Chapter Text
In all the years of Zoey’s life as a demon hunter, Celine had never looked small before. Even the few inches that Celine physically stood over her had always been enough for Celine’s presence to feel impossibly powerful and majestic, and whenever Zoey indulged in fun personal fantasies, she’d always imagined Celine even taller.
Now the crumpled-up woman on the floor looked like Zoey could pick her up in one hand and drop her out the window if she wanted to — which she did. Zoey really, really wanted to.
“We’re going to find Rumi,” Mira said, her voice steady but her fists shaking, “and you’re going to stay right here so she doesn’t have to see you. When we bring her back upstairs to our home, we will text you to leave the building, and you are never going to come back until we tell you that you can. You are never going to call Rumi until we tell you that you can. You are never going to text Rumi until we tell you that you can. Do you understand?”
Celine’s tear-soaked, bloodshot eyes drifted back and forth between Mira and Zoey.
Silently.
Not good enough. “I think we need to use small words,” Zoey said. How far could she take this before she ran out of steam? “Right now, stay right here, then leave when we tell you to leave. You don’t get to see our friend, you don’t get to talk to our friend. We might let you see her and talk to her at some point, or we might not. Do you get that?”
Celine nodded as she started to stand up.
“SIT.” Zoey threw her fists out, holding up the magical shin-kal knives that had suddenly appeared in her hands. She almost hoped that Celine would stand up anyway. That Celine would give her a reason to use them.
Celine’s face dropped. Zoey turned and followed Mira out of the office, ignoring the pathetic whimpering behind them.
Down the hall, Rumi was curled up against the wall, crying into her arms.
Zoey ran over and knelt down next to her, her heart breaking as she tentatively put a hand on Rumi’s patterned shoulder.
This was all her fault. She’d been so certain that the truth, whatever it may have been, needed to be made as clear as possible as quickly as possible for Rumi’s sake, but all that had done was hurt Rumi even worse.
Should they have done this Rumi’s way after all? Should they have just told Celine openly ‘we found out that Rumi’s half demon, and Mira almost killed her because your training told her to’ and asked her what secret nuance she’d come up with to keep Rumi safe? Rumi was going to be disappointed and betrayed one way or another by Celine’s confession that there hadn’t been any, but would it have hurt less if she hadn’t spent so much time fighting desperately for an answer that was never coming?
Rumi’d already been devastated enough that night for a thousand lifetimes, and it had been Zoey’s and Mira’s job to take care of her. Had they just bullied her into ending this in the most traumatic way possible for no reason?
Zoey forced herself to breathe. It was too late to worry about this now — the damage was done, and now she needed to help Rumi through it. “Hey,” she said as she and Mira walked over to where Rumi was sitting. “You wanna go home?”
Rumi nodded. Mira reached down, and Rumi took her hand to pull herself up, burying her face in Mira’s shoulders until she was able to breathe steady again. They all walked together through the deserted office space in silence, making their way back to the elevator.
The clanging of the bell and the crashing of the opening door briefly bombarded the empty silence, but as they all walked into the elevator itself, Zoey found herself feeling more as though the walls were offering an embrace.
She took her phone out, texted Celine “Leave,” and started drafting a longer text to Bobby in her Notes. She sent the first draft to Rumi and Mira in their HUNTR/X group chat — she couldn’t send something this important to Bobby until they’d given the OK first, but she was certain they were both too wiped out to listen to it as a monologue. “Here’s what I have for Bobby so far: Celine’s been bullying Rumi for years behind our backs, and she’s never allowed in our building again. She’s too important an employee for us to fire her, but we’re making her work from home until that changes. We’ll try to tell you more in the morning.”
Rumi and Mira took their buzzing phones out of their pockets and started reading. On Zoey’s phone, the picture of Leonardo labelled “Gimbap Roomba” reacted with a thumbs-up, and the picture of Raphael labelled “Mira, Mira, On My Phone” responded “Looks good”.
Zoey sent the text to Bobby. After a minute of the response-in-progress bubbles appearing and disappearing and appearing again and disappearing again, the picture of Donatello labelled “Bob Abbott” finally responded “You don’t have to share anything else.” and “IT will pack up her computers first thing in the morning, and security’s going to deactivate her passes. We’ll have her office emptied by tomorrow night.” She gave his first text a heart emoji and responded “Thank you so much. For everything.”
