[secondtolastrow]

This isn’t a mirror mirror ask but I would love some fluffy Sarang content. Do you have any nice headcanons? Sarang deserves the best.

This totally counts as a mirror mirror ask 👍

I keep thinking about Sarang and floor time. Just her flopping out on a heated floor and having some good good relaxation. Sometimes Derpy comes to hang out and they have it together. Nice living vibrating weighted blanket for her

When Sarang isn’t running with Rumi, she’ll usually listen to audiobooks while she runs. She loves learning stuff and having access to so many stories and being able to just run and listen all she wants makes her very very happy

She has a whole collection category of Special Gifts. Stuff like the first shirt Celine gave her after they came to this world, and the stuffed duck that Zoey bought for her that she just. Could not comprehend being for her at the time, and her ID card that tells everyone that she’s Rumi’s sister and Celine’s daughter and she has a name. They’re her favorite things to share with other people—okay, well, the ID when relevant—because she gets to give them all the love that she’s experienced :)

Also, idk if I’ve said this outright at any point: but ducks are her favorite animal. She loves those weirdos. Always has

[fakelawyerbug]

🥺🥺🥺

I'm imagining Sarang with one of these lights

That she got almost as a joke gift but it's one of her favorite things now

[kenkuheart]

Imagine Sarang building up a collection of rubber ducks Huntr/x buy for her whenever they go on tour - that one dressed like a beefeater from when they went to London, one dressed like the Mona Lisa from Paris, one painted with cherry blossoms from Kyoto…

Imagine the duck collection slowly seeping into the rest of Huntr/x’s fandom. Little duck pin badges on Rumi’s lanyard, a photo of Mira holding up two duck stuffed toys and carefully considering the two, an Instagram live in which Zoey gets derailed from her answer about new songs and instead tells 12000 viewers about mandarin ducks and their eclipse plumage. Fans going “… I guess we like ducks now? Duck mascot time!!”

Sarang finding out about wedding ducks and looking around at all the duck-themed gifts her mother (she has one!) and unnies (she has three!) have given her and seeing every one as an extension of the same question- “We want you, we choose you, be family with us”.

Ducks 🥹

[secondtolastrow]

When Sarang was young, back before she was Sarang, before she was a person, Celine—Master, the other Celine—would sometimes decide against doing her exercises in the yard that day, and would take the demon up to the pond

And after, when she was tired and the demon was sore and exhausted, she would sit in the sun and the grass and the demon would get to watch the world. And the ducks in the pond would dart around and duck their heads under and squawk at each other and (this was a very bad thought, back then, one she didn’t really let herself have) they would fly away whenever they liked

And when Sarang got her very first duck, a squishy thing that is bright yellow like a duckling and soft in her hands, she thought of all those ducks and she thought of Celine’s arm around her shoulders as they walked between worlds and she did not know how to say those words, as she dropped to her knees and pressed her forehead against the floor because a thing like her did not deserve this, and clearly it was a mistake

And now she has more than is reasonable to count (she knows the exact number)

And, whenever she likes, she gets to go out and watch the ducks at the park. With her family

[kenkuheart]

Not long after Sarang became Sarang and she was learning to read stories all by herself, Zoey - spurred on by fond childhood memories of Peter Rabbit - buys Sarang a copy of Jemima Puddle-Duck and a little figurine to match. The figurine looks silly, with her bonnet and shawl, but the story (another gift from one of her unnies! Sarang has so many gifts now and she still pauses to run her fingers over the spine in wonder that Zoey saw this, and thought it would make Sarang happy, and gave it to her because that was a thing Zoey wanted!) is going to be special.

Sarang wants to be able to read about Jemima, and she wants to be able to talk about the story with Zoey, but she's still learning and Sarang doesn't want conversations about the book to become something about Zoey teaching her. Her unnie is sharing this thing she loved with Sarang. If it becomes a series of reading lessons, it is not sharing any more. It would be about what Sarang has learned, not what they both liked, and Sarang does not want that. She wants this thing to be equal between them.

So she goes to Rumi, even though she knows that Rumi will not keep this a secret from Zoey. And Rumi sits with her and she reads the story to Sarang, all about how Jemima is tricked by Mr. Fox, who lets Jemima sleep on top of feathers and collects herbs to cook with, and then Jemima is rescued and goes back to her home on the farm and that is the happy ending.

After the story is done, Rumi puts it to one side and says, "Maybe don't ask Celine to read this one to you just yet."

Sarang knows enough - the things Celine had thought, how she wanted to keep them safe - to nod. "But she's not like a fox, though," she adds loyally. "He's supposed to be charming."

Rumi finds that very funny, even though Sarang hadn't really meant it to be, and then they get distracted talking about the difference between charming and manipulative, and how Sarang could tell them apart.

They both talk about the book with Zoey, because Sarang doesn't want Zoey to think that she doesn't like her gift, her special book, and Rumi offers to help explain when the words feel too much. And Zoey just cringes and says, "Oh noooo, I thought I was doing so well by avoiding The Ugly Duckling..." and then, of course, Sarang asks about the other duck story that Zoey did not tell her about, and then she reads The Ugly Duckling and decides that it is a better book than Jemima Puddle-Duck, because the animals look like real animals and do not wear clothes, but it is not really about a duck so it cannot be a very good duck story.

Sarang puts both books away on her bookshelf, which is slowly filling with books and photo albums and souvenirs from days out with her family. And they stay there, for weeks, until Celine offers to practice reading with Sarang and takes Jemima Puddle-Duck from the shelf before Sarang can stop her.

Sarang reads it, Celine helping her sound out some of the harder words but otherwise letting Sarang take the lead until they reach the part when Kep saves Jemima but they are not yet back at the farm, and Rumi's warning is sounding so loud in Sarang's head she has to close it and then take Celine's hands in hers (Sarang is allowed, Celine has told her - Sarang will always be allowed) and say, as furiously as she can, "You are not a charming Mr. Fox."

Celine blinks. She does not laugh, and Sarang feels how much she loves her mother bubble up inside her so strong she can taste it.

"And you are not a Jemima Puddle-Duck," Celine tells her, and Sarang nods very quickly because she is not a duck at all. She is a person. She has an ID card to prove it.

"You gave me a family," Sarang says, like Kep but not really. "You brought me home."

"Sarang, uri ttal," Celine says, and holds out her arms for a hug, which Sarang gives to her happily. Celine is asking! For a hug from Sarang! She wants Sarang to be close to her, and Sarang wants the same thing, and they can both share the wanting and the holding and the closeness for as long as they like!

They do, and then Celine smooths down Sarang's hair and runs her thumb over an imaginary crease in Sarang's t-shirt and then smiles. "Are you hungry? I'll get you some fruit."

"Then more reading?"

"If that's what you want, Sarang."

[secondtolastrow]

This isn’t a mirror mirror ask but I would love some fluffy Sarang content. Do you have any nice headcanons? Sarang deserves the best.

This totally counts as a mirror mirror ask 👍

I keep thinking about Sarang and floor time. Just her flopping out on a heated floor and having some good good relaxation. Sometimes Derpy comes to hang out and they have it together. Nice living vibrating weighted blanket for her

When Sarang isn’t running with Rumi, she’ll usually listen to audiobooks while she runs. She loves learning stuff and having access to so many stories and being able to just run and listen all she wants makes her very very happy

She has a whole collection category of Special Gifts. Stuff like the first shirt Celine gave her after they came to this world, and the stuffed duck that Zoey bought for her that she just. Could not comprehend being for her at the time, and her ID card that tells everyone that she’s Rumi’s sister and Celine’s daughter and she has a name. They’re her favorite things to share with other people—okay, well, the ID when relevant—because she gets to give them all the love that she’s experienced :)

Also, idk if I’ve said this outright at any point: but ducks are her favorite animal. She loves those weirdos. Always has

[fakelawyerbug]

🥺🥺🥺

I'm imagining Sarang with one of these lights

That she got almost as a joke gift but it's one of her favorite things now

[kenkuheart]

Imagine Sarang building up a collection of rubber ducks Huntr/x buy for her whenever they go on tour - that one dressed like a beefeater from when they went to London, one dressed like the Mona Lisa from Paris, one painted with cherry blossoms from Kyoto…

Imagine the duck collection slowly seeping into the rest of Huntr/x’s fandom. Little duck pin badges on Rumi’s lanyard, a photo of Mira holding up two duck stuffed toys and carefully considering the two, an Instagram live in which Zoey gets derailed from her answer about new songs and instead tells 12000 viewers about mandarin ducks and their eclipse plumage. Fans going “… I guess we like ducks now? Duck mascot time!!”

Sarang finding out about wedding ducks and looking around at all the duck-themed gifts her mother (she has one!) and unnies (she has three!) have given her and seeing every one as an extension of the same question- “We want you, we choose you, be family with us”.

Ducks 🥹

[kenkuheart]

What happened to Jeongho in the dream to nightmare au? Main!Celine doesn’t seem to know him but alt!Celine does and it seems like he was part of the alt universe sunlight sisters’ lives for a bit. I’m really curious if you and/or @the-fallen-blue have any ideas for what might have happened to him. Or any info on him in general. The more he’s mentioned, the more curious I become.

So both @the-fallen-blue and I have said in the past that if it's not written in the story, we consider it fair game (and as far as I'm concerned, that's the whole joy of collaborative writing - I get to be introduced to so many new ideas and different perspectives that I wouldn't get writing by myself) so anything I say below is only fixed when it gets written in the story.

(I'll also add the caveat that the dream to nightmare world in the main storyline with blue is slightly different from its incarnation in the threeway swap world where @zoloteh-volossya suggested that Miyeong and Jeongho's relationship was not a particularly happy one and that's feeding into Miyeong's reaction to mirror!Rumi. That Miyeong says she used to think there were nice demons but she was wrong, so to me that suggests that Jeongho hurt her in some way, and Miyeong thinks of him as having been tricking her by pretending to be nice.) As far as the main dream to nightmare, I think the following parts are important to how both Celines would think about Jeongho:

Jeongho is a demon. Miyeong might not have consciously made a choice, but Celine had a lot of internalised homophobia (which only one of them ever worked through) and thought that kissing/touching/loving women was in some way corrupting or harmful to them. Seeing a woman she loved in the arms of a literal demon just underlines how disgusting Celine's desires really are.

Jeongho is the reason Sunmi leaves SLS. Miyeong tells them both that she is pregnant and going to have a baby with her demon boyfriend, and both Celine and Sunmi are incredibly hurt. This risks everything the three of them have worked so hard to build, and it hurts that Miyeong wouldn't talk to them sooner. Sunmi walks out and Celine stays with Miyeong but hurts, visibly, the whole time.

