Chapter Text
Traumas aquired in the formative years are never forgotten... Some people call that nostalgia.
- Dubravka Ugrešić
Rumi could feel her patterns, once.
She felt them as a dull ache under her skin. If she pressed on them, they were tender, like a bruise.
She remembers when she felt them the first time – the day Celine told her about her father, that he was a demon, that the patterns marked her skin because of him.
Only six years old, she had stared at her arm in the mirror that night, and for the first time, she saw the small violet swirl on her shoulder in a different way. For the first time, she saw not a gentle flower, nor a lavender kiss from her mother’s spirit, but a mark of shame. And that night, as she lay in her bed, the mark grew.
And when it grew, it stung.
It ripped at her skin, soft swirls angling to sharp spikes, hot like branding iron. It came suddenly, and Rumi bolted upright, clutched at her arm, and screamed.
When the bedroom door slammed open and Celine rushed in, Rumi could barely breathe. Hot tears streamed down her face; her little body trembled violently.
“Rumi! Rumi, sweetheart, what’s the matter?” Celine perched on the edge of the bed, lifted the small girl onto her lap, held her close. Rumi pressed her tear-stained face desperately against Celine’s collarbone, finding comfort in her guardian’s warm skin and familiar chrysanthemum smell. Celine rubbed slow circles on her little girl’s back until her breaths slowed and the tears stopped. But even then, Rumi did not – could not – let go of her arm.
It was only when she stopped crying that Celine noticed. Her posture changed, then, and Rumi felt it, felt the way her guardian’s muscles tensed, the way her spine straightened. And an emotion Rumi was still too young to name (but would one day know as guilt) took root in her gut.
“Rumi,” Celine whispered. “Did… did something happen? To your arm?”
Rumi sucked in a shuddering breath. “Hurts,” she mumbled, tears spilling quietly from her eyes again.
Gently, delicately, fingers trembling almost imperceptibly, Celine coaxed Rumi’s hand away from her arm, rolled up her pyjama sleeve. And she saw. For the first time, the patterns had grown.
Rumi looked, too.
“Why… why is it bigger?” Rumi’s little voice wobbled.
“I… I don’t know.”
The little girl sniffed, wiped at her eyes. “It hurt, Celine.”
Celine swallowed, then, pulled the pyjama sleeve back down. When Rumi looked up, she saw something shift in her guardian’s eyes – anxiety stilling to a quiet resolution. And Celine held her close again.
“That’s good, Rumi,” she said. “It’s good that it hurt. Demons don’t feel pain.”
“They… they don’t?”
“No, Rumi. Their patterns don’t hurt them. If your patterns hurt, it means they’re not part of you. You’re not one of them. You’re human.”
Rumi didn’t know what to say to that. How could pain be good? She didn’t really understand. But if feeling pain meant being human… well, maybe she could learn to live with it.
---
And she did.
Things changed, after that day. Celine added pain-relief gummies to Rumi’s daily vitamins. The sting of her marks became a dull throb, and soon it faded to the background of Rumi’s life, a film score you barely notice while the action plays. That’s why she felt it most in stiller moments – when she was alone at night, or sitting by her mother’s grave, Celine braiding her hair. Sometimes, when it hurt, she would tell Celine, and Celine would gently massage the ache from her arms (always over the fabric of her sleeves). But even that stopped as Rumi grew, as the ache became so familiar, so constant, that she never thought to mention it anymore.
---
When Rumi met her girls, things changed again.
There was Zoey, who burst into her life like a firework – an explosion of colour and light, and Rumi could not look away from her brightness. Zoey brought laughter to the quiet hanok – even Celine smiled more now, Zoey’s joy too infectious to resist. To Zoey, everything was new and exciting. Things Rumi had never looked twice at, Zoey’s eyes cast in a new light. “I’ve never stayed in a hanok before!” Zoey confided with a smile. And as she marvelled at the sloping roofs with their ancient tiles, at the glossy wood and underfloor heating, the sliding doors and the plants in the courtyard, Rumi couldn’t help marvel along with her.
That first day, Zoey pressed her nose to the wall and sniffed deeply.
