Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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@gveret-fic
I bet you could get Lara to speedrun her quest by making her watch Revolutionary Girl Utena.
Lara partway through RGU: I understand. Girls can also be princes. I should smooch Mari.
Lara all the way though RGU and AoU: I understand. The ideas of The Prince and The Princess are restrictive and, ultimately, tools of the patriarchy. The answer is to free yourself of predefined roles. I should smooch Mari.
hello, it's me, gideon nav. I'm back from the dead babeyyy and I'm currently piloting this corpus and I'm mainly having these three moods on loop:
ow fuck ow stupid fucking evil killer bees coming at me from every angle jesus christ for fuck's sake harrow why have you not lifted a single weighttttt OUGH and that's a sword right through my me and by my me I mean your you
inconsolable despair from feelings of rejection and worthlessness
I AM LOOKING RESPECTFULLY I promise I am looking respectfully fuck I'm not even looking unless I literally physically have to I am being so nice to your body I care so much about doing this right I have sat buried alive in a straight jacket for nine months watching everybody torture you for fun I'm so invested in keeping you safe and unharmed forever I love y oh I mean uh. your mum. or something. fuck.
what if rumi started to hear gwi-ma instead of losing her voice
hey bro last night was really fun, i felt my inner flower bloom in your presence. sadly the only butterfly species with a long enough proboscis went extinct long ago. but i saw you ate that fruit cup without cutlery so maybe not all hope is lost
After that first night in the bio sibling au, the mutt is the first to wake.
It is still dark, or at least as dark as it ever gets in the city, lights spilling in through the giant windows.
Part 1
Rumi is a notoriously light sleeper. It comes with the job. And the whole—herself. She’s been waking up before her alarm for going on nine years now; she used to be able to sense a hand on her doorknob before it made contact.
The city feels different, somehow, than it did before… this.
The Honmoon flickers in the corner of her eye, and the mutt’s shoulders tighten. It’s not as bad as it was yesterday, lingering, tugging at her, racing after her when she ran.
But it is bad.
She bares her teeth at it, and ducks into her favorite hideaway.
The Honmoon is here, too, of course. It is not dissuaded by the carefully set up noisemakers that the mutt uses as a warning system—or, more likely, a notification, at the sight of toppled over buckets and newly cracked bottles. But it made her feel better.
She puts her hoodie down and carefully unwraps her stolen containers. They look like she could keep them, use them for other things.
If she had anything to hold in them.
She is not sure she does, but she doesn’t want to get rid of them, either.
Cold, lonely, stolen breakfast does not taste as good as dinner did.
The mutt misses the Hunters already. Misses them terribly, aching deep inside. And that is why she had to leave, before that could realize what she was and make her and it would hurt even worse, but—
The mutt misses the Hunters.
She packs back up the food she has left, checks her shirt collar again for the orange sticker, and slips back out around her defenses.
Maybe, somewhere in the noise of the city, she will drown out the ache.
The mutt goes to the park. There’s more than one scattered in the city, of course, but she goes to the big park.
It is a good long way from where she had first started, and this means the mutt can consume herself with running.
Humans run for fun, sometimes, and often without purpose. The mutt has never understood this before.
Running is something she has always done to get away from a clear and present danger—her father would not like it when she ran, and he always made sure she did not like it when he caught her. So she did not run unless she was too stupid to think of these things, even when she was little.
(At the park, when she climbs up in the trees, she watches the children run after each other, and their parents laugh and smile. Sometimes they run, too, and when they catch the children everyone laughs.)
(Well. Not always. Sometimes the parents catch the children by the wrist and they are angry as they shake them and say no, and this is not so strange as everything else the mutt sees. But usually, at the park, families are happy.)
But, now, the only danger is in her thoughts, and she wants to run very much.
So maybe the humans make some sense after all.
The issue being, of course, that it does not work.
All she thinks of is how warm she was. How Rumi stared, as if she were something that mattered. How Zoey laughed, sweet and bright. How gentle Mira’s hands were over hers.
Live until you die, her dad used to say sometimes, with a look of desperation. The mutt knows this—she stays alive, even when it is hard, unpleasant work.
No one has ever helped her to do that before. Not without wanting something in return.
Her father always wanted to understand.
What happens if I don’t feed the mutt? How much taller has the mutt gotten over the last year? What happens if I keep the mutt in the dark? How hard can I press before the mutt’s skin breaks?
Rumi wanted to understand, too.
But…
The mutt runs faster, even if she knows it is fruitless.
By mid-morning, Rumi is all fidgets and distraction—a miserable state for dance practice. She’s stepped on poor Jimin’s feet more time than she can count, unable to find her own mark.
They’d canceled the first item on their schedules, which had been miserable, sitting and waiting and hoping without any distraction, so Rumi had insisted that Mira drag them all downstairs to the studio.
It’s just been a waste of their backup dancers’ time, though, and she knows it. Everyone knows it.
“Take five,” Mira says. “Or ten. Whatever.”
Her usual cool is frayed at the edges. Rumi sees Yeeun and Yunseo exchange a worried look.
She doesn’t know what to tell them. She should know what to tell them. She thinks about the kid. Are you a mutt too?
The way she’d flinched. The way she’d smiled, like she didn’t even realize she was doing it, surprised and fascinated by the smallest things. The way she’d looked like Rumi.
Is she okay? Has she come back? What if she has? What if they aren’t there and then they aren’t consistent and then the kid hates them and thinks that they’re liars and she never wants to talk to Rumi again and—
“I’ve got water, and I’ve got half-water,” Zoey says cheerfully, holding up Rumi’s water bottle in one hand and an open sports drink in the other.
