holds her breath. She doesn’t know why.
“Mira, look at me.”
She feels a gentle jasmine-scented hand ghost across her face, and she flinches hard, immediately rising from her bow to see the purple-haired woman looking nervous, but no longer high-strung and tense as she once was. Her hand retreats, and Mira finds herself fleetingly wondering how it would’ve felt if she’d let her caress her cheek.
“Sorry. Sorry, that was an overstep on my part. I shouldn’t have touched you without permission. But it’s okay, I promise.” Rumi’s words are slow and methodical, like calming a spooked cat. “It’s okay. Don’t worry, you weren’t that rude. I guess I was just a little scatterbrained myself, because I wanted to make a good impression on everyone. And,” She coughs, voice lowering, “I may have lost Bobby when I bumped into you, so I was running myself ragged trying to find my way around.”
It’s Rumi’s attempt at an olive branch, her own crooked attempt at humour, and Mira gladly accepts it.
“God, tell me about it,” She scoffs. “This place is like a damn labyrinth. All we’re missing is a minotaur and the human bones.”
Rumi laughs gently, a pleasant sound.
“I can take up redecoration suggestions with the higher-ups,” Her voice borders slightly on mirthful. “But in the meantime, Bobby said you and… a Zoey would be willing to show me around?”
“That’s right,” Mira confirms. “If you’ll have us, Rumi-seonbaenim.”
“Well, if I’m calling you Mira…”
“Rumi it is.” Mira lets loose a small, but genuine smile. “I take it as a yes.”
“I’d like that very much, yes.” Rumi dips her head, and Mira catches a flash of something akin to warmth in her eyes. “We can start with lunch tomorrow, at the breakroom, if that’s alright?”
“Of course.” She dips her head again. “See you then, Rumi.”
Rumi does give a small, shy smile of her own then. It feels strangely hopeful. “See you and Zoey tomorrow.”
Mira walks out and closes the door behind her, feeling her chest lift with relief, but also triumph. She’d done it. She didn’t fuck it all up!
Her pride still makes her roll her eyes when Zoey looks up at her like an expectant parent after their child’s first day at school.
“How did it go, champ?”
“Don’t call me that.” She snorts, turning away. “But I guess it wasn’t as bad as I expected. We start tomorrow, during our lunch break.”
Zoey whoops and goes in for a back hug, which Mira quickly relaxes into. Zoey’s always been a bit of a physical touch person, and she’s quickly learned to get used to it. It’s… nice.
“This calls for some celebration! What are we thinking, Mira?”
“Well, we can quickly grab your cookie before we get back to work?”
“Hell yeah!”
They’re both so caught up with her small victory, in fact, that they both fail to notice a woman slip in behind them and enter Rumi’s office as they walk back to the cubicles.
Rumi, none the wiser to who her guest is, looks up again, a little too eager, a little too naive. “Mira! Did you forget something?—”
“Rumi.”
She stiffens. Celine strides up to her with a presence that screams a natural disaster incarnate, all-powerful and reverent and demanding respect.
“Celine. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Rumi,” Celine says her name again with a certain tone, as if she were scolding a despondent child, and Rumi shrinks back as if she were one. “There’s no need for pleasant niceties. You know why I’m here.”
There’s a moment of silence, and Rumi’s skin raises with goose pimples under her mentor’s gaze. Even as a fully-grown woman, even as a hunter, even after being trained her whole life to be a weapon, Celine’s being is enough to disarm her into being nothing more than her five-year-old self.
“Are you certain that this is a good idea, fraternising with Mira and Zoey while they’re severed? Wouldn’t you rather place all your efforts into—”
“It’s not fraternising,” She bites back, cutting her off. Her hands clench tightly on her pencil skirt. “I— None of this was premeditated on my part. I didn’t bump into Mira on purpose, and Bobby was the one who assigned the two of them to help me around.”
Celine doesn’t look convinced, unsurprisingly.
“I swear it,” Rumi implores. “I wouldn’t— I wouldn’t force them to acquaint themselves with me, here. I’m here because I want to be close to them. I just want to make sure they’re both doing okay.”
Without them pointing their weapons at me remains unsaid, but it still hangs thick and heavy in the air.
“Still, I don’t think it's wise to be close to them here, even if these versions of themselves can’t tap into the Honmoon and sense your heritage. And what you’re doing out there, too! It’s going to poke holes in the story I’ve told them about you being captured by Gwi-ma.”