The ding of the elevator bell and the clunking of the door sounded so much quieter than it had a minute ago. If nothing else, at least now they were truly, properly home again — their own couch for if Rumi needed to cuddle again, their own kitchen for if she needed last-minute comfort food, their own bedrooms for if she just needed to crash now.
Or not. Maybe Rumi would want to go somewhere else once she got her bearings again. Zoey couldn’t imagine Rumi would be up for going to the bathhouse until she’d had a night’s sleep — good or otherwise — but if she wanted to go out right now, Zoey wasn’t going to bully her into staying cooped up all night. Zoey had already broken her “we’ll do whatever you want” promise enough for one lifetime. “Do you need anything?” she asked Rumi.
Rumi drifted to the couch. “I dunno,” she mumbled as Mira took a seat just around the corner from her.
“That’s OK. You don’t need to.” Zoey sat down next to Rumi, putting an arm over her patterned shoulders. If Rumi couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do, then they didn’t need to do anything. They could just stay in all night, then go to the bathhouse in the morning if Rumi still wanted to go then.
Or not. Maybe Rumi would want to spend a day on the town, or get back to rehearsing for their next performance of — “Oh, crap.” They couldn’t rehearse tomorrow for their next performance of “Golden” because there was still a completely different problem that everybody’d completely forgotten about once the “Rumi's hiding demon-patterns” problem exploded in everybody’s faces.
Exploded so badly, Zoey reminded herself, that Rumi still needed time to recover from the second problem before she could think about jumping back into the first one.
Zoey hadn’t said this out loud, had she?
“What’s wrong?” Rumi asked.
So Zoey had said that out loud after all. “It’s not important. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is.”
“NO,” Rumi snapped, sending Zoey recoiling back. “I have one thing on my plate, and I won’t get any sleep tonight if I’m playing that one thing on repeat, endlessly in my head all night. PLEASE, give me something else to think about for 5 minutes.”
Zoey had to admit that sounded fair. “I was just realizing that we kind of forgot about the whole ‘losing your voice’ thing once whole ‘you’re half demon’ thing came up.”
Rumi’s fingers snapped up to her throat. “Oh. Right. That.” She took a breath. “I mean, by the time we got to, well, THAT part, I was already pretty confident that you were right the first time — I was probably just overworking my muscles.”
That would be fucking hilarious. If Zoey’s first guess had been right all along, then that meant the entire fiasco she’d kicked off by blurting “you’re a demon” — the trauma Rumi had suffered by being exposed, the trauma Mira had suffered by feeling the urge to kill her, the trauma Rumi had suffered by watching Zoey and Mira ganging up on Celine, by hearing her forced to admit that all the love and happiness in Rumi’s entire life had been sacrificed for a lazy, thoughtless lie — had been a complete waste of time from the beginning.
“I was already pretty sure that having soup and tea was helping,” Rumi continued, “and I’d already decided that if I’m still having trouble in the morning, then we’d make an appointment with the doctor you found. That should still work, right? We have two weeks until the Idol Awards — are you confident your doctor can fix my voice in time for us to turn the Honmoon golden then?”
Almost definitely. Healer Han’s website was one of the best laid-out, easiest to navigate that Zoey had ever seen, and the testimonials all agreed that Han’s special tonics could cure anything.
Mira bit her lip. “Well, sure, but do we even want to turn it golden anymore?”
Zoey just barely stopped herself from throwing her hands up.
“Um, YES?” Rumi yelped. “OBVIOUSLY we want to make the Honmoon strong enough that demons from the underworld can never murder innocent people again!”
This seemed obvious to Zoey too. Celine was the worst possible person for raising Rumi for the mission, and she was the worst possible person for training the three of them for the mission, but that still didn’t mean that the mission itself was wrong.
“And what happens to you?”
Oh.
Shit.
Scratch that — Mira was right. This could actually be a lot worse than they’d thought.
Rumi shrugged. “I lose my demon powers, and I become a normal human,” she said, clearly missing the newest problem Mira had just recognized. “Like both of you. Yes, it’s going to suck that I wasted decades that I could’ve embraced what I am and what I can do, and it’s going to suck that I only have two weeks to enjoy it before it’s gone forever. But if the choice is ‘Golden Honmoon — I live as a human, and everybody else on Earth lives’ versus ‘no Golden Honmoon — I live as a half-demon, and everybody else on earth dies’?”