“Um… what are you doing?” Rumi asked, unsure if this was a quirk or if smelling walls was just a thing people did in California.
“Smelling,” Zoey told her, like it was obvious. “Don’t you love the smell of clean, polished wood?” She took in another deep breath. “Mmm… pine. I can’t wait till it rains.” And she flashed Rumi such a bright smile, the purple-haired girl couldn’t help but giggle.
Mira was different. She was the raincloud Zoey was waiting for, drifting into the compound like something prayed for to wash away the dirt and bring new life. With Mira came a darkness that warmed to hot pink in Zoey’s light. She was a fire that burned at first touch, but soon settled to tender warmth, and Rumi wasn’t sure how she’d survived the years of cold without her.
One day, a real rainstorm came, and the three girls sat in the large living room that faced the courtyard, where, unconventionally, a garden grew. Plants had grown there for generations, but Celine and Rumi had planted more: sturdy bamboo that swayed gently but never broke; persimmon trees that burst orange in the autumn; swan-like orchids, peonies in purple, and the chrysanthemum that Celine loved to harvest for home-made tea. The girls could see it all through the window that filled the whole wall. Rain streaked across the glass, and the garden was washed into watercolour.
“This is what I always wished for, growing up,” Zoey said. She sat curled up between Rumi and Mira, socked feet bundled beneath her.
Mira cocked an eyebrow. “What, a rainstorm?”
Zoey shook her head. “A big window.”
The two older girls looked at her, confused. “A big window?”
Zoey shrugged. “We didn’t have tons of money, growing up. Our apartment was pretty cramped and the windows were small. We lived in southern California, but there was never enough sunlight. All I could see from my bedroom was a concrete alley and the back windows of the apartment building the other side. It felt pretty… stifling, I guess. Especially when my parents were fighting.”
Rumi felt her heart cramp then, pained by the notion of Zoey hurting. Rumi felt Mira’s heart tighten, too, in sync with her own, twin pulses beating in time with Zoey’s, sharing her burden till it felt lighter.
The youngest carried on: “Back then, I used to dream about living in a big house, with big windows, where I could sit on a comfy couch and be inside, protected, but still feel the sun. Or watch the rain.” She sighed. “Like now. This.” And she reached her hands out, then, and folded one into Mira’s, one into Rumi’s. “This is what I always wanted.”
Mira squeezed Zoey’s hand. “I get it,” the elder girl said. “Feeling stifled in your own home. I mean, we had the big windows. I took those for granted. But… I had to be a certain way, you know? The perfect chaebol princess. And that was never me. But if I didn’t play that role…” Mira’s jaw locked; she swallowed back the hurt that was clamouring to come out, but she wouldn’t let it. She wouldn’t let her parents hurt her anymore – not even the memory of them. She refused to grant them that power. So it was only when she felt sure that the hurt was swallowed far enough down, too deep to bite, that she could say, “Things got ugly, then. It was safer to pretend.”
Safer to pretend.
Mira’s words rolled like warm waves in Rumi’s soul. Rumi had never considered it before – that Mira and Zoey might have pretended, too. Might understand what it meant, to confine yourself to a role that protected you, even if it meant living a lie. And for the first time, she considered it:
Maybe I could tell them.
Maybe they would understand.
“When we have our own place, I’ll make sure it has big windows,” Rumi said. “But no one there to see through them but us. So you don’t have to pretend. So you’ll never feel stifled again. So we can all be happy.”
And Zoey collided into Rumi’s chest, a bundle of warmth, and Mira leaned into them both, cradling them in her long limbs, and Rumi decided: they would understand. She would tell them. She wouldn’t hide from them anymore. They were her girls – two pieces of her soul. How could she hide from her own soul?
She would tell them. And she’d never felt calmer, never felt warmer, never felt more at peace.
And in that peace, there was no pain.
And that realisation struck her like the lightning that flashed in the storm.
Demons don’t feel pain.