Miyeong's pregnancy with Rumi is not a happy time. SLS all feel hurt and angry with one another for various reasons - Sunmi hates Miyeong for putting them in that position and hates Celine for staying with Miyeong, choosing Miyeong over Sunmi when Miyeong was the one who betrayed them first. Miyeong regrets hurting her sisters but she does not want to be ashamed of her baby, especially knowing that the world will already treat her harshly as a single mother. Celine hates herself more than she hates the other two, but she's hurting as well.

During Miyeong's pregnancy, Celine does get to know Jeongho a little. What I think is true, although this has not been explicitly stated so collaborators are welcome to write something different, is that main!Celine chose not to tell Rumi her father's name or anything about him as a person. Alt!Celine had enough time with Jeongho engaging in relatively prosocial behaviour to, if not look past the demonhood, at least pity him on some level. Main!Celine either did not see that or recontextualised it due to the circumstances of Miyeong's death.

So why is it different between the two worlds? Again, not explicitly established but I think there's a way of making all three worlds connect together - the main world, the alt!world and the threeway swap alt!world. And it comes down to Miyeong's death.

This generation's Hunters are separated and in hiding while one of their number recovers from recently giving birth. The Honmoon has been growing so strong under them that if Gwi-Ma's forces do not strike now, they may never get another opportunity.

The demons are going to launch an attack, and Jeongho - who still bears Gwi-Ma's marks, who can still be controlled by him - knows where the most vulnerable Hunter is hiding.

In the alt!world, Jeongho tells them both that Gwi-Ma is trying to use him to kill Miyeong before the Honmoon can turn golden. He can't stay with them as Gwi-Ma is doing everything he can to seize control of Jeongho, and he can't go back to the demon realm without being tortured, tricked or tempted into giving them up either. His control is slipping and there's only one way out that lets him stay himself, stay the kind of man he would have wanted to be for his family.

Jeongho dies at their hands. They remember him at Seollal and Chuseok and eventually come to see him as a tragic warning of what the patterns will end up doing to Rumi if they don't act quickly to save her. Celine doesn't ever love him but she had a kind of familiarity through being around him when he was near Miyeong and Rumi, even though she seethed with jealousy the entire time and hated herself for it, and she does love Rumi, so she can't hate him.

In the main!world, Jeongho gives them up to Gwi-Ma. Demons attack them and kill Miyeong while Celine escapes with baby Rumi. Jeongho is part of the force that attack their little house, and Celine feels nothing as her blade bites into her neck. There is simply too much else that needs to be done for her to gloat. In the aftermath, Celine realises that Jeongho was amongst those fighting against them. She tells herself that Rumi is better off for not knowing anything about the man who betrayed them all - better that she should think her parents were star-struck lovers on opposite sides, than the conclusion she came to which was that Jeongho had been manipulating them from the very start.

The threeway swap alt!world is somewhere in the middle. Jeongho sells them out - whether he's tortured or tempted into it, it doesn't matter; Miyeong feels betrayed by the fact he didn't go to her for help. But, crucially, he does so and then tells Miyeong what has happened so she and Celine can prepare - relocate to another safehouse in time, one he doesn't know the details of, set up better defences etc. Miyeong survives but can't forgive the betrayal that nearly killed her & Celine and gave their baby over to Gwi-Ma. They tell Rumi her father was a demon who died because of his patterns, the illness they represent to the alt!SLS which consumes the personhood and leaves only a vessel obedient to Gwi-Ma.

[the-fallen-blue]

Yeah we're definitely on the same basic page, this is pretty parallel to what I was kicking around when I first started thinking about it. I feel like it's kind of the natural path, given:

Dude is a demon. Not healed, like Rumi, which no one in either universe knew was possible; purple, like Jinu. He would, for most of the time they knew him, have been the charming but selfish asshole dudebro you wish your friend would stop giving second chances to.

alt!Celine in the two-person swap considers him a person, and has the same amount of hostility toward him that she might any other ex of Miyeong's.

main!Celine doesn't think he deserves for Rumi to even know his name; her hostility toward him is a lot more like what we'd expect from a Hunter for a demon.

So at least from Celine's perspective, in the rainbow universe he was at best a shithead, at worst a monster; in the golden universe, he was at worst a shithead and at best did something really redeeming, in the end. Which could be about anything but why wouldn't it be about Miyeong, who he is most closely linked to narratively and whose presence or absence is the single major difference between universes? It makes a lot of sense if the reason for that difference is whether Jeongho contributed to her death (and is hence unforgivable), or her survival (which could be redeeming, but potentially not redeeming enough if there was a betrayal first).

Although to that last point, there's also room there for Celine to be more swayed by his final sacrifice than Sunmiyeong were, for a variety of reasons (empathizes more with Being A Monster, places unhealthily high value on Saving Miyeong, stuck on Bad Person can't do Good Thing, secretly believes more strongly in hope and redemption than Mieyong but is less obvious about it, whatever). Since Sunmiyeong haven't talked about him in the two-way swap and alt!Celine hasn't talked about him in the three-way swap, it could still be consistent if they simply don't wholly agree about it.

[kenkuheart]

I also like the idea that the universes diverge from decisions that are not made by Celine. Alt!Celine can’t go “I’m the good one, which is why my decision was the best decision and that meant I got everything I ever wanted, and the version of me who lost everything deserved to do so because she made a different choice.”

They did the same thing. The decisions that caused the timelines to split off were not in Celine’s power. They were both identical, and it’s only in the aftermath that alt!Celine learned to allow herself softness, openness, vulnerability - all the things she resents the absence of in main!Celine’s life. And main!Celine made different choices- trying to be a good teacher, pushing Rumi because her life depended on mastering some of those skills, building SLE with its different culture to make the industry better for Rumi and her friends- but alt!Celine doesn’t know about them or trust they have any value yet.

[kenkuheart]

What happened to Jeongho in the dream to nightmare au? Main!Celine doesn’t seem to know him but alt!Celine does and it seems like he was part of the alt universe sunlight sisters’ lives for a bit. I’m really curious if you and/or @the-fallen-blue have any ideas for what might have happened to him. Or any info on him in general. The more he’s mentioned, the more curious I become.

So both @the-fallen-blue and I have said in the past that if it's not written in the story, we consider it fair game (and as far as I'm concerned, that's the whole joy of collaborative writing - I get to be introduced to so many new ideas and different perspectives that I wouldn't get writing by myself) so anything I say below is only fixed when it gets written in the story.

(I'll also add the caveat that the dream to nightmare world in the main storyline with blue is slightly different from its incarnation in the threeway swap world where @zoloteh-volossya suggested that Miyeong and Jeongho's relationship was not a particularly happy one and that's feeding into Miyeong's reaction to mirror!Rumi. That Miyeong says she used to think there were nice demons but she was wrong, so to me that suggests that Jeongho hurt her in some way, and Miyeong thinks of him as having been tricking her by pretending to be nice.) As far as the main dream to nightmare, I think the following parts are important to how both Celines would think about Jeongho:

Jeongho is a demon. Miyeong might not have consciously made a choice, but Celine had a lot of internalised homophobia (which only one of them ever worked through) and thought that kissing/touching/loving women was in some way corrupting or harmful to them. Seeing a woman she loved in the arms of a literal demon just underlines how disgusting Celine's desires really are.

Jeongho is the reason Sunmi leaves SLS. Miyeong tells them both that she is pregnant and going to have a baby with her demon boyfriend, and both Celine and Sunmi are incredibly hurt. This risks everything the three of them have worked so hard to build, and it hurts that Miyeong wouldn't talk to them sooner. Sunmi walks out and Celine stays with Miyeong but hurts, visibly, the whole time.

Miyeong's pregnancy with Rumi is not a happy time. SLS all feel hurt and angry with one another for various reasons - Sunmi hates Miyeong for putting them in that position and hates Celine for staying with Miyeong, choosing Miyeong over Sunmi when Miyeong was the one who betrayed them first. Miyeong regrets hurting her sisters but she does not want to be ashamed of her baby, especially knowing that the world will already treat her harshly as a single mother. Celine hates herself more than she hates the other two, but she's hurting as well.

During Miyeong's pregnancy, Celine does get to know Jeongho a little. What I think is true, although this has not been explicitly stated so collaborators are welcome to write something different, is that main!Celine chose not to tell Rumi her father's name or anything about him as a person. Alt!Celine had enough time with Jeongho engaging in relatively prosocial behaviour to, if not look past the demonhood, at least pity him on some level. Main!Celine either did not see that or recontextualised it due to the circumstances of Miyeong's death.

So why is it different between the two worlds? Again, not explicitly established but I think there's a way of making all three worlds connect together - the main world, the alt!world and the threeway swap alt!world. And it comes down to Miyeong's death.

This generation's Hunters are separated and in hiding while one of their number recovers from recently giving birth. The Honmoon has been growing so strong under them that if Gwi-Ma's forces do not strike now, they may never get another opportunity.

The demons are going to launch an attack, and Jeongho - who still bears Gwi-Ma's marks, who can still be controlled by him - knows where the most vulnerable Hunter is hiding.

In the alt!world, Jeongho tells them both that Gwi-Ma is trying to use him to kill Miyeong before the Honmoon can turn golden. He can't stay with them as Gwi-Ma is doing everything he can to seize control of Jeongho, and he can't go back to the demon realm without being tortured, tricked or tempted into giving them up either. His control is slipping and there's only one way out that lets him stay himself, stay the kind of man he would have wanted to be for his family.

Jeongho dies at their hands. They remember him at Seollal and Chuseok and eventually come to see him as a tragic warning of what the patterns will end up doing to Rumi if they don't act quickly to save her. Celine doesn't ever love him but she had a kind of familiarity through being around him when he was near Miyeong and Rumi, even though she seethed with jealousy the entire time and hated herself for it, and she does love Rumi, so she can't hate him.

In the main!world, Jeongho gives them up to Gwi-Ma. Demons attack them and kill Miyeong while Celine escapes with baby Rumi. Jeongho is part of the force that attack their little house, and Celine feels nothing as her blade bites into her neck. There is simply too much else that needs to be done for her to gloat. In the aftermath, Celine realises that Jeongho was amongst those fighting against them. She tells herself that Rumi is better off for not knowing anything about the man who betrayed them all - better that she should think her parents were star-struck lovers on opposite sides, than the conclusion she came to which was that Jeongho had been manipulating them from the very start.