(Celine always insisted they had to be watered down if they were actually exercising, with how much sugar was in them. Rumi can’t drink one without diluting it, even still. Tastes wrong.)
“Thanks,” she says, and takes her water.
“She’s fine,” Zoey says, nervously fiddling with the lid. “It makes sense that she left, but she’s gonna be fine. She’s been doing this for years.”
Rumi nods. “I know.”
“It doesn’t make sense to be scared, because she’s fine,” Zoey says.
Rumi shakes her head. “It doesn’t.”
“I’m still really, really worried,” Zoey says.
Rumi swallows. Removed the lid from her water bottles and actually swallows some of its contents, to combat her suddenly dry mouth. “…So am I.”
There's nothing to be worried about. There's nothing to be worried about. There is nothing to be worried about.
So someone has been to her shelter. That's okay. It happens. It happens a lot. It's not the end of the world. She can deal with this. Here we go.
The bottle she’d set up as alarm isn't broken, but it is gone. It might just mean that somebody wanted the 100 won deposit. She might still be able to come back here after a few days being careful. She'll just grab the food containers, and—
And of course they're gone.
Stupid. Obviously someone who'd carefully deconstruct her little system for 100 won will want the food too.
Her hoodie is gone, and her little pile of rags. Her stash of plastic bags are scattered and torn. Only the Honmoon is still there, untouched and undisturbed, curled like a cat in the empty ruin of her home.
I bet you like this, thinks the mutt. You don't really care what I want.
She walks away from her favorite hideaway, stripped and marked by an unknown hand. She sticks close to the walls. She feels unsettled. Which is dangerous.
How did one day and one night tip her so far off balance?
And now it's like that day is simply erased. Their delicious food. Mira had made it for her. Mira had made it for her and made her laugh after. Zoey had held her hand, and Rumi had held her all night.
Did they really? It seems so unlikely. Fanciful. You're a daydreamer, her father's echo agrees.
The mutt reaches a hand inside the collar of her shirt. She feels carefully along it, searching, searching, and—
Her heart freezes. Her dad is always right.
The orange sticker isn't there.
In a daze, the mutt curls against the back wall of her shelter, hand still fisted in her shirt collar.
It’s gone it’s gone it’s gone.
It shouldn’t matter. A sticker from a piece of fruit that got peeled off and restuck four separate times was bound to be barely hanging on—she was always going to lose it. She’d be stupid to think otherwise.
But she is. Stupid. Always has been.
This is the life of a thing like the mutt: cold and lonely and miserable. There is no kindness for useless things like her.
Like an echo of her misery, something bangs against the wall behind her head.
She jumps, inadvertently releasing the collar of her shirt. (Rumi’s shirt. Soft and clean and—)
Someone yells, words muffled and unintelligible through the wall. The mutt scowls to herself and clambers to her feet. How hadn’t she noticed someone getting so close? Was she really that self-absorbed?
She climbs the wall, quick and practiced as she shimmies up a pipe and then hops to a crate, scrambling from there to one of the high window ledges. It cracks under her foot as she pushes off, wobbling, and the mutt has a feeling she won’t be taking this route again.
The glass has long since been busted out—one of the reasons she doesn’t use this shelter much in winter—and she pokes her head out, bracing on the inside of the frame as she looks down into the alley below.
Distractingly, the Honmoon loops around her shoulders. She bats a hand at it, uncomfortable, taking in the scene:
The woman is bleeding as she bares her teeth. She looks like the mutt, ragged and thin. Her voice shakes as she says, “Just fuck off. I’m not—last warning. I’m not joking around.”
The men… the boys, closer to mutt’s age than the woman’s, laugh, nudging each other. They are sleek and clean and cruel.
“Come on,” the one says. “Show us what you got, huh?“
The other two laugh.
“Just hand it over,” says the short one.
The one with the hair snickers. “Hey, no, if she wants a fight, we can give her one, right?”
They laugh again. Always laughing. This is a game.
The woman cowers. She has a bag pinned to the wall behind her, the mutt realizes.
(Run, her dad hisses. You useless creature, you’d better run, because if I catch you—)
She braces against the empty window frame, and swings her legs out to leap into the alley below.
The mutt lands with grace and a great big thud.
All three figures turn to her.
Oh no. Oh no. What is she doing? What the fuck is she doing? This is not what she does. This is not what a smart stray does, a stray that doesn’t want to get kicked.
But—she really, really isn’t. Smart.
And this, this woman—she looks so much like her. Small and scared and hungry. But the mutt isn’t hungry, not today. Today, she is well-fed, and angry, and here.
The mutt gets her feet under her, and shifts into a crouch.
One of the boys takes a step toward her. He laughs. “Hey, what? Wanna join in the fun?”
“Fuck off,” the Mutt growls, and pounces.
He doesn’t know how to fight; the mutt can immediately tell. He doesn’t know about the switch you have to flip to stop worrying about getting hurt so that you have an actual chance to avoid it. He flinches, when she grabs him by the shirt and bites into his arm. He yelps and tries to shake her off, but she can just sink her teeth in deeper and hold on.
“Fuck!” He screams. He’s loud, loud. “Let go! Let go!”
The mutt doesn’t. She locks her jaws. He still doesn’t hit her. He doesn’t know how.
The other boy takes a step. “Please let him go,” he says. His voice shakes a little. “We’re gonna go.”
