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The rain had started sometime around noon and showed no signs of having anywhere else to be.
It came down in sheets against the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city below reduced to soft blurred lights and grey, and the penthouse had gone warm and dim in the way it only did on days like this, when the outside world turned itself off and the inside world became the whole world.
Mira had lasted until two-thirty.
She'd been on the couch since morning, book in hand, and Zoey had watched her read the same page three times before her eyes started losing the fight. By two she was horizontal. By two-fifteen the book was on her chest. By two-thirty it had slid off entirely and Zoey had caught it before it hit the floor and set it quietly on the coffee table.
Now Mira was fully asleep, her head on the armrest, one arm hanging off the edge of the couch, breathing slow and even.
Zoey sat cross-legged on the floor next to her with her sketchbook and a set of fine-tip markers she'd bought three weeks ago and had barely touched. Rumi was beside her, her shoulder against Zoey's, legs stretched out, her own mug of tea warm between her hands. The light blue patterns on her forearms caught the grey afternoon light in the way they did when she was relaxed, a little brighter, a little more present. She wasn't covering them. Hadn't covered them in months now and Zoey still noticed every time, still felt something quiet and significant about the fact of it.
Outside the rain kept coming.
"She's so out," Rumi said softly.
"She was fighting it for like an hour," Zoey giggled. "She kept blinking really hard like that was going to help."
Rumi looked at Mira's sleeping face.Her face was fully relaxed in a way it rarely was when she was awake, the jaw unclenched, the small line between her brows gone, just a person sleeping on a couch on a rainy afternoon. "She looks different when she sleeps."
"Younger," Zoey said.
"Yeah." Rumi sipped her tea. "Younger."
Zoey uncapped a light blue marker and looked at Mira's face. Then at the marker. Then back.
Rumi looked at her. "Don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're looking at her face with a marker in your hand."
"I'm thinking about my art."
"Zoey—"
"Very small," Zoey said. "She won't even feel it."
Rumi pressed her lips together. Looked at the marker, then looked at Mira's cheek.
"One thing," Rumi relented, a small smile forming on her lips.
Zoey was already leaning forward.
She drew a very small star on Mira's cheekbone. Careful and slow, barely any pressure so Mira didn't stir.
Zoey sat back and looked at it.
"Okay that's actually adorable," Rumi hummed.
"Right?" Zoey uncapped a yellow one. "One more."
"You said—"
"A moon. To go with the star."
Rumi watched her draw a small crescent just below the first star. Mira's breathing didn't change. She was completely gone.
"She's going to wake up and yell at us," Rumi huffed.
"That's fine," Zoey said, waving her hand as she reached for a pink marker. "She can yell. We'll have documentation."
"Documentation—"
"I'm taking a photo when we're done."
Rumi laughed quietly.She leaned her head against Zoey's shoulder and watched her work, a small flower on Mira's jaw, a tiny sun near her temple, a little swirling pattern along her collarbone where it peeked out from her shirt.
The rain hit the windows in waves. Somewhere far below a car horn sounded once and then the city went quiet again.
"Can I?" Rumi held her hand out for the green marker.
Zoey gave it to her.
Rumi drew a small vine along Mira's forearm where it rested on the couch cushion. Delicate and careful. She had steady hands when she was being precise about something. She added small leaves off the vine, then a tiny flower at the end, taking her time with it.
"You're good at that," Zoey said.
"I used to draw on myself when I was little." Rumi kept going, adding a second flower. "When it rained, I had to stay inside."
"Yeah?"
"Mm." She sat back and looked at the vine. "I had a lot of time inside."
Zoey looked at her. "Because of training?"
Rumi was quiet for a moment, her smile turning sad. "Because Celine didn't really have a concept of just… sitting. Rain meant we were inside, which meant we could use the time." She said it plainly, the way she said most things about that part of her life now. Not bitter exactly. Just the facts of it laid out flat. "Vocal exercises. Pattern concealment practice. Reviewing old performances and finding everything wrong with them."