The threeway swap alt!world is somewhere in the middle. Jeongho sells them out - whether he's tortured or tempted into it, it doesn't matter; Miyeong feels betrayed by the fact he didn't go to her for help. But, crucially, he does so and then tells Miyeong what has happened so she and Celine can prepare - relocate to another safehouse in time, one he doesn't know the details of, set up better defences etc. Miyeong survives but can't forgive the betrayal that nearly killed her & Celine and gave their baby over to Gwi-Ma. They tell Rumi her father was a demon who died because of his patterns, the illness they represent to the alt!SLS which consumes the personhood and leaves only a vessel obedient to Gwi-Ma.

[the-fallen-blue]

I know you said that Miyeong wouldn't sleep with Celine now that she knows what's going on but I think she should go for it. They're both Celine it's not even cheating.

Miyeong is cross-legged on the floor, face-down on the coffee table when Sunmi finds her.

Sunmi settles down, kitty-corner, on the old blue couch, and waits.

"… she's so gorgeous," Miyeong says, eventually, like Sunmi dragged it out of her with a crowbar instead of just sitting nearby. "And so strong. And so careful. And so dedicated. And so good with the kids."

Sunmi cocks her head. "Mi. Unnie. My dearest friend, a third of my soul. Are you actually sitting here contemplating cheating on your wife with your wife."

"I am not contemplating anything," and Miyeong manages to make a broad, frustrated gesture with one hand without picking her face up at all, "but how am I supposed to just stop being attracted to the actual love of my life? She may not be our Celine, but she is still Celine in every way that matters. You want me to turn off more than twenty years of knowing how right we are together?"

"I mean this one's kind of a bitch. I feel like that's a way that matters."

"She's hurting," says Miyeong, unamused, rolling her head sideways to shoot a glare at Sunmi. "I know you remember."

"Yeah. I remember all of us hurting, actually. I also remember the rest of us getting over it."

"Don't pretend you don't care about her like I don't know you."

Sunmi gives an exasperated huff. "Of course I care about her. She's Celine. Fortunately I don't feel the need to sleep with her about it."

"Well nobody asked you," says Miyeong, petulantly, rotating her face back down against the wood.

It earns her a laugh, but not mercy. "Come on," Sunmi goads. "It can't be that bad, they don't even hold themselves the same way."

"They kiss the same way!" Miyeong argues.

And all Sunmi can say to that is "Unnie."

Miyeong waves the hand again. "Don't say it like that, it was that first day, before we knew what was happening," but it doesn't sound like she entirely believes herself.

"I'm sure that will comfort our Celine immensely."

Miyeong makes a sad little noise, and Sunmi feels instantly guilty.

So she adds, after a moment, "… on the other hand. She did forgive you for sleeping with an entire demon, so."

Miyeong's head snaps up to stare at her incredulously.

"Sunmi. We were not even together when I slept with Jeongho, we were certainly not married. And..." She makes a sort of shrinking, defeated shrug. "She only forgave me then because of Rumi, anyway."

Sunmi blinks at her.

"… that is absolutely not true."

Miyeong scoffs out a laugh. "You didn't see how hurt she was when you were gone. When I was with him. Sunmi, she spent her entire life up to then believing that her love made her a monster and I told her it was true, that she was worse than a demon. An apology and an Effexor script don't make that right. There's nothing that can."

"And Celine has told you this herself?"

"She doesn't have to."

Miyeong's chin goes down into her hands, elbows on the table, disconsolate, and honestly. Her fucking soulmates, the most useless lesbians in Korea. Sunmi presses at the headache starting between her eyes, flops back into the cushions, and reconsiders her approach. Eventually, she tries,

"Ok, put a pin in that and let's deal with things we can still control. What if I remind you that some of the traits that make Celine Celine include highly competitive, extremely protective, and chronically self-loathing? If you put them in the same room they'd probably go off at each other like badly socialized dogs. You really want to find out how much worse you can make it by putting yourself in the middle of that?"

"… that actually does sort of help, yes," Miyeong says into her hands. "Unfortunately."

Sunmi hums contemplatively, tripping a few golden threads of reassurance in Miyeong's direction.

"Let's make a deal, then. You do your very best not to climb this Celine like a tree because it will make our Celine very unhappy and I'm pretty sure this Celine would be a little traumatized too. And I'll try to get her back to her own universe before you hit your terrible impulsive decision threshold."

Miyeong drops her face again. "You're a good friend, Sunmi."

Sunmi rolls herself lengthwise, feet on the armrest, pulls a pillow over her head, and mutters despairingly into the fabric. "Don't I fucking know it."

[kenkuheart]

'Please don't cheat on your wife with her alternate universe double' and other advice you didn't know you would need to give when you signed up to become a magical girl pop idol: A Compendium by Kwon Sunmi.

[kenkuheart]

Scenario: The Celines rotate through their worlds. So mirror!Celine ends up in alt!universe (coos over alt!Rumi), then main!universe (clashes with main!Rumi and Huntrix. Does seeing a patterned Rumi acting so much like her human self inspire doubts in how she handled her own Rumi?), before ending back up in mirror!universe (with a Mira and Zoey who are suddenly very hostile).

And main!Celine lands first in mirror!universe (picks up Sarang), then in alt!universe (maybe the golden Honmoon burns Sarang? And Celine has to spend the entire time holding Sarang up so she isn't touching any surface that hosts the Honmoon) before finally getting back to main!universe.

Meanwhile alt!Celine starts in main!universe (freaks out), then the mirror!universe with an empty kennel and a despondent Zomira (freaks out Even More) before crash landing back in alt!universe.

Main!Celine and Alt!Celine are both incredibly traumatized and handling it with varying degrees of emotional intelligence. The jury is out on how Mirror!Celine would handle it (up to you). Mirror!Zomira hate themselves and Mirror!Celine. Alt!Miyeong & family now have horrible horrible context for what Mirror!Celine actually meant when she fed them her sob story, and have met two very different versions of their Maman. Meanwhile Main!Huntrix are just happy to get their Celine back and have a brand new (also horribly traumatized) little sister. Sarang has had a very confusing week and doesn't really want her new Celine to stop carrying her absolutely everywhere.

Celine getting pinball machined through the multiverse🤣

However the image of Sarang being piggybacked everywhere like a little koala and always holding onto Celine is very cute. That would probably end up staving off the worst of Celine's breakdown - because Sarang cannot stay in this new world with a version of Miyeong who flinches from her patterns, not when just being in this world threatens to tear Sarang apart. And Celine might be thinking that she's evil and filthy and depraved for having the potential to do this to a child but she is also practical enough to know that Sarang needs to be held, and refusing to do so in the alt!world would only hurt Sarang more. So she gets over some of her hang-ups about having no right to touch Sarang a lot sooner than in the main mirror-mirror AU.

Plus alt!Celine has two teen boys who love comics and they will think it is so cool that their sister could have had fangs and claws, check it out! What can you bite through with those? Demons aren't a real thing to be threatened or disgusted by in the alt!world, so Hajoon and Seojoon would be introducing Sarang to many dumb teen experiments like seeing if her claws can shred metal. (Miyeong and alt!Rumi would be struggling the most with Sarang's appearance, because Sarang looks like Miyeong's worst nightmares and Rumi became fully human at such a young age she's never connected herself to any of those traits. So!)

alt!Celine is going to be horrified by mirror!Celine, no doubt, but she also might be the one who could give mirror!Zomira a better steer instead of just stealing their Rumi and running out of the universe. alt!Celine has been living her best suburban mother of 3 life - main!Celine belongs to a world where monsters are killed, alt!Celine knows that if you suspect abuse then you contact the police.

(Zomira: "But it - she, I mean - isn't here. That first Celine took her when the portal opened, she said she was going to take it somewhere safe."

alt!Celine: "So what if we say that she was hurting you two instead?"

And for that, there is corroborating evidence - times when Zomira have picked up injuries from hunting or combat training that can be recast, in the public eye, to be evidence of their accusation.

Zomira: "She'll say we're lying. We would be lying."

alt!Celine: "...Girls. Grooming children into criminal activities is also a form of abuse. Making you witness that kind of physical abuse is abuse.")

As for mirror!Celine..? Ultimately, mirror!Celine is already traumatised, that's just true of every version of Celine. Seeing the alt!Miyeong only cemented her belief that she was justified - if Miyeong hadn't died, they would have turned the Honmoon golden and that would have given Miyeong a perfect human daughter. mirror!Celine watched the child succumb to the patterns and take on ever more demonic characteristics; it was a kindness that she didn't kill it already. Seeing Rumi pretend to be a person doesn't shake her - demons can manipulate; she's known that all along. She'd see every difference between the Rumis as proof of main!Rumi's demonic nature, and every similarity the same.

(She cannot afford to doubt herself, or the decisions she made, because if she does then she will have to confront the fact she put a child in a cage. So it has to be justified, which means the child has to be a demon, which means anything that makes it seem like she's wrong is a demonic trick.)

----

The branches of the sinmok are trembling with a strange, crackling energy. Celine looks over at this world's Zoey and Mira, clutching at one another for comfort, and finds she can't even get angry at them. Celine should have taught them better. Ultimately, the blame is hers alone.

The girl, the one Rumi could have been, shakes too, out of fright. She clasps her own hands together; her claws catch on her own skin, and Celine reaches forward to stop her.

"Careful, jagiya," she says softly. "You could scratch yourself by mistake."

"Is this it? You're just leaving us here?" Mira looks frightened and terribly, terribly small; Celine knows that the right thing to do would be to tell her that everything will work out just fine, but she tries not to make a habit out of lying to the girls. They're going to be stuck here when she returns: how could any of them be fine?

"I don't think I can stop it," Celine confesses. "Go back to the house - grab what you need, take money and buy the rest. If you hurry, you can be gone before she gets back."

Zoey and Mira both nod, but the girl (not Rumi, not her Rumi, but so very close all the same) gulps audibly and flings herself into Celine's arms, wrapping her arms around Celine's neck in a clumsy, inexperienced hug.

"Please," the girl whimpers, and Celine holds her back with as much love and tenderness as she has within her -- and the world changes around them.

Yellow light spills across the sky around them, like an old childhood game. Do you like butter, buttercup? Let's see if you're telling the truth. The Honmoon sings, joyfully, and Celine stumbles into a new world.

The girl stumbles with her.

"Maman?"

They hit the ground in front of the tree - Celine twisting to land on her back, so the girl lands mostly on her, and then takes advantage of their new position to jam her head, muzzle and all, into the side of Celine's neck, bunch her hands into the back of Celine's shirt and make a keening noise in the back of her throat.