The mutt eyes the woman behind the writhing boy. She’s huddled, making herself small. She isn’t looking at them. She doesn’t want to invite violence by looking at it directly.
The mutt lets go.
The boy stumbles back, holding his wounded arm. His sleeve has a wet ring of red. His breath is heaving. “This bitch is crazy!” he gasps. “She’s got rabies or something!”
The other boy grabs him by the sleeve that isn’t bloody and tugs. “Dude, shut up. Come on.”
The bleeding boy looks at her with his lips peeled back, his eyes wide. He’s trembling. He looks scared. “I hope they put you down,” he tells the mutt, and stumbles away after his friend.
The mutt watches him go, and considers why that doesn’t sting. He’s scared. And she—isn’t.
You hope they put me down, she thinks with a strange satisfaction, because you can’t.
The mutt turns to the woman, still cowering against the wall. She’s trying to hurriedly stuff some containers back into her bag with shaking hands.
The containers look familiar.
“You took those,” the mutt realizes.
The woman flinches. She drops a container. It thuds against her bag, and makes glass clink.
“I—I don’t want a fight—I didn’t—“ She scrabbles at it, picking it up off the ground and offering it out to the mutt. She’s is trembling so hard it nearly falls again.
The mutt blinks, trying to grasp what is happening.
The woman skitters in front of her bag—dark, stained canvas, ratty from overuse—her posture fearful and protective. This is all she has. Even if she thinks she will fail, she has to try to hold on to it. “What, you want all of it? Are you fucking—“
“No,” the mutt says.
She understands: the woman is afraid of her. The mutt could bite her, too, could snarl and rip and take.
Or… she could not.
“I took them first,” she says. “I hope—I hope you eat.”
She thinks the Hunters would have wanted her to eat.
The woman stares at her. The mutt goes to smile, the way Zoey would smile, like a promise: this is okay. Then she remembers her teeth are covered in blood.
She jerks her head down and wipes at her mouth with the sleeve of her stolen gifted shirt. “It is okay,” she repeats. “I hope you eat.”
She watches through her eyelashes as the woman snatches up the container and edges around her on careful feet, slipping out of the alleyway and taking off at a run.
The mutt looks at the stain on Rumi’s shirt. It will dry and fade, red-brown and immutable.
But the Hunters had so much food to share, and so many clothes to share, and so much warmth…
The mutt swallows around the taste of iron in her mouth, and she thinks about her dad, again. Live until you die.
Maybe she will get a start.
She hadn’t quite thought about it directly for fear of jinxing it, but Rumi had sort of had this vague little hope in the back of her mind that when they returned to their apartment they would find the kid already there, sitting on the couch or in the kitchen, natural and comfortable like this is her home.
But she isn’t. The apartment is dark and empty and exactly as they left it.
She can see Mira physically wilt, like a long leggy underwatered flower. Rumi walks over to wrap her arms around Mira’s middle and pick her up a few centimeters off the ground until she laughs, and Zoey grabs Rumi in a hug from behind.
“Okay,” Mira squeaks finally, “you can put me down now, I need to take off my makeup.”
Rumi obliges, but Zoey holds on for a few more waddling steps. Rumi twists around to give her a kiss on the head for her effort.
Zoey flops dramatically on the couch. “This is not a bad sign,” she says convincingly. “We are not catastrophizing.”
“Right.”
“Don’t catastrophize, Rumi!”
Rumi sighs. “I’m just gonna go grab us some emotional support ramyun.” She pulls on her sneakers.
“And some turtle chips for me, please,” Zoey says forlornly.
Rumi swings around to squint at her. “We had like four packs?”
“Had being the operative word,” Zoey agrees shamelessly.
Rumi snorts. “All right. Any special requests, Mira?”
“My youthful carelessness back,” Mira calls back from the bathroom.
“Never had that!” says Zoey. “Korea’s number one give-a-fucker.”
Rumi smiles and goes in search of Mira’s lost nonchalance. And snacks.
But she doesn’t quite manage. Because standing right outside the building, near the back door, with her wild purple hair and Rumi’s t-shirt, is the kid.
She looks okay. She looks good. Not like she’s horribly injured—more injured than she had been—or like she’s been horribly mistreated—more mistreated than she had been. If anything, there is a certain air about her that hadn’t been there before; not quite confidence, but not too far from it.
“I don’t know what that says,” says the kid, gesturing at Zoey’s sign. “But I think that’s for me?”
Rumi nods fervently, eyes blurring with tears. “It’s the security code for our back door,” she chokes out. She wants to hug her so, so bad. “In case you wanted to—come back.”
The kid makes a face. “If you’d just written the numbers, I could’ve gotten it,” she mutters. She turns to look at Rumi. “Can I have the sticker?”
And Rumi—bursts out laughing.
Rumi laughs, wild and relieved, like she can take up the whole world with her joy. “Absolutely. You can have anything you want.”
That’s a dangerous thing to say, but the mutt thinks she understands it a little more now. So she doesn’t tell Rumi she can’t.
Instead she waits, careful and still, as Rumi peels the sticker off the sheet of paper with patterned fingers, and gently presses it to the mutt’s cheekbone.
Rumi smiles, and the mutt smiles back, just a little.
And then Rumi shows her the code to the back entrance—1-0-1-1-star, and the light on the keypad flashes green—her finger moving much slower than the mutt knows it usually would.
They walk into the same stairwell the mutt had snuck out through this morning, large and concrete and echoing up, up, up.