“That’s—” Rumi locks her jaw in frustration. “It’s not any better, keeping up another lie we’ve built! We’re meant to fight as a trio, and the Honmoon grows weaker—”
“Do you want them to kill you, Rumi?”
Silence.
“What if,” Rumi's words feel like knots in her throat, tangling and choking all at once. “What if the only thing that’s keeping my patterns from leaving is… this? This… lie. Telling them that I’m not me. That I’m a demon, and the real Rumi is out there? It’s a cruel lie,” She can feel the slight wetness of tears beginning to form around her eyelids. “It’s cruel. Telling them that I’m out there, needing to be saved while I’m here, as they cut me and hurt me.”
“You know I just want the best for you,” Celine says eventually. “It may not seem like it now, but when your patterns finally disappear, everything will be fine.” Upon seeing Rumi’s face, her eyes soften a fraction to something more motherly. Rumi’s starting to detest the feeling she gets from it. “Hey. It was hard for me, too, when your mother passed away, and your Auntie Seo-yeon disappeared.”
“But they’re not Mom or Auntie Seo-yeon.” Rumi’s face is shadowed, her traitorous voice quiet and cutting all at once. “Mira and Zoey are alive. Well. You speak their names as if they’re gone. But they’re here.”
“They were taught to kill demons, Rumi. To seek out and destroy the patterns.”
Discreetly, Rumi tugs at her sleeve with her gloved hand. She doesn’t need the reminder when the patterns burn on her skin like lightning scars, emboldened by rejection and shame, and her hidden demon claws dig into her skin like fish hooks.
What makes you think they’ll spare you?
“I’m not changing my mind.” Rumi’s voice is a tremulous thing, but her eyes are resolute. “They just need time. And I just need to prove that I’m me.”
“I just… I just want to be a little bit selfish. Just for a while.”
I don’t. I need them more than they need me, and a world without them isn’t worth living.
There’s a sigh. It’s not one of disappointment, or anger, or anything.
“Okay,” Celine says. “Okay, Rumi.”
She leaves without another word, and Rumi’s world goes quiet once more.
+++
It’s a strange thing, Rumi thinks. Grief, that is.
It sits low and mournful in the pit of her stomach like a kicked dog, persists like a lump in her throat. Some days, she can ignore the ache it brings, and other days it sends her spiralling in a pain so intense it feels like she’s been stabbed and left to bleed.
She doesn’t remember anything clearly since…. their separation. It feels as if someone took a whiteboard eraser to her mind and scrubbed out all the dates, leaving only the vaguest memories of weeks spent not living, but surviving on autopilot. Wake up, eat, kill demons, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat. The details are like looking through fogged glass, mostly darkened but interspliced briefly with sickly pink and purple— whether it be from her patterns or from enemy demons she’s unsure.
The haze only clears on the day that Celine tells her of their joint employment to Sunlight— she’s not quite sure why her mentor had chosen to tell her in the first place, given how she’d doubled down on her push for the golden Honmoon. Rumi likes to believe that maybe it was in a split second of kindness. To give her the semblance of an anchor, something to moor herself to.
But she just… had to see them. Some version of them.
It’s funny, because even when its hunters are apart, the Honmoon howls and demons don’t wait to be let in, to be denied their infernal right to feast on the living.
It’s hard to describe what it feels like, to sense a tear opening, to feel the threads fray and snap under demonic teeth and talon. All Rumi knows is that when it does, the Honmoon keens its grief, its pain like an infant ripped from its mother, torn away before it can latch on to suckle. It’s a sound that hunters can’t ignore. To do so would feel cruel, to feel wrong on every level that made them human.
So why does it hurt Rumi so much when she only bears half of that heritage?
Ever since that day, the day she lost them, the Honmoon cries out frequently, mourning what’s been lost. More tears open more regularly, and Rumi runs herself ragged trying to fix it all. The patterns all over her body have only spread faster, greedily ravaging her unmarred skin like a fungus, an infection—her left eye hasn’t stopped glowing, and her right hand remains monstrous.
So she hides more, no longer just sleeves. Cakes her face with liquid foundation, uses coloured contacts, clips her claws and puts on gloves. It’s only a temporary fix, and she knows that. She knows how Celine can’t even bear to see her anymore outside the office.
