Chapter Text
Mira and Zoey - the real Mira and Zoey - stared at her, uncertainty and betrayal etched into their faces. No matter what she said, Rumi couldn’t stop them from taking a few steps away from her. None of the frantic words falling from her mouth were enough to keep them from looking at her like she was a rabid animal.
“No, don’t leave. Don’t leave… I can still FIX IT!”
The Honmoon shuddered violently as her distorted voice tore from her throat. Rumi could only wince as she watched those angry ripples of deep magenta disappear into the hazy darkness under the stage. Her patterns glowed a similar colour, momentarily pulsing brighter and burning hotter as her demonic power surged.
Mira and Zoey also watched her impact on the Honmoon, on the barrier all three of them had worked so hard to protect. Now, just like Rumi, it was coming apart at the seems. But the difference was that they had been taught - brutally, in some instances - to protect one of those things at all costs. To destroy anything that posed a threat to its existence, lest all of humanity be put at risk.
The Honmoon needed protecting. The threat Rumi posed needed neutralizing.
Mira moved first, calling her gok-do into existence with little fanfare. She held it up, blade pointed right at Rumi’s chest, though she lacked her usual confidence, her resoluteness, her stoic determination to see the demon before her dead. Now there was mournful realization in her expression, betrayal and heartbreak mixed with the knowledge that she had to do her duty. No matter how painful, no matter how much she didn’t want to.
Rumi felt something inside her die. She felt her guilt, her shame, her fear open up within her chest like a gaping chasm. She gave her head a quick shake, hoping beyond hope that this was all just some terrible nightmare. But that fleeting glimmer of hope swiftly died, too. Tears burned hot in her eyes. She could feel her patterns glowing brighter again, flaring as if someone was retracing them with a red-hot knife. “No,” she uttered, “Mira…”
Her grip tightened on her biceps, manicured nails digging into her skin. Her eyes found Zoey’s. Her younger bandmate was on the verge of tears herself, indecision and hesitation clear on her face. “Zoey, please,” Rumi whimpered, begging with every ounce of her soul that was left in her miserable heart.
But Zoey closed her eyes. A decision. A step away. And something else died in Rumi’s chest as Zoey’s shin-kal appeared in her hands.
The tears burned as much as her patterns did. Rumi felt them spill from her eyes, the liquid like acid on her cheeks. Something constricted tightly around her heart and lungs, like weedy vines choking out the flowers in a garden. Breathing became almost impossible, and her heart pounded like a heavy bass right in her ear. She wanted to run, to retreat, to escape. It was too claustrophobic under the stage. She needed to get out. Instinct was telling her to flee, and suddenly she understood cornered, injured animals.
But her heart - her miserable, sentimental heart that had been torn out and stomped on until it resembled roadkill on a busy highway - had her doing something else, urging her body with the last shreds of itself as it withered and rotted. Something desperate. Something hopeless. Something stupid.
“Please, I need you to listen—” She took a single shaky step toward them, more of a stagger as her legs felt like lead.
“Not another step.” Mira’s voice echoed through the quiet void under the stage. It was strong, it was commanding. She had managed to shove her fears down, and put a wall up to prevent them from stopping her. This was the only warning she was giving.
But Rumi needed her friends more than she needed air. She needed them to listen. She needed them to see her, all of her. She needed them.
She lurched forward again, just one more foot before the other.
Her years of training and ingrained muscle memory were the only things that prevented her from being run through with the glowing gok-do, although she suspected Mira might have pulled her punch a little. “I warned you, Rumi! Stay back!” Mira barked, gritting her teeth in anger as she held her position between Rumi and Zoey, obviously shielding their youngest teammate.
“Mira,” Rumi tried again. Her heart thundered away, beating so hard she thought it was going to explode. She felt herself growing lightheaded. “Please.”
“No! Why should we?” Mira demanded, “Either you lied, through your teeth, the whole fucking time we knew you. Or you’re a demon - a demon who will do or say anything to lower our guard so you can break us. Either way, you’ve earned none of our trust.”
“I’m not… I’m not trying to hurt you!” Rumi cried.
“Then why did you lie?” Mira shouted back, “I asked you point blank if there was anything you were hiding and you said to my face that you weren’t!”
“I didn’t want to lie!” She took another step, not thinking.
“Stay. Back!”
She was just that much closer, and Mira was that much angrier. And this time the blade grazed her. Merely a scratch, it wouldn’t even leave a scar on her bicep. But Rumi was a spring-loaded trap, one hair trigger away from every coiled muscle and animal instinct exploding out behind her crumbling walls.