And then, Rumi takes the mutt out through the other door of the stairwell, and into the kind of place that the mutt would normally get kicked out of, shiny and clean and big, with a fountain and men at the front desk, but when the men at the front desk see that Rumi is bringing the mutt in, they turn the other way.
They get in the elevator, and go up, up, up. Rumi looks at the mutt, intense and single-minded.
The mutt thinks maybe this is okay. Rumi wants to understand, but she is… and she is gentle and kind. And being gentle and kind is good. So she will probably keep doing it.
The elevator doors open.
“Mira,” Zoey calls from the couch, throwing one arm up into the air. “I have ballet videos so you can critique their turnouts instead of catastrophizing. And I want snuggles!”
The mutt snorts. She doesn’t know what half those words mean, but Zoey sounds very silly either way.
“Two minutes!” Mira calls back.
“I’ll do you one better,” Rumi says.
Zoey sits straight up. Her eyes go wide.
“Mira!” she shouts, vaulting over the couch. “Now!”
The mutt tries to resist the urge to skitter backwards, but Zoey still skids to a halt in front of her, smile big and wide and bright, hands spread wide. “Hi! Is a hug okay? No is fine, I’m just—we’re really glad you’re okay. Is that blood?”
“Blood?” Mira echoes, jogging into the room. “Sh—kid! Where’d you come from?”
“Blood?” Rumi squeaks.
“Outside.” The mutt shrugs, tugging at the stained sleeve. “It’s not mine.”
They all stare at her.
She remembers the other question, and the idea bites her like an angry squirrel. Her face gets hot as she ducks down her head.
“And. Yes.”
“Yes? Yes to hugs? Hugs right now? Hugs forever?”
The mutt laughs, and nods, and then she is being folded seamlessly into Zoey’s strong arms. She presses her face to Zoey’s sweater, which smells like one of those shops that sell swim trunks and colorful shirts. Zoey cradles the back of her head in her hand and holds her close and sways giddily from side to side.
It’s a lot all at once, but not in a bad way.
Zoey waddles backwards, leading the mutt along, still swaying slightly. She flops onto her back on the couch and settles the mutt comfortably in her lap.
“Outside blood not yours?” she asks quietly.
“Mmhm,” agrees the mutt.
“Wanna tell me whose?”
The mutt shrugs.
Zoey pets her hair. “They totally deserved it?”
The mutt nods against Zoey’s chest.
“And they’re still alive? All their limbs attached?”
She nods again.
Zoey hums. “Good enough for me. Wanna watch a pacific ocean livecam?”
The mutt isn’t sure what that is exactly, but she nods anyway. Zoey wriggles her shoulder in a complicated motion to reach for the remote without dislodging the mutt. The big screen lights up a deep blue. A group of fish are swimming through colorful, strange looking plant-things. The only sound they make is the muted shifting of water.
“Rumi!” Zoey calls. “I have a cat in my lap and I can’t move. Come wait on me hand and foot.”
Rumi instantly appears with an elaborate bow, closely followed by a scowling Mira holding two cups of tea. “Not gonna ask me to wait on you?” Mira grumbles.
“I know I never need to!” Zoey says brightly. She keeps stroking the mutt’s hair. “Tea on the table, please, we’re busy.”
Rumi lays out two coasters with a flourish and Mira places the cups on them, looking pleased.
“Where should we have them sit, my liege?” Zoey asks the mutt.
“Couch,” says the mutt.
“I guess we can make room. Rumi! I need a footrest, chop chop.”
Rumi laughs as she settles down beside them and lifts up Zoey’s legs to place in her lap.
“Mira!” Zoey commands. “Living pillow!”
Mira rolls her eyes as she tenderly shifts Zoey’s head to rest against her thigh.
The fish on the screen move together in a coordinated, shimmering ripple. Rumi lets out a pleased little huff. Zoey wiggles happily and holds the mutt tight.
Hugs forever, hm.
Liz Toohey-Wiese, 2024.
"A sign installed in the largest wildfire burn I’ve ever seen, along the BC/YK border. Borrowing the aesthetics of BC Recreation Site signs, once again pointing to the overlaps of outdoor recreation, resource extraction, and the consequences of the climate crisis. Most recreation sites in BC exist along previously built logging and mining roads.
“Forced into a great and difficult transformation” was a line I heard in a lecture on Buddhist philosophy I was listening to on my drive up north. But it became another mantra I thought about while living in a place that’s been utterly transformed by resource extraction over the past century, and as I thought about the burnt landscapes I drove through."
More here.
what should I listen to
women
really nice gift for Specifically Me when the character has an immediate and violent panic response to being held down / physically restrained. especially if their affect is usually cheerful or relaxed or reserved and this is their one "sicko mode (wildly uncharacteristic)" button.
We've had bodyswaps, but weve never seen Rumi's patterns follow her. Demon stuff ain't biological but what happens when she wakes up in Mira's body covered in patterns, when she covers herself exactly the same way she did in her own body and the other two are even more confused (if very releived) as to why upon realizing Rumi's body looks fine, no scars or any other signs. How badly would it fuck up Rumi to have proof they aren't only skin deep?
Oh, thinks Rumi, as she looks down at Mira’s long, perfect, delicate forearm, marred by twisted purple lines. So it isn't just the way she was born. She should've known. This taint is just her.
Mira thankfully has plenty of long sleeves in her closet; she runs cold. But of course, there are no high collars. Mira has such an elegant neck; there's no reason for her to hide it. Rumi has to rummage through the winter closet for a sufficiently light scarf. It's going to be a challenge in this heat.