"How old were you when the concealment stuff started?"
"Young." Rumi looked at her own forearm, at the patterns there. The color turned into a pale purple at the tips."Really young. I don't even have a memory of the first time Celine told me to cover them. It just always was. Like a rule that had existed before I could remember." She ran one finger along the edge of a pattern without quite touching it. "Patterns stay covered. That was just.. true. A fact about the world."
"Did you ever ask why?"
Rumi made a small sound. Not quite a laugh. "Once."
Zoey waited.
"I was maybe eight. I asked why they had to be covered and Celine just looked at me." Rumi's voice stayed even but something underneath it had gone careful. "Not angry. Just looked at me like the question didn't make sense. Like asking why you had to breathe. And then she said because ‘no one needs to see them’ and went back to what she was doing." She paused. "I didn't ask again."
The rain shifted against the windows, heavier for a moment, then settling.
"Do you remember the first time you didn't cover them?" Zoey said. "For real, I mean. With us."
Rumi smiled. Small and private. "You know when it was."
"Tell me anyway."
"The night you and Mira first actually saw them, really saw them after the whole…thing." Rumi looked at Mira's arm, at the small vine drawn on her skin. "She grabbed my wrist and she didn't flinch or pull back or make a face. She just looked at them like they were.. normal. Like they were fine." Her voice had gone softer. "And you said—"
"They're beautiful," Zoey said.
"Yeah." Rumi's throat moved, quickly darting her eyes away from Zoey’s hazel ones. "That."
Zoey reached over and pushed Rumi's sleeve up gently and looked at the patterns the way she always looked at them, the specific attention she gave things she found genuinely worth looking at. The colors slowly moved as Rumi breathed.
"Celine was wrong about them," Zoey said. "I know you know that. But I want to keep saying it until it stops needing to be said."
Rumi looked at her own arm. "Some days I believe it more than others."
"What about today?"
Rumi thought about it. The rain outside. The warm dim room. Mira asleep on the couch with small stars on her face. Zoey's shoulder against hers.
"Today I believe it," she said.
Zoey let her sleeve fall back down.
They sat quietly for a moment. The sketchbook was still open in Zoey's lap and she picked up a marker and turned it over in her hands without opening it.
"What about you," Rumi said. "Rainy days when you were little."
Zoey looked at the marker.
"Different," she said.
Rumi waited. She was good at waiting.
"My dad had a thing about rain." Zoey's voice was even but she was looking at the marker rather than at Rumi. "Like it got into him somehow. Whatever he was carrying going into a rainy day, the rain just made it heavier. And he was already—" She stopped. "He wasn't easy."
"Was he upset?"
"Almost always." Zoey set the marker down on the sketchbook. "But the thing that I still haven't figured out — and I've thought about this a lot — is whether he was angry at me specifically or just at everything and I was in the path of it." She shook her head slowly. "You'd think that would be something you could figure out about your own father. Whether his anger is about you or about the world. But I genuinely could not tell. I'd walk into a room and he'd be sitting there and I'd be doing the calculation the whole time I was walking in — is this mine or is this bigger than me?"
Rumi was very still beside her.
"That sounds exhausting," she said quietly.
"It was." Zoey looked at the window. At the rain coming down. "The worst part was that on the good days he was.. actually good. Like he could be really good. Funny. Present. He'd sit with me sometimes when it wasn't raining and it would be fine and normal and I'd think okay, this is okay, and then a bad day would come and it was like those good days had never happened." She exhaled. "So I never really knew which one was real. The good version or the other one."
"Maybe both were real," Rumi said.
"Maybe." Zoey picked the marker back up. "That might actually be worse."
Rumi didn't say it wasn't. Because it might be.
"Rainy days I used to stay in my room," Zoey said. "Or go to a friend's house if I could manage it. Because at someone else's house at least I knew what I was walking into." She looked down at her hands. "I still do this thing when it rains where my whole body just braces. Before I even think about it. Just automatic."