She skidded away, one hand clamped over the wound. Her patterns glowed with sharp intensity, and she could almost hear her skin sizzling. “I don’t want to FIGHT YOU!” She didn’t mean for her voice to change again, but the Honmoon rippled and shook. This time the red-pink lines stayed, little particles floating off of them like ash from a fire.
Rumi had blinked as she spoke, closing her eyes to brace against the intensity of her yell. But when she opened her them, she knew immediately that something was wrong. She could see, far clearer than she had just moments ago, just from the left side of her vision. It was like she was was outside in broad daylight on that half of her sight, while the other was that same hazy darkness. Zoey gasped, her grip tightening around her knives as her wide eyes stared at Rumi in horror. Mira only seemed more resolved, her feet subtly shifting into position.
What Rumi couldn’t see herself, but her friends had, was that following that outburst, her left eye had started glowing. The iris had changed to a vibrant, demonic yellow, and shone in the dark like a candle flame. It wasn’t quite the orb of hellfire most demons possessed, her pupil hadn’t even narrowed, but it still stood in stark contrast against the shadows.
And to Mira, it confirmed her greatest fear. She was done trying to ignore this demon’s pleas. Rumi-shaped or no, a demon was a demon and the Honmoon was on the verge of ripping open.
And so she pushed forward. Her gok-do whistled through the air, a melancholic sound as if the Honmoon itself mourned what must be done. Rumi managed to dodge the first swing, then the second. By the third swing she realized just taking fumbling steps backward wasn’t going to work much longer. She could fight back, counter with her saingeom. She had sparred with Mira plenty of times before, but always with (relatively) harmless wooden weapons.
But her heart just wouldn’t reach out to the Honmoon to summon her sword. The risk was too great that she could hurt one of them with it.
Mira used a different approach, quickly spinning her weapon to lunge forward with the blunt end. It nailed Rumi square in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her with the sharp strike and sending her flying. She crashed to the floor, rolling once, before throwing her right hand out to try and slow her momentum on the ground.
Claws ripped from her fingers, digging into the concrete and dragging through it with a piercing screech. Sparks flew from the contact as she slowed, managing to stay up on one knee. It took more effort than she expected to tear her hand out of the floor, and she spent longer than she should have staring at the blade-like appendages protruding from her trembling fingertips.
The whistle of a blade through the air alerted her again, but this time she was a little too slow and the gok-do bit into her shoulder. This time it had been deeper, enough to override her surging adrenaline to be the most painful thing currently happening to her (which was a surprisingly long list). And as she skidded to a stop after her poorly executed dodge, something primal and feral overwhelmed her and she hissed.
It was a sound that was distinctly animal. She slapped a hand over her mouth, coming back to her senses in an instant. She felt something sharp against her hand, and a trembling finger discovered fangs where her canines should be.
As she forced herself to focus, to try and find her threats— Her friends, her eyes met Zoey’s. And Rumi’s heart finally fully withered, because Zoey had found her resolve as well.
She almost wanted to stay and let the barrage of shin-kal rain down on her. But once more that feral instinct to just survive took over and she rolled. She heard one blade whiz past her ear, taking a few strands of flyaway purple hair with it. She didn’t get a chance to recover from that, because the gok-do was closing in from her periphery.
She didn’t fight back. Only dodged, ducking and weaving, rolling and skidding. Anything to avoid their blades that wouldn’t hurt them. She wished she could say it was solely because she couldn’t bear to cause them harm, but she also believed it to be her last hope in getting them to realize it was her: Rumi, their friend. A demon would fight back by now. A demon would only care about their own self preservation.
Every so often a blade would nick her. Never anything devastating, but enough to sting. Enough to make her feel like she deserved this somehow. A demon with no feelings doesn’t deserve to live, after all.
She felt herself slipping with each hit. The demon in her was growing agitated, angry she was still fighting it back when it was clearly trying to keep her alive. The gok-do sliced into her collar after barely missing her neck. It wasn’t deep but it stung. It forced her to pause, to clamp one hand down on it in reflex. Zoey took advantage of her slow down, using the speed the rapper was known for, and one of her shin-kal found its mark, striking her thigh.
That did it.
Something that could only be described as a roar ripped from her mouth as the pain caused her to drop to one knee. Mira took the opportunity, her blade moving like lightning toward Rumi’s neck. Mira thought she had her, and braced for the horrific sight that was about to follow.
A slitted, fiery yellow eye met hers, then Rumi disappeared. The gok-do sliced through a cloud of red dust instead.