If only that were what Zoey — and Mira, if Zoey had guessed Mira’s concern correctly — were worried about now.
“Then guess what? Me living the rest of my life as a human doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world.” Rumi’s eyes narrowed. “Actually, now that I think about,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “maybe you know something I don’t. You’re both clearly the experts on being human, right?”
Zoey tried to remind herself that Rumi didn’t actually hate her. Tried to remind herself that Rumi was only lashing out because 24 years of invisible, silent trauma had just exploded in her face — and that it might be about to get even worse once Zoey and Mira had a chance to explain their new concern. Tried to remind herself that after all of this was over, Rumi would still want to be her friend.
And, to be fair, it wasn’t like Rumi’s math itself was wrong — just the numbers she was plugging in.
“Are you saying, in your professional expert opinions as lifelong humans,” Rumi asked in an insultingly fake tone of deference that Zoey hadn’t heard her use since the last time Mira tried to teach them how to cook something, “that being human is something so horrible, something that I should be so afraid of, that I should be sacrificing everybody else’s lives just to protect myself from it?”
“I think she’s saying —” Zoey forced herself to breathe. “— that we don’t actually know if the Golden Honmoon will turn you human just because Celine told you it would. What if it banishes you to the underworld, or just straight-up kills you?”
Rumi’s hands dropped to her side. Her jaw slacked. Her gaze fell to the floor. “Oh.”
Zoey pulled herself closer to Rumi to embrace her. Had she and Mira once again rushed too hard and too quickly into something that Rumi wasn’t ready for? Should Zoey have tried to backpedal when Mira brought this up? When she’d first brought up “this is all Celine’s fault” and when Zoey had first gotten her to back off, it hadn’t lasted long before she’d forced the issue again, but could Zoey have gotten her to back off better this time?
Still, too late for that now. All Zoey could do now was hold her friend and try to give her at least a little bit of comfort.
Rumi took a breath. Sat up straight. Clasped her hands together. “Oh, God. OK, wow, that is — yeah. That would suck. That would really, really, really suck.”
Zoey nodded as she lay her head on Rumi’s patterned shoulder.
“But, still, that doesn’t really change the mission, right?”
Zoey’s heart caught in her throat. How could Rumi say that after everything that had happened that night?
“We still have to —”
“No,” Mira snapped before Zoey could say it first.
“Excuse me?”
“I said ‘no.’ If we don’t know that you’ll survive the Golden Honmoon, we’re not doing it.”
Rumi’s muscles practically tensed into concrete under Zoey’s arms. Zoey let go of her and scooted a little off to the side.
“And does that mean,” Rumi asked through clenched teeth, “that you’re not going to let me fight demons either just because there’s an impossibly tiny chance that one of them might be able to kill me? That all the innocent people around us should be left to fend for themselves just because you personally think I’m so much better than any of them? What if I tell both of you not to fight either?”
“Hey,” Zoey said, tentatively putting her hand back on Rumi’s shoulder, “remember what I said about how that risk is different from the risk Celine put you in?”
Rumi took a breath. “You said that you and Mira need to risk your lives fighting demons because innocent people will get killed if you don’t, and you said that I do everything in my power to help you manage the risk.”
“Whereas there was no reason for Celine to tell us ‘kill everything with patterns’ in the first place, but even if there had somehow been a reason why she had to create the danger, she still shouldn’t have made you do all the work of handling it yourself.”
Rumi closed her eyes, clasping her hands together. “Are you,” she asked, her voice far more gentle now, “thinking that there’s a way we can still do our duty to the Honmoon even if we don’t turn it golden? Are you thinking that even if turning it golden is the only way, we can also do something else to stop it from hurting me?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe both. Or, third possibility, maybe it’ll turn out that we’re completely overreacting and that the Golden Honmoon was never going to hurt you in the first place.” Zoey looked over at Mira, glaring at her while Rumi wasn’t looking — this was the fourth horrific thing Rumi had been traumatized by in the last hour, and Zoey wasn’t going to let Mira double down on it again.