Rumi knows Mira and Zoey wouldn’t let the Honmoon be destroyed, even now. They are bound to duty, it’s been drilled into them at this point— But ever since Celine had informed her about their new jobs at Sunlight Industries, she’s let the burden of defending it during the day fall on her shoulders. She wonders why they chose to be severed when souls are at stake.
But perhaps they already knew she would be the one to take care of it herself. A way to repent for existing.
If it’s the least she can do, after lying to them after all these years, for being born something unnatural and filthy and monstrous, she will do it. Her new position at Sunlight is more of a cover than anything— Celine’s pulled enough strings to at least allow her to see them. To watch them on the other side of the glass.
But she supposes it’s not quite the case anymore.
Her morose thoughts are soon interrupted by the ripping of spiritual seams— part of the Honmoon’s stitches snap and shred, and it shrieks like a wounded animal as demons bleed from its wound, pouring out in waves of infernal meat and writhing bodies. Her saingeom is summoned by rote, muscle memory hammered into her very being by a lifetime of training. Sometimes she doesn’t understand why the Honmoon chose her, a half-breed of all things.
You are ours, It sings between screams. Just as they are too.
Rumi knows. But it doesn’t mean that she believes it.
The demons seem to have caught on to the fact that there’s been some sort of divide between the hunters, because their movements are fervent with confidence and their faces are cast with feral grins that show too many crooked teeth— their animal minds tell them that only one hunter is barely a threat. But Rumi is nothing but determined, and before the hunters were three, Celine trained her to fight alone, as a one-woman army.
And she is one. She cleaves dokkaebi in half like she cuts vegetables for stew, sears them into dark ash that flickers with demonic embers— She needs no assistance, no backup. Her saingeom never falters, burns righteous and severs through bone and gristle.
It’s quick but tiring work. Rumi feels unbalanced, so used to fighting in three-part harmonies— now her soul rings out by itself towards the Honmoon, and it mourns how lonely the song it sings is.
But it’s done. She’s got nothing but some scratches and cuts to prove she was ever struggling, and they will eventually fade as the Honmoon brushes its strands across the wounds, willing them to heal, heal what it can because it can’t heal the fracture between its hunters.
But even the Honmoon struggles to do even that now; its magic is laughably weak from their separation. The Honmoon sounds once again like a mourning bell, and it sounds almost human in its frustration, a frustration of feeling so useless, so helpless.
“Don’t worry,” Rumi says in an attempt to comfort it. “I can heal the normal way. Save your strength, please.” And it does settle slightly in her reassurance.
It’s funny how the Honmoon chooses to act around her now. It’s almost like it can sense her loneliness, her yearning. And it wants to be there for her, starlight rubbing against her legs like a friendly housecat. It’s no replacement. But it makes her nights more bearable, just to feel a presence around her. Something alive that still loves her, for the way she is, even as her patterns begin to swallow her whole.
But she wonders, as she becomes the very thing it was built to defend against, how much more demon she becomes until it, too, abandons her.
(She would rather not entertain the thought.)
Speaking of, she hears two familiar sets of footprints approach her location, and the Honmoon tugs at her legs with its frayed threads, urging her to move. It knows that if they saw her now, they would not spare Rumi.
Reluctantly, she does— it’s frankly frightening how the shadows manage to so utterly swallow her up, even with the light pollution so rampant in Seoul that she can no longer see the stars, and where darkness only leaks from Honmoon tears into the underworld— but even that is lit grimly to the eerie fuchsia of Gwi-ma’s flames. No, it is not true darkness, in a literal sense.
Rumi knows what it is.
She only watches from afar when she sees Mira and Zoey arrive on the scene, her patterns throbbing painfully at the sight of their drawn weapons, even when they don’t know she’s here yet.
“The tear’s already been sealed,” Rumi hears Mira murmur to Zoey. “No demons either.”
“It may have just closed naturally,” Zoey argues back. “I don’t think it’ll hurt to look around. The Honmoon’s weak enough as is for us to be taking chances. And I want to see if we can get some info on Rumi’s whereabouts, anyway.”
Every time, it still takes her breath away to see them like this. The separation hurts her, even when she’s only a few feet away from them, Mira and Zoey in the light and her swathed in the dark.