It's okay. Rumi loves a challenge.
She's just finished covering everything when there’s a frantic knock on the door.
“Rumi,” her own voice says urgently. Fuck, that's weird. “Rumi? Are you in there? Are you okay?”
“I'm okay!” she calls in Mira’s lovely, luxurious voice. Fucking weird. But also nice. “You can come in.”
Rumi's body spills into the room, with Mira’s effortless feline grace. The relief is crystal clear in her own face. And then Rumi is being swept up and squeezed firmly in her own arms. It’s—kinda nice.
Rumi laughs. It sounds so good in Mira’s voice. “Hi. I'm okay. You okay?”
Mira nods against Rumi's neck, and Rumi feels an inappropriate surge of delight at being taller. “You run so fucking hot,” Mira grumbles, still holding on tight. “How are you not dying in these sleeves?”
Rumi takes a breath. The patterns are on her. They're in her. They're a mark of her inhumanity, her inherent corruption.
No matter her current form, they shouldn't be on Mira.
Rumi forces herself to laugh again. “Sorry. I guess I have weird temperature regulation. Wanna grab something from here?”
Mira lets her go with clear reluctance. Rumi feels guiltily gratified.
“You used to have normal summer shit too,” Mira complains as she raids her own closet.
“Yeah, I donated them, sorry.”
“Hm.” Mira shoots her an assessing look. “Can I..?” She gestures at herself.
“Oh! Yes, of course! Let me—should I turn around?”
Mira’s look turns condescending. “It’s your fucking body.”
Rumi makes herself laugh again. “Haha. Right.” She doesn't look away as Mira peels Rumi's sleep shirt off Rumi's body.
Except—it isn't. Rumi’s body. It has never looked like that, not ever. Smooth and clear and unmarked. Human, human, human.
So much more right, under Mira’s stewardship.
She wishes—
Never mind.
“That's better,” Mira says quietly as she pulls on a cropped top, and Rumi can't help privately agreeing.
Yeah. It is.
William Etty's Male Nude, with Arms Up-Stretched (1828) revamped by Astra Zero
for the bio siblings au: celine meeting mutt and immediately noticing how much she looks like rumi's dad?
Ohhhh that would be. Not good! Seeing as this is an au where Rumi was conceived during rape.
Might be a little like this:
Rumi knocks the glowing things out of Celine's hands before they can fully take shape. “Stop it!” she snaps at Celine, who is Rumi’s guardian, who is a Hunter, who looks so angry, the angriest the mutt has ever seen.
Celine is turning to her, oh no, turning the full brunt of her fury on Rumi—
And the anger dissolves into something else, something horrible, like terror, like abject pain.
Zoey’s hands squeeze the mutt’s shoulders; she hadn’t noticed them touching her at all.
Mira huffs. She’s planted herself directly in front of the mutt. “Let's try that again, huh? Kid, this is Celine, who is usually cooler than this. Celine, say ‘hi, kid who can barely squeeze a lemon without feeling bad about it’.”
Celine abruptly schools her expression into perfect neutrality. She’s looking directly at the mutt from behind Mira’s shoulder. Something in her intent focus is almost reminiscent of Rumi. Truly, this is the gaze of a hunter.
Rumi’s stance has softened. She doesn’t touch Celine, but she leans into her space, almost as if she’d like to. “I told you, remember?” she says, voice low. “She’s like me.”
“Yes, I hadn’t expected…” Celine does not finish the sentence. Instead, she shakes her head slightly and inclines it to the mutt in an almost-bow. “Hello, it’s good to meet you.”
The mutt swallows, the urge to run fighting with the urge to placate the Hunter fighting with the urge to duck herself closer behind Mira and all resulting in her doing nothing but shaking like the miserable, useless creature she is.
Zoey’s hands squeeze her shoulders again, comfortingly, pulling her back to her body.
Celine bends down to pick up her bag, finally looking away.
“Do you want to go back into the kitchen?” Zoey asks quietly. “You can stay in there as long as you want.”
The mutt shakes her head. If she went, she would never come back.
“You’re sure? I can go with you if that helps,” she adds.
But the mutt—the mutt looks over at Rumi, and Celine, and their intense gazes. She’s like me. Her voice shakes, but she still manages to force herself to speak. “I want to be brave.”
This, of course, makes Celine grimace.
“You’re doing great,” Zoey says, and she lets go of the mutt’s shoulders—the mutt resists the urge to lean after the loss—and slips around to walk beside her.
The silence on the way to the couch is deeply awkward. And when they sit down.
“I am sorry,” the mutt says, remembering.
Everyone looks at her.
“About your tupperware,” she clarifies for Celine. “I should not have stolen it.”
And despite how Rumi and Mira and Zoey had talked about how upset Celine would get over the good tupperware being gone—though only ever when they thought the mutt could not hear, which meant the consequences very much would impact the mutt—Celine does not get angry.
“It’s alright,” she says. She does not sound like she means much it, everything flat and hollow, but she says it. “The girls can get new ones.”
The mutt wishes that she would just be upset. It is easier than kindness, even real-kindness and not false-kindness, though she knows it would make Mira, Zoey, and Rumi sad if she said that. Even so, it can feel like waiting to be hit.
At least if Celine just hit her, she wouldn’t have to wait.
Unfortunately, Celine seems to have a preference for waiting.
Her voice had been so warm and alive, behind the door, when she was speaking to Rumi. And then she had seen the mutt, and became quiet and careful.