Rumi reappeared with only a fraction of a second delay, but in a completely different position. Rather than being at the mercy of Mira’s gok-do, Rumi was suddenly behind Zoey. Before the younger hunter could react, Rumi had her by the collar and threw her forward. Zoey - stunned by the sudden shift in the fight - was tossed off her feet as if she weighed nothing to Rumi, and collided into Mira.
Mira had her breath stolen as her back hit concrete. Zoey also fought for air after landing on top, Mira’s arms positioned perfectly to nail her sternum. A low snarl and flash of yellow were the only warnings they got, but Mira managed to get her weapon up in front of both her and Zoey on the ground as the demon pounced.
Hands - one bloodied and nails chipped, the other blackened and clawed - clamped around the staff of her gok-do. All Mira could see was colour: bright, angry reddish-pink and deep, midnight purple; blazing golden yellow and deep, shadowy brown; blood red and ivory white. Rumi let out a growl that didn’t even sound like an animal Mira could name. Her fangs were bared and inching closer and closer to Zoey, who was pinned against Mira’s chest as the demon held them both down underneath her. Mira pushed with all her might - and from the sound of the panicked grunting, so was Zoey - but Rumi was so strong.
All Zoey could focus on were Rumi’s eyes. One was still hers, but it wasn’t. Her deep brown eye was glazed over by something feral. It was hard to tell in the dark, but her pupil was contracted to a pinprick, as small and intense as the demonic one. Her narrow pupil was like a cat’s, locked in on the hunt. It was ironic, really, that it was such a rich yellow. Golden. That eye had laser focus, completely unclouded by anything other than cold predator instinct.
Rumi’s lip was curled up, showing off those elongated fangs as they inched closer and closer to Zoey’s neck. She didn’t want to believe it to be true. This was Rumi - their Rumi. She would never hurt them! Never, never.
But her eyes weren’t Rumi’s. The growling wasn’t Rumi. It was her body, yes, but a demon had stolen it. That had to be it, because Zoey remembered who she was supposed to be. She remembered feeling like she could be herself with the leader of their group, she remembered feeling safe and cared for and seen by Rumi in a way no one else could make her feel. Rumi always had such a quiet compassion, a soft kind of confidence that Zoey could just absorb like a sponge. Rumi never thought she was too much. She never objected or rolled her eyes when Zoey would launch herself at her, catching her up in her hugs that were always a little too energetic. But she also was there with a plate of cookies when Zoey would stay up too long fighting writer’s block. She was there whenever Zoey couldn’t quite master a new fighting technique or dance move, and was always able to break it down into something the younger girl could understand.
Rumi wasn’t this. But as she pushed back, she saw all the gashes and tears in Rumi’s skin, cutting across the glowing patterns. Blood droplets fell onto her cheek from one particular slash that had come dangerously close to ending this battle. And that’s when Zoey remembered that demons don’t bleed. Once struck with one of their spirit weapons, their bodies start to dissolve. The more mortal the wound, the faster they disappear.
So…if she was bleeding… Then that meant that she wasn’t fully demonic.
“Rumi!” Zoey cried, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was desperate. This was the only thing she could think of, hoping her panicked voice would find her friend behind the monster. “Please stop!”
Mira assumed it would fall on deaf ears. A demon was a demon, and once they found a desire to kill, they would. There was no stopping them without a spirit weapon, there was no reasoning with them, there was no mercy granted from either side.
But suddenly the pressure against them let up. Suddenly Mira thrust her weapon forward because there was no resistance, the force of which throwing her off balance. Zoey had been equally caught off guard. But the second weight on Mira’s body had been tossed off as she pushed her spear upward. She faintly registered a dull thud and a pained grunt not far away.
As they untangled themselves, Mira and Zoey were met with a sight that finally - finally - snapped them out of their instinctive reactions. Rumi was near them, hands and knees on the ground. She was bloody and bruised, numerous scratches and wounds scattered amongst the glowing veins of demon marks on her skin. She was still a wretched hybrid of demon and human parts. The hit had broken one fang - the shaft of the spear must have got her - and blood trailed from her mouth and down her chin. It only made her look worse, as now she had one of each thing: one human eye and one demon; one human hand and one full of claws; one fang, the other broken and bleeding.
Her gaze was haunted, mortified. Her chest heaved as she stared unblinking at the ground. Her demon patterns glowed so brightly they looked like cracks in cooling lava: vicious, burning lines that pulsed with each ragged breath. Rumi’s trembling hands found their way upward, raking through her hair to hold her head hard. Neither Mira nor Zoey missed the streaks of blood that trickled past the right side of Rumi’s hairline.