“I’ll check this way,” Zoey says, taking off down an alleyway. “Tell me if you see anything.”
Mira nods stiffly and heads the other direction, face haloed by the harsh glare of the street lamps. She reaches where Rumi had just finished her battle— and pauses.
Mira examines the ground, smells the lingering smoke of foul incense, the stench of slain demons. That’s all she needs to know before she hardens her gaze and prods at the Honmoon, whose threads bounce innocently in response.
“She’s here, isn’t she?” Mira hisses. “The demon that wears my girlfriend’s face. Where is she?”
The Honmoon does not twang its threads towards Rumi. It will not assist in the murder of its children. But for all the years Rumi was trained to be a hunter before her, Mira is not lacking in experience, and she is certainly no fool.
She finds her anyway, eyes shooting towards the darkness to where her patterns cannot hide her, nor the inhuman glint of her left eye, and her expression turns flinty and cold.
“I told you,” Mira’s voice comes out something akin to a strangled snarl, a sound thick and emotional and angry. “If I ever saw you again, I’d kill you. Don’t make me make good on that promise, demon.”
It still hurts Rumi to hear the name they’ve given her, to substitute for the absence of warmth that she used to give so easily to her. Where Mira’s voice had once uttered her name like a prayer, like something to be cherished, now it does nothing more but curse her, like how one spits out the rotten pith of a spoiled fruit.
From strangers to friends to lovers to nothing.
There is no greater loss. Not to Rumi.
“I won’t fight you,” She says softly, stepping into the light, because even when she’s hurting, she would rather die than yell at her girls. It proves to be the wrong thing to say, because Mira’s expression twists with rage and grief and sadness all at once, and she lunges with her gok-do.
Rumi parries it, and sword-steel clashes in a shower of starlit sparks. The Honmoon trembles underfoot in its discomfort, whines discordantly as Mira swings and Rumi dodges. It goes on for a bit before Mira’s blade inevitably clips the sleeve of her hoodie, tearing the fabric and revealing the pulsing patterns on her arm. She yelps and jumps back, not because she’s been cut— but she instinctively presses her hand to cover it regardless. The sight of such a meaningless action makes Mira scoff.
“There’s no point in hiding those anymore, is there?” She sneers, words cutting like razor blades and broken glass. “We already know what you are. You can’t hide from what you are anymore.”
Rumi doesn’t entertain Mira with a response, not giving her the verbal ammunition she desires to fire at her. But she does say one thing.
“I just want to talk.”
It again only proves to be the wrong response.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” Mira snarls, levelling her gok-do with Rumi’s eyes. “You’re a demon. We’re hunters. End of story.”
It still hurts every time. Every rejection, every burning bridge. Demons bleed ash when they’re hit by hunters, and maybe that’s why she tastes it in her mouth, bitter and hard to swallow. Rumi hears Zoey’s footfalls headed in the direction, no doubt having heard that clashing earlier. It means it's time to go, because she can’t fight two of them at once. She can’t. She won’t.
Mira, sensing her intent to leave, goes to swing her weapon with a yell, but Rumi is too fast. She leaps backward and disappears again, and with only the cat-like grace a half-demon heritage can provide, manages to shake an experienced demon hunter such as Mira, crouching down atop some of the pipes sticking out in an alleyway.
“She was just here, I fucking swear it!” She hears Mira growl. The two of them do search for a while, but the Honmoon refuses to guide them, and its uncooperativeness renders them blind to her presence.
“Mira, she’s not here anymore.” Zoey’s face remains unnaturally stony, unnaturally devoid of her messy emotions, but her voice is resigned. “Let’s go home.”
“This isn’t over.” Mira seethes into the open air, perhaps still sensing her there, voice low and all too foreign in its fury.
“I’m going to kill you for taking Rumi from us.”
Rumi pretends not to notice how her voice wavers just a bit, for her sake.
Then she stalks away after Zoey without so much as another word, gok-do disappearing into the threads. The Honmoon seems to exhale, a sound singing of cosmic sorrow and loss. Rumi gently runs her hand over the trembling threads as if it were an anxious housecat, before she prepares for her departure. She needs sleep— she’s got a lunch date tomorrow, after all, and she doesn’t want to be late.
“I’ll see you both tomorrow,” Rumi whispers gently, before she slinks back into the shadows and truly disappears back into the night.