"Holy shit," says a boy's voice.

"Unnie? That you?"

Celine tries to slowly sit up, but at the first sign of movement the girl lets out a choked gasp and she stills, runs her arms over the child's back as gently as she can be. "It's OK, sweetheart," she whispers. "Everything's OK. Do you think we can get up?"

The girl doesn't move. Celine is aware of more noises, footsteps running over, and she glances up - wary of anything happening to her new charge - only to see Miyeong's face, hope twisting into horror at the sight of the girl in Celine's arms. At the knowledge of what Celine has done.

There's a hushed whisper of "Maman and noona's evil twins!" from the boys, which she decides to ignore.

"You're not my maman," a girl with dark hair says blankly. "What- what are you? What is that thing?"

Celine curls her hand around the back of the girl's head, toying with the fine hairs that grow there the same way she used to with Rumi as a baby. The girl's shaking grows worse, and she lets out another high-pitched whimper.

Focus. One problem at a time.

"You're OK. Good girl," she murmurs into the girl's hair, and slowly eases them both up to a sitting position. As soon as she does, she sees some of the purple lines on the girl's face ripple black, the skin around them puckering and turning a violent shade of red. The places where the girl had been touching the ground. Almost as though--

Celine gathers her up to sit fully in her lap, cradling her the way she hasn't cradled Rumi in a very long time. That seems to slow the spread at least, but the girl whimpers again.

"Your Honmoon," she realises. "It's - different. It's hurting her."

"She's wearing a muzzle," Miyeong says, hysterically.

There's no denying it, and no use wasting time. The Honmoon has always been stronger at certain places - the tree, for one, but other places and things that resonate with its Hunters. Now that Celine knows what to look for, she can see how this new world's Honmoon wraps around each of the people before her: Miyeong and Sunmi, who she recognises, two boys who she doesn't, and a girl with short dark hair and bare arms.

"We need to move," she tells them, and pushes herself to her feet - the girl clings tighter, claws digging into her skin; Celine can feel the blood start to trickle down her back - then staggers forwards into the night.

[zoloteh-volossya]

Celine stumbles as she lands. She opens her eyes to find herself in front of the sinmok. The two girls she just met - Rumi's fellow Hunters - are staring at her with wide eyes.

"Hello." Celine smiles. "Mira and... Zoé, was it?"

"Zoey," corrects the pink haired one (how embarrassing, she mixed up which girl had which name) as the black haired one (Mira?) says, "You're not our Celine." There is a tinge of relief in her voice.

"I'm afraid not." Celine looks around but doesn't see... "Where's Rumi?"

Mira's eyes well up with tears. Zoey grabs her in a hug, her long pink hair swaying with the force of the movement. After a moment, Zoey's eyes also water, and then both of them burst out crying.

Oh dear. Ignoring the sinking feeling in her gut, Celine bundles the two girls into the angeori and coaxes the full story out of them.

The full story is awful. Celine sits in horror as the girls recount the depths of the depravity she is capable of sinking to, the cruelties she could have inflicted on Rumi if it hadn't been for Miyeong, the shape that her daughter would have been twisted into if it weren't for the golden Honmoon. (She is shamefully relieved that another Celine, presumably the Celine whose world she just came from, took this world's Rumi with her. That Celine has experience with a demonic Rumi in a way that she just does not.)

What Celine does have experience with, though, is dealing with distressed teenagers. She will get these young Hunters situated as best she can before she is yanked out of this world once more.

First things first - getting them away from her other self.

[Cue the conversation from the previous post]

-----------------------------------------------

Rumi has never seen a demon before, so it takes her a moment to connect the patterns, the claws, the odd hair color (so similar to what her own had once been) to demonhood. She has a moment to gape - why is this woman who is not her maman embracing a demon? And then this version of maman is moving, and all Rumi can do is scramble to follow her.

Despite carrying an entire demon, the new imposter sets an impressive pace as she marches straight up the mountain. She doesn't answer any questions as she goes, so Rumi, Eomma, Sunmi-imo, Hajoon, and Seojoon end up just trailing awkwardly after her. From this vantage point, they watch as the back of her white button-down stains red with the blood that trickles down from where the demon's claws have sunken into her shoulders.

Finally, after nearly an hour of hiking, not-maman's strength finally appears to fail her and she staggers over to sit on a stump, perching the demon delicately on her lap. Rumi is huffing and puffing as she arrives moments later and can finally take a proper look at them both.

Not-maman has more grey in her hair than either maman or the previous alternate-maman, but is otherwise unremarkable. The demon, on the other hand, is very remarkable - it's Rumi's first time seeing one. Patterns very much like the ones she vaguely remembers having cover her whole body. Her hair is purple, like Rumi's used to be. The similarities end there, though - the demon's hands and feet are likewise purple, her fingers and toes taper to sharp points, and behind the muzzle Rumi can see small tusks jutting out of her mouth. Is this what she would have turned into if it weren't for the golden Honmoon? The previous not-maman had said that in her timeline Rumi had become a full demon, is that what happened here?

The previous not-maman had told horror stories of what demon-Rumi had been like (and it had made Rumi a bit uncomfortable, but that's natural when talking about a timeline where you become a demon, right?) But that demon had mauled a Hunter, and this demon is obviously just as dangerous - she's wearing the same muzzle as the other not-maman had described, and has thoroughly shredded this not-maman's back even as she carried her up a mountain.

But on the other hand... that's her, right? And like, she hasn't behaved aggressively, other than the clawing. Her arms are pretty badly burnt where they had touched the ground. Rumi would want a hug from her maman if she'd been burnt that badly (she wants a hug from her maman now). Maybe she's just in too much pain to realize the damage she did? Now that not-maman has stopped moving all rbe demon has done is curl up in her lap, occasionally snuffling piteously.

The demon turns towards her and she can't help herself from jerking back in disgust at the sight of slitted yellow eyes looking out of her own face, disfigured with patterns. The demon shrinks back from her gaze, burying her face in not-maman's shoulder again.

""Rumi?" says not-maman.

"Yeah?"

"Surely your mother has taught you that it's rude to stare?"

[kenkuheart]

Celine does not stumble as the golden Honmoon fades around her, gives way to something iridescent.

Seeing Miyeong - not just alive and well, but in love with her own Celine, raising the daughter she should have had - has been beautiful but emotional, too. More than once she's caught herself looking at Miyeong's Rumi, whole and unblemished and exactly as she ought to be, and wondered about what could have been, if she had been able to drive the demon out sooner.

It would have been nice, she thinks. To see Miyeong's little girl growing up. To be able to keep her safe and make sure she knows how much her mother would have loved her.

Three girls are waiting under the boughs of the tree. Celine is gratified to recognise Mira and Zoey at once, but the sight of the third has her on guard immediately.

"Celine?" Zoey asks. "Please be ours, please be ours..!"

"Or at least one which isn't going to cry everywhere," Mira mutters.

The demon takes a step closer. "Hey, Celine," it says, reaching one of its pattern-marked hands towards her arm. "Let's get you inside."

---

Zoey and Mira hold each other as they cry, and Celine listens. Perhaps it would be harder, if she had seen the girls do what they are confessing to. If she had seen this world's version of her daughter treated like an animal.

As it is, their Rumi is some place safe. Celine has to believe that - has to trust Mira's insistence the other other Celine was horrified and had taught them they were wrong to let it happen, so it (she, I mean she, I'm so sorry, I promise I know she's a person now..!) - Rumi must be safe.

These kids, she can help.

"What about your families? When we report Celine, will you be able to go back to live with them?"

Both girls wince and cling to each other again, and with that Celine understands exactly how the other Celine had been able to get her claws into the pair so completely.

"OK, then," she tells them both. "That feels like a good place for us to start."

---

"I wasn't staring," the dark-haired Rumi tries to object, pouting in a way that makes her look much younger than she is. Celine doesn't dignify that with a response; she can feel the girl's breath in hot, sharp puffs of air against her collar bone that seem to be getting more jagged.

"It's OK, sweetheart," Miyeong is saying, and Celine - without thinking about it - turns her head to see Miyeong comforting not the child in Celine's arms but the other Rumi. Miyeong hugs her as though she's the one hurting, and Sunmi hugs Miyeong, and it is Celine - still - and Celine's hands, which have hurt this child so badly already, who has no choice but to quietly stroke the child's back and wait for her to calm.

"Would it be too much to ask if you happened to bring a first aid kit?"

"We weren't expecting you to drag us hiking, so no--" Miyeong says, hotly, only to break off as Sunmi tosses a small travel kit she fishes out from her backpack.

"Been a while since I've needed my go-bag, unnie."

Celine nods. That would make sense, she guesses. All three Sunlight Sisters alive, and apparently unbroken, and a golden Honmoon wrapped around them all. She wants to look over towards Rumi, sulking in her mother's arms; she wants to fall onto her knees in front of Miyeong and beg for her forgiveness.

She settles for taking one hand off the child's back - as she does, the girl stirs, unconsciously trying to chase the contact, and it makes her heart sore to see just how desperate this child must have been left for affection - and unzipping the first aid kit.

"Here," Sunmi offers, stepping forward to kneel by her side. "Let me."

Then Sunmi's hands are on Celine's shoulders, trying to look at the cuts under her torn shirt, and Celine can't quite keep her voice even as she asks "What are you doing?"

The girl - the almost-Rumi in her arms - has been burned.

Sunmi blinks. Refocuses. And then takes out the burn gel and applies it to the girl's arms. It appears to give her some relief, at least; after a moment the girl's shaking grows less pronounced and she drops her head from where it's pressed into the side of Celine's neck to rest against her sternum instead.

"Do I want to know why you brought your pet demon universe-hopping?"

The girl does not visibly react to being called a pet demon. Celine hates herself for having done that to her, and hates Sunmi for bringing it up, and hates herself all over again for thinking she could get away with hiding this shameful secret from the people who most need to know.

Celine doesn't know what caused her to be brought here, to this universe. But surely it is so this poor girl can find a mother who will shower her with all the love she should have received. Surely it is so that justice can finally be done. Miyeong can avenge herself on Celine - for all the crimes Celine committed in her name, for the damage to Miyeong's honour and the perversion of Miyeong's friendship, for her daughter under the tree and her daughter in the cage, and for Celine, gripping her hand, promising that she would always protect Rumi.

[zoloteh-volossya]

Celine jerks her arm away from the demon. The patterns on its arm have the same iridescence as this world's Honmoon, and Celine realizes that it has managed to corrupt the Honmoon entirely. She'll give Gwi-Ma this - it's a clever plan.