The mutt understands. When you’re dealing with an unknown threat, it is smart to wait and observe. But she is in no way a threat to Celine, and she knows how dangerous it is for her to be perceived that way. What she doesn’t know is how to fix it.
Mira catches her eye and wiggles her eyebrows. The mutt does her best to wiggle back.
“Orange slices, anyone?” Mira says in a perfect monotone.
“Yes, please!” Rumi and Zoey say almost in tandem, and then smile warmly at each other.
The mutt collects all these looks for morale and looks at Celine. “You—you have raised Rumi well,” she stumbles. “She’s—great.”
Rumi smothers a laugh with an orange slice. But Celine frowns.
“Thank you,” she says slowly. “She is.”
Rumi chokes the orange down and fans herself. “Oh, go on.”
Celine eyes her sidelong. “With an ego to match, I’m sure.”
“I do nothing by half measures,” Rumi agrees.
“Mm,” says Celine, and is silent again.
Mira turns to Celine. “How about you ask her a question?” she says bluntly.
Celine obligingly turns to look at the mutt, and the mutt does her very best to meet her eyes. She manages only a glance. There’s something unfocused in Celine’s gaze. “How are you finding your room?”
“Good,” the mutt forces herself to say. “It’s—it’s very good.”
“Hm,” says Celine.
The mutt wants to wipe her sweaty palms on her nice new linen pants, but she resists.
“She’s been into linear algebra lately,” Mira says pointedly. “She thinks eigen decomposition is elegant.”
“I see,” says Celine.
The mutt has something stuck in her throat, she’s pretty sure, although she hasn’t touched the orange slices.
Rumi slaps her thighs. “Okay! Celine, I have a sponsorship proposal I wanted to run by you. Could you join me in the office for a moment?”
It takes everything Rumi has in her not to immediately snap at Celine and ask her what the hell she’s thinking once the door is shut behind them.
She takes a deep breath through her nose, grabbing her temper tight. “I don’t know what your issue is, but you better work it out before we get back in there.”
Celine doesn’t say anything.
Rumi doesn’t know what she expected, but it wasn’t that.
She turns around.
Celine is still standing at the door.
Rumi presses a hand against her temple, tired. “Look, I—I know I’ve done a lot of things that weren’t necessarily what you’ve wanted, but—“
“What?”
“She’s just a kid,” she finishes, nonetheless. “Whatever it is, don’t take it out on her.”
Celine looks—stricken, for some reason, at this remark. “Rumi-ya, I—I didn’t mean—I’m sorry, I never meant—I promised—“
“To protect all that was left of my mother, I know.” Rumi’s only heard it a million times. “Is that all you care about?”
“No, I—“ Celine closes her eyes and leans back against the door. “Before that. Miyeong made me promise her that I would never hold the demon against you.”
And Rumi’s breath stops. Her anger falters.
The demon means her father, however rarely Celine has spoken of him. Rarely enough that Rumi’s never heard this before.
“And I know she isn’t guilty of…” Celine pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes. “She looks so much like him.“
“Guilty?” Rumi echoes, the lump in her throat a violent and living thing.
(She doesn’t remember when she first came to the quiet, sickening conclusion that her father had raped her mother. She does remember the moment—the exact moment, watching Jinu look at that little girl with her hand drawn card—when she’d let herself consider anything else.)
Celine opens her eyes. “I never once looked at you and saw anything other than someone your mother loved. I know she isn’t your father. I’ll get over it, I promise. I just need a minute.”
(The consideration turns to ash.)
“Oh,” Rumi says.
“I’m messing this up,” says the mutt, worrying at her cuticle with a thumb. “What should I do?”
“No, you’re not,” Mira grumbles, visibly annoyed. “Celine is.”
“You were cute as a button!” Zoey agrees, and takes her hand so that now the cuticle-worrying is a much greater logistical challenge.
“Are buttons very good at making a good first impression?”
Zoey giggles. “Well… Celine is notoriously hard to impress.”
“It’s not your fault,” Mira says firmly.
The mutt frowns. None of that sounds right. “You don’t need to lie,” she says.
Mira looks offended. “I don’t lie.”
“She’s a Hunter,” says the mutt. “I’m a demon.”
“Can I make it any more obvious?” says Zoey. “No, Mira’s right, though. Even if that was her problem, no way that’s your fault. She knows better by now.”
“I think she’s… scared of me,” says the mutt.
They both laugh.
The mutt slips her hand away and tucks it in her lap.
“Nooo, sweetie, I’m sorry,” Zoey scrambles. “It’s just, we know Celine. She doesn’t get scared like that.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s a block of granite brought to life,” says Mira.
The mutt stares at her lap. She trusts their judgement, so much more than her own. But she knows what fear looks like.
On the streets, in a situation like this, the best strategy was to run. But, maybe here there could be a better option. She had rarely had the opportunity to clarify her intentions. Well, except—except for the woman who had taken the containers. And now she’s gotten to apologize for that too.
For all the good that did. In order to explain herself, she needs to be able to explain stuff.
But maybe she can prove it.
Zoey says, “That would explain her abs.”
Mira snickers.
The mutt considers her plan. Her thumb starts to drift towards her cuticle again.
“We should do your nails sometime,” Mira says, passing her an orange segment, not casually at all.
Unfortunately, they took the peels off earlier, so all the fiddling that she could do with the orange would be messy. She takes it anyway.