Mira bit her lip, her eyes almost-imperceptibly widening in barely-controlled panic as she averted her gaze.
Good. “But we’re not going to be performing for any massive audiences until the Idol Awards anyway,” Zoey said as Rumi turned to meet her gaze again. “Until then, we couldn’t hurt you by turning the Honmoon golden even if we wanted to. That gives us two weeks to figure out if you’re even in danger in the first place, and if you are, can we do something else instead so you don’t have to put yourself in danger, and if you have to put yourself in danger after all, can we at least make it less dangerous for you.”
Before Zoey could ask “Is that OK,” Rumi threw her arms around her and held on as though for dear life. Zoey patted Rumi’s back as Rumi buried her sobbing face in Zoey’s shoulder. Mira scooted across the couch to embrace Rumi herself.
Rumi yawned like a tiger into Zoey’s ear. Zoey couldn’t help but giggle as she and her friends let go of each other. “Do you think you’ll be getting any sleep tonight?” she asked Rumi.
“I dunno. I mean, I should try, right?”
Zoey tried to fake-yawn to trick Rumi into real-yawning again, just to remind her how much she needed to get some form of rest. Her cunning ruse failed when her mouth started actually yawning.
If nothing else, it got Rumi yawning again. “Shut up.”
Mira, visibly trying to stop herself from yawning, put her hand on Rumi’s patterned shoulder. “We love you too.”
Rumi stood up, and she started walking to her room.
Just in time for Zoey to realize something else important that they needed to talk about.
Did they need to talk about it right now? Should Zoey call Rumi back to talk more before trying to go to bed? Or should Zoey just take the win and let Rumi do the thing she’d been pressuring Rumi to do already?
Wait, no. Both of those were wrong. Zoey should ask Rumi what she wanted. “Actually, before you go to bed, I just thought of something else that might help you feel a little better. Do you wanna give it a try?”
Rumi stopped. She held still for five agonizing seconds before looking back over her shoulder. “Sure. Why not?”
“Well,” Zoey said, “‘strengthen the Honmoon, killing you’ and ‘do nothing for the Honmoon, letting demons kill everyone else’ aren’t actually the only options, right? Can’t we just keep working to repair and maintain the Honmoon as it is without trying to push it further?”
A smile crept across Rumi’s tear-stained face for the first time since ice-cream-time had been ruined. “Yes. Yes, we can.” She glanced over at Mira. “Are you OK with that?”
Mira bit her lip. “Yeah, I guess I can work with that. The Honmoon’s never hurt you before tonight, right?”
“Never.”
“Then we just need to make sure our next performance isn’t AS powerful as we’d originally been hoping for.”
“And honestly,” Zoey added, “we might not even need to worry about that either. Like, our last performance came closer than ever to sealing it completely, but we don’t actually know how close is close enough. For all we know, we could fix Rumi’s voice enough for us to make the next Idol Awards the strongest performance of our lives, and we’d still only manage to turn the Honmoon golden part-way.”
Rumi chuckled to herself as she wiped her tears. Zoey could only imagine what it was like for her to have spent the last 20 years being told “you need to make the Honmoon as powerful as possible as fast as possible so that it can cure you” only to find herself grateful for the promise of not being able to do it.
“That is better, yes,” Mira said with a nod. “But not good enough. If it doesn’t look like the Honmoon’s turning golden again, sure, we can try to push it harder. But the second it looks like it’s starting to turn golden again — even if it’s an even fainter trace than what we saw last time — we’re pulling the plug. I don’t care how much our fans want us to finish whatever song we’re in the middle of.”
“No, wait!” Rumi’s eyes popped in excitement. “That might not be necessary. You just said so yourself — we got a little bit of the Honmoon golden last time, and even if it does turn out that this is how I got hurt, it still wasn’t anything worse than a sore throat. If turning the Honmoon completely golden would banish or kill me, then turning it partially golden again should hurt me again long before it gets that.”
Zoey just barely stopped herself from squealing in joy. Rumi was exactly right — even if the Golden Honmoon was dangerous after all, there was no chance it could possibly surprise them, and they could spend the next two weeks planning to go into their next performance full pedal-to-the-metal, completely safe in the knowledge that they’d see any problem coming a kilometer away.