The demon stops - it even manages to pretend to look hurt, but it'd have to be skilled at acting in order to have pulled this charade off - and does not advance further.

"OK, so, NOT our Celine," says Zoey. Which has very disturbing implications - is this world's Celine bewitched, or did she make the mistake of looking at the demon child and only seeing the human it could have been? Either way, her Hunters do not seem bothered at all to be standing next to a demon. She needs more information on exactly what is happening here. Are they being controlled or have they been criminally misguided by their Celine?

"No," she says, managing to keep her voice cool and even. "You seem a bit older than my Hunters. What year is it?"

That sets Zoey off (it's 2025, and she now knows a great deal about the many many things that will happen in the coming five years. Once she returns to her own world she will have to make some timely investments). As that conversation is ongoing (despite her age and presumed idol career, this Zoey has not been taught to control the more overbearing aspects of her personality) the demon ushers them into the hanok and the Hunters obey it.

That's fine (it's fine, she can play along for now, until she finds out what exactly is going on here). Once inside, she takes her leave, retreats to her room (locks the door), and pulls out her phone.

She finds what she's looking for with just a little digging - a video of Mira and Zoey attempting to take down the demon on stage that suddenly cuts to black, a poorly explained 'reconciliation' afterwards, confused reports of an impromptu concert featuring a giant fire (Gwi Ma!!! It must be!!!), and, most damningly, reports of thousands of mysteriously disappeared people over the past few weeks.

What has happened is apparent: the Hunters caught onto the demon's manipulations, but it managed to enthrall them somehow and summon its true master into this world. With the Hunters compromised and the Honmoon corrupted, Gwi-Ma is free to gorge himself as he pleases.

Celine must fix this before she leaves.

------------------------

Shin Byeongmin (aka 'Bobby') is one of the best managers in the business. Celine came into contact with him during an incident where one of the girls in his group was outed - he'd reached out to her organization as he fought like hell to protect his charge from being dismissed and to keep the group above water. It was touch and go for a while there (god, Celine loathes the idol industry), but thanks to Bobby's indefatigable efforts and with the weight of the Sunlight Sisters behind them they'd managed to pull through.

That's the sort of dedication and support these girls need right now, and thankfully no one has realized what a gem that man is in this world yet - his profile shows him as currently between jobs. He sounds thrilled when she gives him a call, and is more than happy to arrange to meet up in Seoul the next day.

"So now what?" asks Mira, in a tone of voice that would seem petulant if Celine couldn't see the fear undergirding her every action. "Who is this guy?"

"You girls shouldn't try to handle this all on your own. You need an adult you can trust, and I would trust Bobby with my own children. He'll do right by you, no matter what happens."

He'd better - she only has three days here, and she must fix this before she leaves.

------------------------

"I kept her chained up in a kennel," Celine confesses. The girl whines, and she brings one hand up to gently stroke the back of her head. "I don't think I even gave her a name."

"What," says Sunmi.

Celine looks over to Miyeong. "She needs a mother to give her all the love she deserves, that she should have received. I have been intolerably cruel to her." The girl whines again, louder this time. Celine can feel the hot puffs of her breath and the cool metal bars of the muzzle as she shoves her face into Celine's chest and throws her arms around her torso, claws sinking into the skin of her back again. Celine carefully adjusts the girl's position in her lap so she isn't at risk of falling off into the golden Honmoon.

Miyeong looks justifiably disturbed, and hugs her Rumi tighter to herself. "Is that why she's wearing a muzzle?" she asks.

"Maman," says Rumi with a twinge of annoyance in her voice. "Don't you remember? The previous version of maman said she had to put a muzzle on the demon I became after it mauled a Hunter."

"An utter falsehood!" Celine snaps, appalled. The girl flinches at her vehemence, and she rocks her gently until she calms again. "You were never at risk of being a demon, Rumi. You are a person. This one, too-" she places an arm on the girl's back and draws her closer to her chest "-is a person, not a demon. My Rumi, even at the end, when she looked like this, was a person and acted as a person."

Sunmi and Miyeong share a glance. "Your Rumi?"

The words pour out, a confession. "The patterns grew, but slowly. I ordered her to hide them, even from her fellow Hunters, as the next generation strove towards the golden honmoon." She huffs out a whisper of a laugh, bitter and self recriminating. "We ran out of time. The patterns grew in seconds, covering her entire body, and her screams were shredding the Honmoon. She teleported to me and begged me to kill her. She thought I would--that I didn't--" she blinks away tears and meets Miyeong's horrified gaze. "I promised you that I would protect her, and twice now I have utterly failed."

[kenkuheart]

Mira glances up from her phone at the sound of unfamiliar footsteps. The figure resolves itself into Celine - a version of Celine, one who walks with a limp. Slight enough to be hard to spot unless you were looking for it, but still enough to change her gait.

At least this version of Celine is still properly a Hunter, Mira thinks with a little shudder. The first doppelganger had been so... leaky and clearly horrified by everything about their lives; this one, who knows they're all Hunters, won't be falling over herself to apologise for their own Celine's actions.

"Celine?" Mira holds her hand up in greeting. The woman's eyebrows draw together for half a beat before smoothing out again.

"Mira." New Celine looks around. "You're by yourself?"

"Zoey went to buy some more things now it looks like we're staying, and Rumi pulled pack mule duty," Mira explains. This Celine's expression does not change, exactly, at that but something in her face stills at Mira's words.

All three Celines look subtly different to one another - the grey in their hair, the creases around their eyes and mouth. But they are similar enough that Mira - who had learned here, with their own Celine, that she had better options than lashing out at the others; who had been dragged outside to run laps or spar whenever she'd forgotten that until the physical exertion had chased all the anger out of her - still wants to trust her.

It's the other parts - the parts that had never really stopped being her mother's daughter - that stir within Mira as this new Celine slowly takes a seat.

"I found a video," Celine starts, and shows Mira her own phone. The thumbnail is one Mira's seen - in memes, in profile pictures, in seven different articles PR had them comment on after the shitshow that was the Idol Awards. She dreams about it sometimes, the look on Rumi's face. The violation.

Mira flinches. The corner of Celine's mouth pulls upwards, the same as their own Celine whenever Mira finally landed a hit on her.

---

The newest Celine makes sundubu-jjigae for dinner, which Zoey eats mechanically. She knows that it tastes good. The first Celine - their mentor - had always treated food as fuel, and the second Celine had--

It wasn't like she'd starved them. The second Celine had just made food that she knew the demon would like, because the demon had been a person the whole time and liked things, the way Zoey and Mira liked things. Because they were people, and the demon was a person, and Zoey had still--

The spoon in her hand is shaking. Zoey watches the lump of soft tofu wobble and drop into her bowl.

The second Celine had known the demon was a person because she'd raised it like one, and it had been a Hunter back in her world. The third part of her own Mira and Zoey's harmony. And she'd said as much to the three of them - and the demon had been around them long enough to know what it had meant - and it had still thrown itself into the second Celine's arms rather than stay with them.

And now another Celine, one who said the demon - Shit, Rumi, it has a name, I know it has a name - was her daughter was sitting across from them. Making them dinner. Saying she'd protect them. Like she didn't know about the kennel, and the chains, and their training sessions. About the times Zoey had summoned her shin-kal just to show the demon she could keep it in line, when Celine needed to go to town.

Mira's knee presses against hers, out of view from this other Celine, and Zoey knows that Mira's just trying to keep her grounded, stop her from spiralling, but Zoey doesn't deserve it. Not even from Mira and definitely not from this other Celine. She heard the stories from both Mira and Celine - the time Mira had assumed she knew better than Celine about the demon, had needed to learn her lesson the hard way. Zoey--

God. Zoey had never even tried.

---

The demon knows, intellectually, what a mother is. It knows that people and animals have them, and that monsters do not. Master had taught it that. The Hunter it killed, so long ago it only remembers Master telling it about the killing and not the event itself, was supposed to have been a mother, and the demon had killed her and the baby, because it is a demon and it is bad and it has always been bad.

This new, different master is holding the demon. Holding the demon like it has seen babies being held, all curled up in their mother's arms. New master is touching the demon so much even though it has been bad and the Golden Honmoon burned the demon the way old Master always said it would and it has been bad because it has new master's blood on its claws and it is bad. New master knows it is bad and she is still touching it.

Despite the warmth of new master's arms, the demon shivers. New master just pulls it closer against her.

"Unnie..." the woman says. "I'm sorry. For whatever happened to your Rumi. But that thing in your arms isn't her."

"I know that," new master says quietly. The demon is not sad because demons do not know how to feel. It is a demon and it is bad so the ache in its chest is just because new master had said that in her world the demon was Rumi, and Rumi had a name and slept inside and had a name because new master thought Rumi was a person, and the demon is not Rumi. And new master knows that it is not Rumi. So.

The women are quiet for a long time. The staring girl looks over at the demon again, and the demon knows better now so it makes sure to look down at the floor and tries to match her breathing to new master's. This close it is almost as though they are one thing; the demon imagines them as links in a chain, the breath from new master's lungs filling its own.

"It's getting late," the woman says pointedly. "The boys have got school tomorrow, so they ought to be getting to bed."

New master blinks in surprise, as if she's only just taking in the fact there are boys at all.

"I don't want to bring her back down if the Honmoon is just going to hurt her again," new master tells the group.

"It's a demon," the one who helped new master clean up the demon's arms says. "That's what the Honmoon is supposed to do."

"Not to her," new master says, and pulls the demon closer. She brings one arm up from where it's curled around the demon's elbow to rest on its shoulder instead, and the new position means the demon's head drops to rest against new master's chest. The demon can hear the steady thump-thump of new master's heart picking up slightly, even though the walk is over.

"...Miyeong, why don't you take the kids home?" The woman says.

The boys object immediately - "We want to see!" - and the girl says "I'm not a kid, I'm 25" and the woman with the braid says "You shouldn't have to see--"

And the demon hears new master's heart jump in her chest.

"See what, exactly?"

"Unnie," the woman says. "It's for the best, yeah?"

"What's for the best?" the girl from before asks.

"Fuck you," new master tells the woman, raspily. "I should have known you--"

New master breaks off and looks towards the woman with the braid, at the girl in her arms. The demon is the only one close enough to feel the way new master has to stifle a cry at the sight of them.

"Miyeong-ah? She's your daughter," new master pleads.

"My daughter is right here," Miyeong snaps, holding the girl even more closely. "That thing is a demon tricking you!"