“Ooh, yes!” Zoey agrees. She holds her hands out in front of her, examining her nails. “Since we’re on hiatus right now, glam won’t even yell at us for at-home mani-pedis; we could have a chill hangout here or we could make a whole thing of it.”
The mutt knows this is an attempt to distract her from thinking about Celine. She hides her smile behind the orange segment. Lucky that she came up with an idea already.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Mira adds. She gestures between herself and Zoey. “We might be beholden to makeup culture and shit, but you shouldn’t be.”
The mutt considers this, for a moment. Zoey had helped her clean and trim her nails once, on the same day she had taught her how to wash her hands properly (all while rambling about how being several centuries old did not mean that a demon couldn’t keep up with advances in hygiene).
It was nice, having someone hold her hands so gently.
“Maybe,” she says. She would need to know more about what ‘a whole thing of it’ means first.
Before she can explain that, she hears footsteps down the hall, and goes still. Now it is time for her to put her plan into action.
Rumi comes in first, and she looks at the mutt, and she is… devastated. It is such an expression that the mutt looks down at herself, half-expecting to see blood spreading across her warm new shirt.
But there is nothing. And now her timing is off.
It is only after Celine comes in to the room, and not before she enters, that the mutt manages to sink to the floor, kneeling properly.
“What the fuck,” Rumi breathes out, looking wild eyed. “Zoey?”
The mutt ignores them. She’s already been distracted enough. She needs to do this correctly.
She looks only at Celine. “You can hit me, if you want,” she tells her, quiet and clear. “Or cut me with your—those big knives. I’m not gonna bite you, or, or anything.”
“No, no no no no—” Rumi chokes out, and starts to step in front of the mutt, and the mutt wants to wave her away, wants to tell her that if Celine could only cut her a little and feel reassured it would be so worth it—
But—rather than summon her knives, or look reassured, Celine drops to her knees in the mutt’s mirror image, and lets out a long, broken keen that reverberates jarringly through the Honmoon so far off-tune it hurts. She puts her face in her hands. The Honmoon pounds through the mutt’s head to the rhythm of her sobs.
She’d braced for pain. But this is worse.
Rumi stutters between them in two aborted movements. Then she bends down to press a hard kiss to the top of the mutt’s head and whirls around to wrap herself around Celine.
Celine doesn’t hug her back; the tips of her fingers are white where they clutch at her head. She’s quieter now, but her body is still shaking with her sobs, and the Honmoon is still knocking through the mutt like a nauseating drum.
She thought she’d understood. Celine had clearly wanted to hurt her when she’d first seen her. Had been clearly afraid and unsettled after that. She’d thought—if she made the offer in good faith, to show she is harmless, that she means no harm—
But Celine is hurting. Celine is hurt, maybe, in a way the mutt doesn’t in fact understand.
“Kid,” Mira is saying. “Kid, no—no one gets to—no.”
And the mutt does not know when she came close, but she does know that she cannot move, not when Rumi is holding Celine and Celine is crying and the Honmoon is shaking and—
Rumi buries her face in Celine’s hair, her voice low and hurried. “I’m okay, we’re okay, nothing’s going to happen, it’s not you, we re okay, it’s not you, nothing’s going to happen, I swear.”
“Rumi?” Zoey says, her voice high and thin as she breaks the stream of Rumi’s words. “Rumi, what do you mean?”
Rumi doesn’t move, just keeps holding Celine, and they are both shaking now, the mutt thinks.
“I can’t,” Celine whispers. The Honmoon screams an echo.
The mutt winces as it hits her, rattling her ribs, and Celine judders towards her, her tear-streaked face such a ragged mess that the mutt almost wants to flinch back at the sight of it.
But she does not, and Celine grabs her face with ungentle hands and rapidly pats her way down the mutt’s shoulders in search of injury before collapsing again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I tried to keep my promises, I did, I swear.”
The mutt sits, stiff and confused, as this woman of stone crumbles into her. She does not know what to do, and it is terrifying.
But Rumi follows, her voice breaking, the Honmoon stinging like tears on the mutt’s cheeks. “You did.”
Mira’s hands are on the mutt’s shoulders—still, again, she doesn’t know, but they are rigid and stiff and the mutt feels like she is disappearing between them, an unthing.
And Rumi looks at Mira and Mira looks at Rumi and Celine holds tight and the mutt says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I only wanted, I wanted to say that I am not going to bite.”
But no one hears. Mira says, “Rumi, what did you do?”
And Rumi says, “I’m okay.”
And the Honmoon pounds.
Mira’s hands are heavy, and Celine is heavier, and the Honmoon squeezes, squeezes her, until she is nothing, nothing, until she is gone—
And pops back into existence, crouched on all fours, on the other side of the room.
“Holy shit,” Zoey blurts out. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
Neither did the mutt. If she had, it might’ve made so many things so much easier, not least of them one of her dad’s very favorite experiments.
But now she has everyone’s attention. This is nearly always bad. And things are quite bad already.
The mutt does what she used to do in such a situation: make herself small, bow down, and wait for the consequences.
She can hear a shuffle, and then Mira’s soft voice: “No, give her space.”
Rumi’s anxiety is almost audible, a tightly wound thread. The mutt has no room for it in her head. She presses her forehead to the cool floor and tries to breathe through clenched teeth.
“It’s okay. We’re okay.”
“I really need you to stop saying that for a second.”
The Honmoon is no longer on her, suffocating her; she’d left it behind, as confused as the rest of them, all the way across the room. Still, it’s so hard to breathe properly. She tries, she tries.