"Does it happen now? Today?"
Zoey looked around the room. At the rain on the windows. Mira is asleep. At the tea in Rumi's hands and the markers scattered on the floor and the vine on Mira's arm.
"A little," she said. "At the start, when it first came on. But it goes away faster now." She looked at Rumi. "It went away pretty fast today."
Rumi reached over and took the marker out of Zoey's hand and drew a very small star on the back of it. Just one, careful and clean.
Zoey looked at it.
"What's that for," she smiled.
"Nothing." Rumi put the cap back on. "Just wanted to."
Zoey looked at the star for a moment. Then she leaned her head back against the couch cushion, tilting sideways until it rested against Rumi's.
"I'm reclaiming rainy days," she said. "I've decided."
"Yeah?"
"This is a reclamation." She gestured at the room without lifting her head. At all of it. "I'm noting it officially."
Rumi smiled, her cheek moving against Zoey's hair. "Noted."
"You can note it too if you want," Zoey said. "Reclaim them with me."
Rumi looked at the patterns on her forearm. Visible. Uncovered. Blue in the grey afternoon light.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay."
They sat like that for a while. The rain kept going. The city below was soft and very far away. Mira made a small sound in her sleep and shifted, hand moving from where it was hanging to settle on the cushion. The flower on her jaw caught the light.
Zoey picked up her phone.
"I need the photo," she said.
"Zoey—"
"Second book," Zoey said. "Ongoing documentation for us." She took it before Rumi could object. The photo came out soft, Mira's face against the armrest, the small careful drawings on her skin, her expression completely unguarded and still.
Zoey looked at it for a moment.
Something moved in her chest. The specific feeling of a thing being worth remembering.
"She looks so—" she started.
"I know," Rumi said, looking at the phone too.
They both knew.
Mira shifted again. Deeper breath. The slow unmistakable return of consciousness. Her hand moved. Then her face. Then her eyes opened and found the ceiling and then the rain and then the two of them sitting on the floor next to the couch with expressions of complete innocence.
She looked at them for a long moment.
"What did you do," she said. Her voice was rough with sleep.
"Nothing," Zoey said.
"We sat here quietly," Rumi said. "Very respectfully."
Mira looked at her own arm.
At the vine.
She sat up slowly, examined it more closely, then looked at Rumi with an expression that was not quite anything but was somewhere between resigned and softeness.
"That's mine," Rumi said. "I did the vine."
Mira turned toward the window and looked at her faint reflection in the glass. At the stars and the moon and the small flower on her jaw. She was quiet for a moment, just looking.
"Zoey," she said.
"You look great," Zoey said.
"You drew on my face."
"Anything can be a canvas."
Mira looked at her reflection a moment longer.
"The vine looks good," she said to Rumi.
"Thank you," Rumi said, her smile widening .
"The stars are—" A pause. "good."
"Great," Zoey gigg;ed.
"They're fine," Mira confirmed, with the tone of someone closing a subject, and reached over and took Rumi's tea directly out of her hands and drank from it.
"That's mine—" Rumi started.
"You drew on my arm," Mira said. She kept the tea, and leaned back against the armrest and looked at the rain on the windows, at the city below, at the two of them on the floor beside her. Her expression settled into something that wasn't managed or performed.
Just a present.
"I’m starting to like rainy days" Rumi says softly.
"Me too" Zoey agreed.
Mira reached down and rested her hand on top of Zoey's head. Light. Just there.
Zoey looked at the star on the back of her hand. Then at Rumi's patterns catching the grey light. Then at Mira's face with its small careful drawings.
Outside the rain kept coming and the city stayed soft and far away and inside it was just the three of them, warm and quiet, going nowhere, which was exactly where they needed to be.
The bracing feeling in Zoey's chest was gone completely now.
She hadn't noticed it leave.
That was the best way for it to go.