The demon does not nod, even though Miyeong is correct. It is a demon and it is bad and it does not deserve to be held the way it has seen mothers hold their children and it should not want those things from new master, who it has already hurt. It does not know how it managed to trick new master into thinking that it was a person but the demon knows it is very very bad indeed because even if it knew how, it thinks that it might not stop. It thinks it would choose to keep tricking new master forever.

New master laughs, but not like she finds this funny. The demon had not known a laugh could sound angry and defeated before.

"Even here, then," she mumbles. Then, more loudly, she addresses the rest of the group: "If you even think about hurting her again, we'll see how your training matches up to mine - and I don't think I'm as out of practice as you are."

Absently, without seeming to think about it, new master --

New master lowers her mouth so that her lips brush against the demon's forehead.

"I'll make it up to you," new master breathes into the demon's ear. "I'll find you a nice home, somewhere safe. I promise. This time, I won't let you down."

[zoloteh-volossya]

"That's not us on screen," says Mira and Celine pauses. "We were lured away by demons pretending to kidnap our manager. Those are two demons disguised as us."

That's... not what Celine expected. Why would the demon do that? "But it is... Rumi on stage, right?"

"Yeah," says Mira, and looks down. "That's how we, uh, found out about her patterns."

"That must have been a shock," says Celine. It's a good thing, she thinks. Her girls hadn't known the demon's nature - they'd been tricked. She has no idea what the hell this Celine had been thinking, but it makes it much more likely that she'll be able to break through to them.

"Yeah, uh. We didn't handle it very well." Suddenly Mira looks up and meets her eyes. "Did you tell your Rumi to hide her patterns from us?"

"No," says Celine, perfectly honestly.

"Must've been nice," mutters Mira disrespectfully. She''d called Celine by name without honorifics earlier. Not acceptable, but something to be addressed later, if she persists in the behavior after she's been freed from Gwi-Ma's control.

"Yes, it's best to be clear about these sorts of things," says Celine. "What happened next? I saw reports of a surprise concert featuring a giant fire in Seoul."

Mira winces. "We, uh, fought. The Honmoon shattered. I... I don't really remember much of what happened next, but I came to in Namsan stadium and Rumi was fighting Gwi-Ma. She was able to defeat him and we remade the Honmoon together." She hums a couple of bars of a song Celine does not recognize, and the corrupted Honmoon shimmers like an oil slick around them.

Celine barely manages to suppress her shudder, both at the alien feel of this corrupted Honmoon and at the story itself. It's along the lines of what she expected, though. Her Hunters fell under Gwi-Ma's spell and were fed a delusion of success and set to maintaining this new, corrupted Honmoon. Presumably it kept Gwi-Ma's rivals out as he gorged himself, and with this generation of Hunters still alive the ancient failsafes would not kick in and empower emergency replacements. The ancient Hunters who set up the Honmoon had foreseen the likelihood of a generation being wiped out, but hadn't even considered the possibility that an entire team could be compromised so spectacularly.

No matter. Mira was always headstrong, not nearly as suggestible and obedient as Zoey. If anyone could break through Gwi-Ma's control, it would be her, and then the two of them could deal with the demon and bring Zoey back to the light.

"You can't truly believe that's what really happened, Mira," Celine tries.

"What!?"

"No demon can fight Gwi-Ma. You're still under his spell. Mira, you need to come to your senses."

Mira recoils, stepping back several times. "'No demon' - are you talking about Rumi!?"

"Rumi's dead, Mira. She died long ago, consumed by the taint inside. That's just a demon wearing her face to manipulate you."

Mira looks horrified. Good. Maybe she's breaking through. "You... you said you told your us about the patterns."

"I was honest about its nature in a way your Celine must not have been. The demon can be useful, Mira, but it's not a person. It must be controlled with a strict hand, or else it will end up controlling you. That's what's happened here."

Mira's eyes are wide. "What are you talking about."

"Mira, surely you're aware that thousands of people have gone missing."

"That's not Rumi's fault! The Saja--"

"It's corrupted the Honmoon! Mira, you have eyes, you can see. The Honmoon is the same color as its patterns! With the Honmoon under its control Gwi-Ma can feast freely. You're being used."

Mira swallows. She breathes deeply... and summons her gok-do. It trembles in her arms but she points it at Celine regardless. "I don't know what's going on with you, Celine, but I'm not letting you near Rumi like this."

"I was afraid this might happen," says Celine and reaches for her ssang-geum. The corrupted, alien Honmoon does not answer.

---*---*---

Mira stops eating halfway through her bowl. The soft tofu wobbles on her spoon, and then her lower lip likewise begins to wobble. There's the sound of shuffling from underneath the table as Zoey leans closer to her - likely an attempt at providing comfort.

On one hand, Celine feels horribly horribly unprepared for this. She's raised (or is in the process of raising) three teenagers, yes, but once Rumi's patterns were cured all their problems had always been minor, scraped knees and hurt feelings and schoolyard disagreements. She doesn't know how to help two teenagers who have been abused and who have been groomed into being complicit in abuse, who are just now grappling with the cruelty they are capable of.

On the other hand, Celine is increasingly convinced that, of all the Celines that may apparently exist, she is one of the few who ever got therapy. Frightening as it is, there likely isn't anyone better equipped to help these poor girls.

"Mira," she says.

"What?" says Zoey. She, too, has stopped eating, attention directed towards Mira, who is staring down at her jjigae and looking increasingly miserable.

"Is Mira all right?" Celine realizes it's a stupid question the moment it comes out of her mouth - a reflex reaction from decades of parenting that is not appropriate in this case.

"I'm fine," says Zo-- the pink haired girl, in a defensive tone that indicates that no, she is very much not fine but also not willing to admit it.

"Oh, you're Mira." Celine rubs her forehead with two fingers. "I'm sorry, girls."

Both of them stare at her like she's grown a second head. The black haired girl has to look up in order to do so, revealing that she's blinking back tears.

Celine tries again. "Zoey, can you tell me what you are thinking?"

She sniffs. "You're being nice," she says, voice hitching on the last word. "I don't deserve--"

"Oh, girls," breathes Celine, heart breaking. "You didn't deserve for the only adult in your life to put you in such a position in the first place."

"I should have known better!" exclaims Zoey, then shrinks in on herself. "Mira tried. I--"

"Hey," says Mira, placing a hand on Zoey's shoulder, "That's my fault, I told you not to try--"

"You're right. You should have known better, both of you," says Celine, because it will do the girls no good to lie to them. They turn towards her, guilty and despondent. "And because of your actions, your Rumi has left you. There's nothing you can do about any of that." Zoey's tears spill over, shoulders shaking silently. Mira leans into her, eyes likewise watering.

"But beating yourselves up accomplishes nothing. It doesn't help Rumi, it just hurts you."

"We deserve--"

"Everyone has a capacity for evil, " Celine interjects. "You've learned this lesson the hard way. But everyone - you girls included - also has the capacity for good. Direct your guilt towards something productive. You can't do anything for Rumi anymore, but there are many other people out there that you can still help."

Zoey sniffs, but now her expression is thoughtful. "We could... try to raise awareness about, uh, about abuse?" At Celine's encouraging nod, she seems to gather steam. "We could donate all our profits to shelters?"

Celine stifles a wince. "Good idea, but not all of them. You still need something to live on."

"A third," says Mira. "Rumi's portion."

Zoey nods. "A third. For Rumi."

---*---*---

"Hold up," says the black haired Rumi. "Are we talking about killing demon-me!?" The girl in Celine's arms freezes, claws slicing through her skin as she grasps onto Celine's shirt.

"That's not you," says Sunmi. "That's the demon you could have become."

Celine wants to scream, because Rumi was never a demon - not even at the worst moment of her life did she ever serve Gwi-Ma. But these alternate versions of her soulmates, with their golden Honmoon, have shown that they will not listen to her.

Maybe they'll listen to their Rumi, who folds her arms. "Well, maybe I become a nice demon."

"There's no such thing," says Miyeong. "For a while, I thought it possible. But Rumi, it was just a manipulation. You cannot trust them."

Sunmi folds her arms. "It was an ugly time, Rumi. The fact that we know of at least two timelines where your mother died show that we were very lucky that things did not go much worse." (They did, they did, oh god, Miyeong's dying face will haunt Celine until she joins her in the grave.)

The stubborn expression that spreads across Rumi's face is very familiar to Celine - typically a prelude to fights about bedtimes and eating one's vegetables. She greets it now with joy. Rumi can be legendarily stubborn when she truly sets her mind to something and for once it is working in Celine's favor.

"Well, this maman raised her me all the way through turning into a demon so I think she knows more about them than you."

Miyeong furrows her brow, but Sunmi persists. "Her demon started destroying the Honmoon. We've left the industry and we're out of practice, if this one damages it we won't be able to fix it!"

Rumi cocks her head with the arrogant tilt that Celine's own Rumi gets when she knows she'd about to win an argument. "Is she? Hurting the Honmoon?"

Everyone turns to look at the girl, who quails under the scrutiny. She attempts to shift as far away from them as possible, shoving her head over Celine's shoulder into her hair as she presses herself flat against Celine's chest. One leg slips off of Celine's lap and knocks against the stump before she pulls it back up with a yelp. When Celine looks down, there is a fresh burn along her shin. The Honmoon shimmers goldenly on, unperturbed.

"No," says Celine. When she raises her eyes to look at her erstwhile soulmates, neither meets her gaze. Miyeong looks away, something like shame playing over her face. Sunmi, though, just frowns, staring at Celine's thoroughly wrecked shirt.

"Unnie, it's shredding you."

"She's frightened and unaccustomed to being held." Celine reaches reaches over to the first aid kit and pulls out the burn cream again. "Now, you said you needed to head down the mountain. I suggest you all get going if you want to make it before it gets dark."

"And what'll you do?" asks one of the boys.

Celine finally looks over at him. He and his brother look very much like her own father used to, which she immediately decides not to think about further. "It's not the first time I've spend the night outdoors," she says, aiming for wry and landing somewhere closer to 'tired' instead.

"You're not staying up here alone," says Sunmi.

Celine opens her mouth.

"The demon doesn't count."

"I won't let you hurt her."

"...So long as it doesn't hurt you, I won't hurt it."

"The scratches don't count."

"Fine. But you'll let me treat them."

It's the best that Celine is likely to get. She nods and begins applying the burn cream to the girl's leg. After a moment, Sunmi steps forward. The girl flinches and edges backward on Celine's lap, so Celine holds her and murmurs reassurances as Sunmi takes off her shirt and pulls out the bandages.