More shuffling. A stagger. A horrible step in her direction. If anyone touches her, she might bite after all.
But no one does.
“Please forgive my… outburst.” Celine’s voice is gravelly and rough, though it no longer trembles. “Are you hurt?”
The mutt shakes her head against the floor.
“Good.” Celine is silent for a long moment. The mutt can hear her breath; it’s loud, deliberate. Persuasive. “I did not require or expect an apology from you. I regret making you feel that I did.”
That’s no good. That’s worse. Without apologies, there is truly nothing the mutt has to offer.
“If I did, I would never—” Another pause. “I—have been trying not to deal in unnecessary violence.”
The mutt thinks of glowing twin blades, taking shape from the Honmoon; of the intent for violence gleaming in narrowed eyes. She knows that look well.
Celine seems to follow her train of thought. “It’s a work in progress,” she says. “Clearly.”
The mutt swallows. It scrapes. “You think I’m dangerous,” she manages.
“No. I—” Celine makes an impatient sound. “My sense of danger could use… calibration.”
“I won’t hurt you,” the mutt tells her quietly. “I do not hurt people.”
“All right,” says Celine. “I believe you.”
The mutt abruptly wants to cry.
“Would you believe me when I say that I will not hurt you?” Celine asks her.
The mutt swallows, again, twice. The fear is still there, a hard persistent lump. She understands about needing calibration. She wants to try. “...Okay.”
“Mm.” Celine takes in a long noisy breath. The sound is a strange relief. “I find eigen decomposition rather elegant, as well.”
The mutt wiggles backwards, and finds she’s already at a wall. She clings to it, trying to convince herself off the floor. “I like—I like vectors.”
And in eigen decomposition, they didn’t change. Well, they did, but not in speed or direction. Impossible consistencies hidden in the wonder of mathematical chaos.
(Her dad taught her numbers, and she had to keep doing math ever since to budget her (mostly stolen) scraps of won, necessary to obtain what she couldn’t just steal directly—usually things like access to showers.
She’s been working on reading, too, but math is so much easier and so much more fun.
Numbers, in the end, always made sense.)
Celine hums, and the mutt manages to grab tight onto the baseboard, and push herself upward.
“Of course you agree,” Mira mutters, affectionately. She is holding Rumi, tightly, like she had to stop her from coming over, and Zoey is holding Rumi like one of them might die if she let go. Celine is standing, looking ready to fall over, between them.
The mutt wants to apologize. She had made such a mess of things, getting on her knees this way. But Celine does not want that.
Zoey laughs. The sound is forced. “Orange slices, anyone?”
“Maybe some water?” Rumi says, softly. Mira does not say it at the same time.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.” Zoey scampers off to go get water.
The mutt manages to sit up the rest of the way, and then she curls into a ball against the wall, her arms tight around her knees. She can’t tell if she wants a hug now or if she would still bite someone for trying.
Celine does something with her face when their eyes meet. It looks like a grimace, maybe?
The mutt wonders if Rumi and Mira and Zoey will wait until she, too, is out of the room before they start talking about whatever it is that Rumi ‘did’. Maybe the mutt could tell her about that, since she has better hearing than a human does.
(She should probably, at some point, explain about that. But a sneak-thief needs what skills it can keep up its sleeves, no?)
(Teleportation. Why now?)
Zoey returns, her hands full of glasses. “I brought water! With ice, in case anybody wants to hold some and have a grounding moment. Or something like that. Though you can just have cold water if you want.”
“Grounding moment?” the mutt echoes, confused.
The mutt watches the ice slowly melt in the heat of her hands, sliding around in the moisture. It’s cold, but—she doesn’t mind it.
It’s funny. Everything seems so stupid now. The instinct to kneel, to bow and scrape and beg, it seems so… removed. Why did she think it made sense, here? The contained chill of an ice cube, in contrast to the snug warmth of all the rest of her; of her hands, hot enough to melt it. Inarguably out of place.
She’d fallen in a pond, when she was young. It had been freezing, and she’d never learned how to swim. Her dad had fished her out, but not before she’d gone still and quiet, the cold an inseparable part of her. Maybe she’d accepted it, back then, taken it in and kept it with her. And she hadn’t even noticed that at some point, she’d let it go.
But she had. She must have. Holding it now in her hands, it’s clear. It isn’t inside her anymore.
The melted ice is dripping on the knees of her pants. She can feel eyes on her. She retreats to the kitchen to dump her handful of icy water in the sink.
She stares at her hands some more, raw and pink, stinging as the warmth comes back. That’s right. She remembers that too. That it hurts to warm up again.
Back in the living room, Celine and Rumi are talking quietly about house plants. Mira is listening, her head on Rumi’s shoulder. Zoey is on the floor, typing dexterously on her phone.
The mutt walks over carefully.
No one looks at her.
She sits on the floor next to Zoey. Scoots closer, closer, until their shoulders are touching. Without interrupting her typing, Zoey lifts up one arm, creating the perfect space for the mutt to burrow into. So the mutt does.
And Zoey keeps typing, and nobody looks at her, and the mutt is warm.
Almost a year since I was arrested... time flies
Trinity "i will be kind to you but cover it up with some bullshit" Santos my beloved <3
this is canon 2 me <3
Look at my bugs #mybugs
hikes are very good yes but a deluxe hike is when you are a accompanied by a freak with niche nature knowledge. they’re like omg stop there’s a horned valerian varmint beetle here and then you both get to crouch down and look at a bug like :)
near-life experience