Oh, no. It finally happened. Zoey had lived in Korea too long. She needed to eat an apple pie and a dozen hot dogs before it was too late.
She forced herself to focus.
Clearly, Rumi’s point was as good as Zoey had thought it was — even Mira had started smiling again. “That’s good,” Mira said, wiping her tears. “And you promise to stop if the Honmoon starts to hurt you, right? You’re not going to try to push through it?”
“HOLY MOTHER-FORKING SHIRT-BALLS!” Zoey’s heart practically jumped out of her chest. “That doesn’t matter! If Rumi’s voice giving out is because the Honmoon hurt her, then she couldn’t push it far enough to kill her even if she wanted to!”
Rumi gasped, covering her mouth just as she started smiling even brighter.
Had she not even realized the best part of her own plan? Had she just been thinking “if sealing the Honmoon gets dangerous, then I can choose to stop” and not gotten to “if sealing the Honmoon gets dangerous, then the Honmoon itself would force me to stop”?
Mira started — crying? Laughing? Both?
Rumi, starting to sniffle again herself, looked at Zoey with the warmest, purest joy that Zoey had seen on her face since — no, not “since.” Ever. Zoey had never once, not in the last 8 years, seen Rumi smile as warm and joyful a smile as she was right now.
“Thank you,” Rumi told Zoey through the fresh tears filling her eyes again. She walked back to the couch, and she knelt down to embrace Mira. “Thank you so much. For everything.”
Mira threw her arms around Rumi, and Zoey lost all track of time as she watched them crying into each other’s shoulders.
Rumi finally stood up, looking Mira in the eye and smiling at her before turning her gaze to Zoey. “See you both in the morning?”
Zoey hopped off the couch so she could hug Rumi too. “Yes.”
Rumi squeezed Zoey one last time before pulling away and shuffling off to her bedroom.
She’d be OK to get a good night’s sleep now, right? Zoey was growing more and more certain that she’d made the confrontation with Celine far more traumatic for Rumi than it had actually needed to be, but that wouldn’t be at the forefront of Rumi’s mind all night, right? They’d accidentally stumbled into a completely new problem that could potentially have become a thousand times worse than even the confrontation with Celine had been, and yet as far as Zoey could tell, they’d completely solved that problem in like 5 minutes. That’s what Rumi would be focusing on when she lay down to go to bed? She wouldn’t go straight from —
No, wait. Of course she was going to. Rumi had always been the kind of perfectionist to go straight from “we just solved the biggest problem” to “the second biggest problem is now the biggest problem,” and now that they’d just decided that the Honmoon was almost definitely not going to be a danger, she was going to go straight back to obsessing over the Celine confrontation that she’d just done such an incredible job of distracting herself from.
But Zoey wasn’t about to let that happen. Not again. Not tonight. “Mira?”
Mira looked up at her from the couch.
“Get your camping mattress. This is a sleepover emergency.”
Mira nodded with a smile as she stood up, making her way to her room.
Zoey raced over to her own room, and she practically dove into the closet with her own camping mattress. She raced over to her bed to grab the sleeping bag that was laid out over it — why sleep under messy blankets that she’d just need to fold in the morning when she could sleep in a comfy, cozy turtle shell instead? — and she raced out through the living room with her mattress rolled up under one arm and her sleeping bag balled up under her other.
As Mira came up behind her, Zoey set her mattress down to knock on Rumi’s busted-up door. They really needed to get that fixed up tomorrow. What would be a good story to tell Bobby for what happened? They couldn’t tell him the whole truth about everything just to explain the need for a housing repair job, could they?
She forced herself to focus.
Rumi opened the door, gasping when she saw Mira and Zoey with their sleep-over gear.
“Zoey had a nightmare,” Mira said. “She needs us to take care of her.”
Zoey elbowed Mira in the belly, but then decided to roll with it, and she gave Rumi the most adorably pathetic puppy-dog eyes she could manage.
Rumi started sniffling again as she wrapped her arms around them. “What did I ever do to deserve friends like you?”
Zoey leaned way up to Rumi’s ear. “Because you’re Rumi.”
Rumi stepped aside to let them in, and they set up their sleeping bags on either side of her bed. She’d gone through so much alone for so long, but Zoey wasn’t going to let her go through anything alone again. Not tonight, not in the morning, not ever.