By the time that Sunmi is done, Miyeong has herded the children (25 year-old included) down the mountain over their complaints. Celine picks the girl up and walks over to sit down on the ground with her back against an old, sturdy tree. She pulls the girl against her chest and waits as she settles herself into a more comfortable position in Celine's lap.

Sunmi sits across the clearing from them, dark eyes gleaming in the light from the setting sun. She has streaks of grey in her hair. Celine's heart aches. She never got to see her Sunmi grow old, and this Sunmi is a stranger to her.

They do not talk further.

The mountain is chilly at night. Celine shivers and is grateful for the warm weight of the girl upon her. Lacking a blanket or a jacket, she instead wraps her arms around the child and hopes it is enough. She doesn't seem to be shivering, at least.

"You're not cold?" Celine murmurs.

"Winter was cold," says the girl. As Celine tries to reign in her rage (she was kept outside all winter!? it's spring now, what temperatures is she accustomed to enduring!?), she continues, "you're warm."

Any further conversation is forestalled when Celine hears the crunch of footsteps in the distance. She sits upright, nearly dislodging the girl, but cannot see anything in the darkness.

After a moment, two beams of light cut through the darkness, and Miyeong and Rumi walk back into the clearing.

"I brought blankets," says Miyeong, gesturing to her backpack. "And a hammock, a tent, two tarps, all four of our sleeping bags, and changes of clothes."

"And food!" says Rumi, dropping her backpack with a groan. "Other-me's eyes shine in the dark. That's creepy."

"Took you long enough," says Sunmi. "It gets cold on these slopes."

Celine blinks at them.

"You didn't think we were just going to leave you up here like this, did you?" asks Miyeong.

And Celine cannot control her shudder. She has been alone for so long that she has forgotten that it was possible (that it was once natural, as inevitable as breathing) to rely on others.

[kenkuheart]

Celine has never shied away from her duty, no matter how difficult. Miyeong was deceived, Sunmi faltered, but Celine has always served the Honmoon faithfully.

Even the mercy she granted the demon could be forgiven - it has proved useful, over the years, especially now that it has grown large enough to help Mira and Zoey’s training while she searches for their missing third.

And, in turn, the Honmoon has always answered its most steadfast defender.

It shouldn’t surprise her that this Honmoon, covered in the demon’s taint, does not but her empty hands ache as they close around nothing.

“Stand down,” she tells Mira, drawing herself up to her full height. The trouble with Mira is that she’s always been a little more brash, out of the two of them. Determined to push back against Celine at every opportunity, until she’d learned the hard way why the rules were what they were.

This Mira seems to have the same lack of restraint as Celine’s own. Her hands tighten around the shaft of her gok-do, turning the hook of the blade ever so slightly towards Celine. Mira’s eyes flicker down at Celine’s empty hands, noticing that she’s unarmed, but she does nothing to press the advantage.

She’s not quite so far gone that she’s willing to threaten her mentor, then. Perhaps there is some hope for the Zoey and Mira of this world, once Celine finds a way to free them both.

“You’re out of your mind,” Mira tells her. Her voice shakes as she does.

“You know I’m right, Mira. Whatever’s been done to you–”

“Shut up,” Mira snaps, as though that doesn’t prove Celine’s point entirely. The corruption in Mira’s mind, trying to make her disregard all the evidence of the demon’s tricks. Sunmi had experienced something similar. Even Celine had not been entirely immune, back when the demon was small, before its true nature had been as apparent as it has become.

“-- There will be a way to help you and Zoey,” she continues. “You may not be the same girls I trained but I cannot in good conscience abandon you to a demon.”

“To our friend. To your– To Rumi,” Mira tries again.

Celine aches for her, the poor girl. So caught up in the facade the demon must have crafted for it, drawing on its knowledge of the girls’ weaknesses. Both of them, always too desperate to belong, too ready to throw everything away for a chance to belong.

At least Celine had been the ones to find them, train them properly as Hunters. If someone else had been able to take advantage of them – Well. Celine suspects she’s looking at the results. A version of herself too weak to defend her mind against the demon, tricked into helping it draw the others under its control. 

There had been times, when it was very small and not yet fully developed, where it had almost seemed cute, the thing that killed Miyeong. The same way a tiger or a bear could seem cute, until it showed its fangs. 

Celine had never forgotten what the demon really was but it was still far too easy for her to think back on that time and realise how close she had been, at times. When she would hold it in her lap while it fed from the bottle, the warmth from its tiny body almost like that of a living things. When she taught it to speak, talking to the creature so it would hear the names of things and patting it on the head when it did well. It would have been easy for Celine to lower her guard, tell herself that its clumsy imitation of a child meant that there was something redeemable within it. Their Celine must have done much the same, but in a moment of weakness - when Celine had been able to catch herself in time - she allowed the demon to influence her.

And now its plans are coming to fruition, she thinks. The whole Honmoon, destroyed. 

She thinks that she has trained the demon well, made sure it would have no chance to develop its powers to this degree back in her own world – but the Celine of this world had probably thought herself safe too. No, as soon as she returns to her own world, the only way to protect the Honmoon and her charges will be to finally put the creature down.

“The demon,” Celine corrects her. Happily, there has always been one thing that Mira could be counted on to value above her own safety. “Mira, listen to me. You have to remember. Zoey needs you.”

—--

Celine watches the girls lift their heads, their new resolve alleviating at least a little bit of the shame that has kept them both curled in on themselves ever since she arrived. Mira and Zoey grip one another’s hands and nod, promising one another they’ll do better in her daughter’s name.

“...Will you tell us about her?” Zoey asks. “Rumi. We didn’t know–”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, which is probably for the best. Celine has not had to see what this world has done to Rumi, has managed to escape the brunt of Mira and Zoey’s horror as whichever Celine they met told them what they were complicit in, but she can see too many of the scars.

(She found a cattle prod, broken in two, thrown out with the rest of the trash. She cannot ask the girls what it was used for.)

“--We didn’t know her,” Mira finishes for her. 

(Better, Celine thinks bitterly, than We didn’t know she was a person.)

“My Rumi isn’t the same as your Rumi,” she warns them. The other world had taught her that much.

“It’s the closest we’ve got.”

Selfishly, Celine doesn’t want to give these girls too much of her own daughter. A Rumi who has always had her family, who grew up without the shadow of Gwi-Ma hanging over her head and a Celine intent on adopting all her parents’ worst impulses, who has been safe and happy and loved and never once felt the need to doubt any of that is not theirs to miss. 

But.

She wants them to know - to remember - that Rumi is more than just a rallying cry for the duo. Rumi is her oldest child, her only daughter, the baby that taught Celine she could do better than her own parents had. That she could be trusted to love someone precious without hurting her.

Celine takes a deep breath and begins. “My Rumi was born with a tiny set of lines on her shoulder, smaller than the width of my thumb. The doctors thought it was just a birthmark, but we recognised it straight away…"

—

Miyeong and Sunmi begin to put the tent up. Celine stays where she is, holding the girl against her chest, and watches them.

She has no words for the feeling that passes over her as she does. She has been used to hating and missing Sunmi in equal measure, but Miyeong has always been… Miyeong. Rumi’s mother. The one who should have been there, in the place Celine had taken for her own. The one truth she’s been able to cling to over the years, as her own doubts set in, was that Miyeong would have known what to do. Miyeong would be so much better at this.

Celine still can’t hate her. She remembers what it had been like, the early days when there had been nothing to do but hold the baby against her chest and look through the archives for anything that would tell her how she could save the child from being turned into another mindless creature following Gwi-Ma’s bidding. Rumi used to sleep in her lap, tiny hands clutching at the fabric of her shirt, while Celine pored through old diaries and correspondence in the hope that some other Hunter had thought to write how a child could be saved from those patterns. The only answer, no matter how hard she looked, was the golden Honmoon. It was supposed to remove Gwi-Ma’s taint: for demons, and those who had already turned too far towards him, it would cut them out of the world entirely, and just sever the connection to him for anyone who could still be saved. Celine had prayed, for years, that some other answer could be found - something that she would be able to do to keep Gwi-Ma from taking what was left of Miyeong. But there was nothing else, and there was nothing Celine alone could do to protect her, so she’d started praying for time instead. Just one more year, over and over, feeling as though every breath Rumi drew was stolen from under Gwi-Ma’s nose.

She has no right, not holding the version of Rumi she has systematically tortured, to compare herself to Miyeong.

But she thinks she understands, all the same.

The dark-haired Rumi drops down to squat next to them, staring at the girl and Celine holds the girl a little more tightly, not sure what Rumi is about to do.

“Are you hungry?” Rumi tries. She tips the contents of her backpack out onto the grass, revealing several containers of leftovers, some bottled water and then, with a little conspiratorial wink at the girl, a much larger plastic bag filled with snack food. “I raided the guys’ stash.”

Although Rumi lowers her voice, it’s not enough to stop Miyeong from groaning. “Rumi, leave your brothers’ things alone–”

“It’s an emergency, Eomma.”

“It’s junk is what it is.”

This Rumi just turns towards her, making her eyes as big as they will go and puffing her cheeks out slightly in a display of aegyo that Rumi has long since claimed to find too embarrassing. 

“Eomma,” she wheedles. “Her world might not even have the same food. Are you going to make her go home without ever finding out if she likes Pepero?”

“She’s not going home,” Celine reminds her.

“Her new home, then. Do you have Pepero?” Rumi asks, as though it’s that simple - that obvious - that the child will be going to Celine’s world.

Silently watching Sunmi had given Celine a chance to think, for the first time since arriving in this world. The child obviously can’t stay here, not if the Honmoon keeps mistaking her for a demon - and that’s discounting the issue of Sunmi and Miyeong’s reaction to her. But nor should she have to stay with the same woman who had treated her worse than a dog.

If there is another world out there, one where Miyeong had survived and the other two hadn’t, one where the Honmoon was the same as it always had been, the girl could slide into their family. A niece, or a cousin. Someone Miyeong would have a reason to take in and care for, give her all the love that had been denied to her.

And if Celine can’t find it… Well, she’ll at least find some place where the girl will be safe before she returns.

There’s a clicking noise, and Celine glances up to see Sunmi clicking her fingers at her. “Still with us, unnie?”

“... Yes, we have Pepero. Why wouldn’t we have Pepero?”

Rumi just shrugs. “Well, I don’t know when your world started going different,” she says, matter-of-factly. “If there are worlds where I’m not even human, then whether or not a cookie exists doesn’t seem like that big a change in comparison.”

Before Celine can rebuke her, she pulls out a few sodas and holds them out towards the girl. “Which one do you want?”