Thunder clouds crashed above the hanok, drummed against her skull. No. She wasn’t one of them – she couldn’t be. If thinking she could tell them about her patterns made the pain stop… well, then it must be Gwi-Ma’s voice in her head, coaxing her to his side, freeing her of her pain in exchange for her soul. If she told them the truth, it would be made real; she would be embracing her demon half, letting it win.
She must never let it win.
The pain clawed its way back, then. It stung like it hadn’t in years, and when she looked in the mirror that night, the purple marks had grown, crept further down her arm, tendrils of poison ivy creeping down the branch of a tree.
Rumi was grateful for the pain. It meant Gwi-Ma hadn’t won.
It meant she was still human.
---
On bad days, Rumi was not just grateful for the pain. On bad days, she craved more of it.
Days when training was harder than usual, when she struggled to live up to Celine’s expectations. Days when Celine’s ever-present grief (for Miyeong, whose memory hung over the hanok like constant mist) grew too strong to bite down, and she would shut herself away, and Rumi would near choke in the silence. Days when Rumi had to distance herself from her own girls: to refuse a bathhouse trip, a swim in the nearby lake, a slumber party in the same room (she couldn’t risk falling asleep in front of them; she had to be vigilant, always).
She hated distancing herself from the girls she loved. Hated it more than she hated Gwi-Ma. Yet she always did it, when she knew it was the right thing (even if it felt so wrong). On those days, she understood Celine a little better.
When she was alone, listening to Mira and Zoey giggling in the next room, or hearing them leave to go to the lake or the bathhouse, she would press down on her patterns, hard, making each one feel tender and sore. One by one, she would move her fingers down each arm and push them onto each accursed mark until she couldn’t bear it anymore. And with each pulse of pain, she was reminded:
I’m still human.
I’m still human.
I’m still human.
Her arms would throb for hours, after. The throbbing settled her. She could breathe easier.
---
Rumi needed her pain.
She needed it to breathe.
The absence of pain felt like the absence of her soul, as though it belonged to Gwi-Ma already.
Huntr/x debuted to resounding, astronomical success. Performing with her bandmates was nothing short of euphoric. On stage, under bright lights, the roar of thousands thrumming in her veins and the souls of her girls in joyous harmony with her own, Rumi would lose all sense of her own body – there was only movement, sound, colour, light. The Honmoon would mould the three hunters into a single being, a being of music and magic. And when the lights faded, and the crowds slipped into the night, it would take time for Rumi’s body to come back to herself. She would allow herself to live in the euphoria – the painlessness – for a while: that hour or so of adrenaline that followed the girls through the rush backstage, out of their costumes, on the drive back to their hotel or their penthouse. Once the adrenaline had worn off, though, Rumi would feel desperately, terrifyingly untethered.
Once that happened, she would tumble into the bathroom, and, safe behind a locked door, stand under the hottest shower she could bear, and press, press, press. Arm by arm, she would squeeze each line of her patterns till her muscles screamed in pulsing pain, till she felt sure that pain would last her through the night.
It was only with that pain to hold her that she felt able to relax: to cuddle with her girls in a pile on the couch, to stuff her face with gimbap and ramyeon and keep it down, to gasp at Mira’s hot takes or cry laughing at Zoey’s antics.
Only with that pain could she be human.
Only with that pain could she be theirs.
---
After Namsan Tower, everything was different.
When iridescent light starred over the purple in her patterns, Rumi’s pain fizzled away.
The ache in her arms was gone. And this time, it would never come back.
The brightness of that day shone on the girls for weeks. Rumi basked in its light and felt free. The pain was gone, but so was her need for it. They cuddled up together on their couch, gazing at Seoul through windows bigger than they ever could have wished for, and in that endless light, they held each other in promises – to never lie, never hide, never carry a burden alone.
So Rumi told them the truth – all of it. Why she had patterns. The way they’d always hurt. How she used to make them hurt more. Zoey and Mira’s eyes widened, then, and they both fell into her, cocooned her between them and kissed her patterned skin all over and made her promise, promise, promise that she would tell them if she ever wanted to feel that hurt again.
And Rumi promised.
Promised she would tell them.
And it’s not that she lied to them, then.
It’s just that in that moment – when she was bound up in so much love – she really, truly believed that she would.