Her eyes flicked upward and met theirs.
Fear. Nothing else: no anger, no defensiveness, no betrayal, nothing except the purest, deepest, most excruciating fear. Demons weren’t supposed to have feelings, and yet Rumi’s bicoloured eyes held so much fear even Mira and Zoey could feel it with her. The trouble was determining what the fear was of. Them? Herself? Gwi-Ma? The longer they stared at each other, the longer they held Rumi’s terrified gaze, the more a second emotion started to bloom in the expression of a creature who they’ve been told wasn’t supposed to feel anything.
Guilt.
Ah. They had their answer.
“Rumi,” Zoey breathed, getting to her knees and moving forward toward their leader, “Hey… It’s…it’s ok. You’re ok.” She had to reach out. There was something stronger than her hunter’s instinct urging her to take advantage of Rumi’s frozen state. Rumi’s eyes were locked on her but they weren’t seeing her. She looked so lost, so broken… Zoey didn’t want to be a hunter anymore, not in that moment. She just wanted to be a friend.
“S…st ay…” Rumi’s voice came out wrong. Trembling and shattered, layered human and monster creating a sound as intimidating as it was fragile. “S tay …back.”
Mira swallowed sharply, not exactly a fan of have her own words so pathetically thrown back at them. She didn’t know what was worse, Zoey reaching out to Rumi as if she were trying to coax a feral cat, or Rumi perfectly matching the description of “feral cat”. It wasn’t just the fear, it was the lack of trust, in both them and herself. She shook her head and screwed her eyes shut tight, tears spilling from them as she did.
Rumi’s thoughts were a jumbled mess, like a massive earthquake had just shaken loose everything from deep within her psyche and she was left to sift through the rubble. She had attacked them. She wanted to hurt them. And it wasn’t like her body moved on its own, and she could assign blame to something that took over her. For just a brief moment, wires had crossed and her entire being followed a new protocol: if she wanted to live, she had to fight.
Zoey’s voice had managed to get through, had been able to uncross the wires and shift her mentality back to where it had been before she had been struck down. Before survival instincts overwhelmed her.
But it had left her with something hollow, something bottomless and all consuming as her mind returned to her senses and then immediately ran in the other direction. Her friends, her girls - the two women she loved more than life itself - were pinned under her, absolute terror on their faces as if she were the monster in a horror movie. And maybe she was, because she suddenly became hyperaware of her claws, of bared fangs, of the snarl still leaving her throat.
She immediately stopped pushing, stopped trying to sink her teeth into her friends like they were gazelles to her lion. She didn’t even register the sharp impact of Mira’s spear colliding with her jaw. Everything had gone numb. Everything physical disappeared as she felt herself being swallowed alive by shame, by guilt, by fear.
Zoey was reaching out to her with kindness Rumi didn’t deserve. Mira was staring at her in shock, but the hatred toward demons had disappeared. Rumi realized the fight was over, but it shouldn’t be. They still had a task to complete, especially now that she had just proven why they should finish it.
But they weren’t going to do it.
It hit Mira in that moment. Rumi hadn’t been fighting back. Only for that one brief moment, but… It happened so suddenly and then ended just as fast. Something wasn’t adding up. She was a demon. All Mira had ever been taught about demons was that they were ruthless, bloodthirsty, soul-sucking monsters. If they had the chance they will kill you, so you had to be faster. And yet Rumi had stopped herself. She had pulled herself out of it upon hearing Zoey’s words like she was saving herself from drowning in tar. Not only that, but she had recognized what she had just done, and tried to keep them away from her.
Another look at all her halves, her single features that should be pairs. Oh. Oh.
Suddenly, Mira saw her. All of her.
She’s not human, but she’s not a demon, either. Not fully. Not in a manner that would make her like the rest. Not in a way that would let her fit in. Too human to be a demon, too demon to be a human. Left to live a life where she was neither, just as much as she was both.
God that must be such a lonely fucking existence.
Before Mira can even think of the right words to say - or any words for that matter - Rumi managed to claw her way out of her fear just enough to break from her thousand yard stare. Their eyes met, only for a moment: her mismatched eyes still so unsettling but there was a hint of purpose, now. A little flash of the leader Mira knew.
Just as the idea that maybe, just maybe they can sort something out without killing each other started to form, Rumi swallowed sharply. “I…I’ll fix it,” she uttered, sounding disturbingly resolute.
Then she disappeared into a cloud of red smoke, leaving Mira and Zoey alone.
Alone to speculate with their own crippling fear just what Rumi meant by that.