The girl doesn’t answer, but she does turn her head to look at the cans. Celine points at each one in turn, reading out the label - the other Rumi’s eyes widen but she doesn’t make a fuss, and if Miyeong and Sunmi realise the implications at all they at least say nothing. 

With some encouragement, the child taps for the banana Milkis and allows Celine to take the muzzle off. She’s tempted to throw it down the mountain, but that feels performative and hollow, so instead she puts it carefully to one side so the girl doesn’t have to see it.

The girl’s claws are too long to undo the tab, and her hands too burned to hold the can comfortably, so Celine raises it to her mouth and lets her sip slowly.

“The banana’s Seojoon’s favourite, too. Mine’s the strawberry,” Rumi volunteers. “Hajoon likes melon, but he likes all the weird gross flavours so you can’t trust his opinions on anything.”

Miyeong and Sunmi join them not long after that, and that’s how they eat, the girl accepting food and drinks from Celine’s hands just as Rumi had as a toddler perched on Celine’s knee. Celine catches Miyeong’s eye as she handfeeds the girl and wonders if they are remembering something similar.

Rumi and Sunmi-imo manage to keep the conversation going between themselves, mostly. Miyeong says nothing. Celine contributes a few comments about snacks her own Rumi liked - Turtle Chips, which this Rumi describes as “actually kind of mid”, and Banana Kick - until she feels the girl’s breathing deepen and her grip on Celine’s shirt loosen.

Without thinking about it, Celine sets the can down and runs one hand over the girl’s cheek where there’s a faint red mark left from the muzzle. The girl’s eyes flutter open and then she tenses, as she realises where she is. Who she’s trying to cuddle into.

Horror floods the child’s face, and Celine understands - she’s seen the other world’s kennel, the chains; she can hold out her hand and take the muzzle this child has been forced to wear - but it still hurts to see, on a face so very much like Rumi’s, and is dangerous if the child tries to push herself backwards into the golden Honmoon again. Celine’s arms come up to hold the child in place before she can think about what that must feel like for the poor girl, but Rumi - every version of Rumi - has always been brave, so the girl stays in Celine’s arms.

“I’ll take the hammock,” Sunmi says, taking one of the sleeping bags. Her eyes trail over the girl, Miyeong, Rumi and then finally Celine. “Shout if you need me,” she adds, faux-casual in a way that makes Celine want to set the child down and smack the look off her face.

Rumi shows the girl how to open the tent flap and the two of them crawl inside. Celine goes to follow, only to be stopped by a hand on her wrist. 

“Is it safe? Be honest with me, Celine; this is my daughter we’re talking about. Is Rumi going to be safe?”

In Miyeong’s other hand, there’s the muzzle.

“Put that down.”

“You’re looking at me like I’m a monster.”

“I don’t know how to look at you,” Celine confesses. “The Miyeong I know wouldn’t be okay with hurting her child–”

“The Celine I know wouldn’t parade my daughter’s corpse in front of me,” Miyeong retorts, and for a moment Celine is 22 again, watching her life fall apart. Miyeong, pink spots blooming across both cheeks, spitting: What do you know about love, Celine?  “The patterns, the claws– Did you mean it, when you said it isn't a demon? Gwi-Ma doesn’t control her yet?”

Celine’s rotten heart splinters once again. “Every word,” she promises. “Rumi - every Rumi - no matter how big her patterns got - has always been her own person, Miyeong.”

“And the muzzle?”

“I was hurting her,” Celine says, as simply as she can. That’s all it comes down to, really. She was hurting the girl; she had been for a long time – years, probably. She hurt Rumi; she had been doing so for years. And Miyeong still looks lost. “Here,” Rumi is saying from inside the tent. Celine glances over to see that she’s finished unzipping a sleeping bag for the girl, and is starting to roll out a second to lie next to it. “You can get in that one now, if you want, or I can show you how to zip two together to make one giant sleeping bag if you want to share with your maman?”

“Maman?”

Rumi’s finger points directly at Celine, an arrow she feels just as surely as if she had really been shot. “It means ‘eomma’; it’s the name we use for our Celine to tell her apart from Eomma - Miyeong’s our eomma. What did you call your Celine?”

“Master,” the girl answers.

[zoloteh-volossya]

What the fuck. What the fuck! What the everloving fuck!!! Mira takes it all back – she’d rather have a weepy ex-Hunter Celine who is horrified by Rumi’s career than… whatever the hell is going on with this Celine. Now she knows what the parts of her that remained her mother’s daughter were noticing. It’s so obvious in hindsight – how this Celine had flinched from Rumi’s touch, how she hadn’t ever met Rumi’s eyes.

It’s clear what this Celine is doing. She hadn’t come out against Rumi right away (because she would have gotten her ass clobbered, and she knew it). She waited until Mira was alone so she could try and drive a wedge between her and Rumi, and now she wants to use Mira to drive a wedge between Zoey and Rumi. It’s like a horrible, twisted reprise of that awful night at the Idol Awards. She had acted first that night – raised her weapon at Rumi, abandoned Zoey – and now a new threat is trying to use her against her girls again.

Not this time.

Mira shifts her gok-do so that she can hold it up with one hand, bracing it against her torso, as she uses her other hand to pull out her phone.

“What are you doing?” snaps the other Celine.

“Calling Zoey,” says Mira truthfully, and raises the tip of her gok-do slightly in warning.

Zoey picks up on the third ring and immediately switches to speakerphone, as they always do when one member calls the other two. “Heeeeeeyyyy Mira!” she says, “We just paid but we’re still at the store, did you want us to pick something else up?”

“This new Celine is bugfuck crazy. Rumi, you can’t come back, she wants to kill you—”

“What are you doing,” snarls the alternate Celine and Mira tightens her grip on her gok-do, “You’re warning the demon!?”

“Yes!” Mira snaps at her. There’s exclamations and protests coming from her phone. “Rumi, I’m serious. I think she killed her own—”

The alternate Celine surges forward and Mira—hesitates—and then Celine is inside her guard and her phone is clattering to the ground as she’s desperately trying to defend herself. She drops her gok-do (it’s useless at such close range) as she's forced to use her forearms to block the flurry of punches Celine is battering her with. Rumi and Zoey’s muffled voices rise from somewhere behind her from somewhere behind her. She tries to disengage, make space, but Celine doesn’t let her, pressing a vicious assault.

One punch gets through her guard – Mira can feel her nose breaking – and it’s over. She stumbles and Celine uses her momentary distraction to slam her into the ground and wrap an arm around her neck. Mira lurches upwards, trying desperately to wrench herself out of the chokehold, but it’s no use. Unlike Zoey, Mira had never been able to match Celine at wrestling.

“Don’t worry,” wheezes the alternate Celine as Mira thrashes, “I’ll deal with it and free you.” Her vision’s going grey, she embeds her nails in Celine’s arm and drags them in a vicious scratch. Celine hisses but doesn’t let go. “Just stay down for a—”

The Honmoon ripples and suddenly Mira is free. She drops to her elbows, dragging in frantic breaths as she fights to keep herself conscious.

“Celine, what are you doing!?” cries Rumi and that can’t be right, she was still at the store. She rolls over (ow ow ow) and yep, that sure is Rumi. The evil Celine is scrambling towards, oh shit, Mira’s gok-do. Before Mira can dismiss it, the other Celine grabs it, only for it to dissolve in her hands.

“You’ve done a commendable job of corrupting the Honmoon, demon,” says the Celine.

“What!?” says Rumi, eyes wide and trembling.

Mira rolls unsteadily to her feet. “Don’t listen to her, Rumi,” she wheezes. “You’re not a demon.”

“It teleported here, Mira,” snaps evil Celine.

“That’s not—“ Rumi blinks rapidly. “I’m a Hunter, like my mother.”

“You keep her name out of your mouth!” It’s the angriest that Mira has ever seen any Celine, teeth bared and eyes wild.

Rumi, bless that hopeful little trooper, stands her ground. She raises trembling arms and summons her sword – its new, larger shape looking unnatural to Mira but still unmistakably a sacred weapon. “See?” Rumi says, presenting it towards Celine.

The alternate Celine stares at the weapon and there’s a moment where Rumi’s eyes brighten with hope.

“There’s a soul embedded in that,” spits the alternate Celine. “A clever fake, I suppose. Is that how you fooled Mira and Zoey?” There’s a beat, and then she says, with horror in her voice, “Is that the soul of their third!?”

“I don’t think we’re gonna be able to get through to her, Rumi,” Mira says, summoning her gok-do once more.

Celine glances back at Mira and then darts towards the open door of the angeori. Mira swears and follows, Rumi behind her. They don’t manage to catch up to her before she reaches the kitchen, though. By the time they get there, she’s already grabbed a knife from the knife-block.

“Shit,” hisses Mira.

“It’s time I do what I should have long ago,” says Celine.

Rumi freezes.

---*---*---

Zoey can't sleep. She can't stop thinking about Rumi. The Rumi this Celine had described - a bright, cheerful girl studying to be a vet - seems so different from the demon who had mauled Mira (Zoey's seen the scars). But then again, Rumi had been raised with love, and the demon had been raised without. What did she know, other than cruelty and violence?

Cruelty and violence that Zoey had participated in. It roils in her chest, how much the demon girl-who-could-have-been-Rumi must have suffered over the years; how much Zoey herself had contributed to it. And she can't fix it or make amends, because that girl is gone. She left. She's free (of them).

Zoey's aware that what the current Celine had said is true - they can't change the past, they need to focus on helping others - but she can't help but mentally replay every training session, every game of "tag", how they'd been in charge of feeding the demon (and how little food, in retrospect, it had been, because "demons don't need to eat much." God, she'd never even questioned it.)

Zoey finds herself lurching out of bed and staggering towards Mira's room (god, the third room in the bakgeori will always be empty now, huh?). She can't be alone with her thoughts right now.

She realizes that perhaps Mira might be asleep only after she's already knocked. Shit, fuck, inconsiderate, demanding too much-- but there's an answering, "Come in," and now she's committed.

Mira looks... bad. She's clearly been crying, eyes red and baggy. Zoey supposes she doesn't look much better herself.

"Could I, um," Zoey begins, but Mira reads her mind and raises the blanket with one arm. Zoey immediately shimmies in to join her, then squeaks as Mira's arm wraps around her and squeezes.

"God, I don't deserve you," Mira mutters into the crook of Zoey's neck. "I don't deserve a family."

And Zoey wants to-- to object, to disagree, to argue against her. It's Zoey who doesn't deserve Mira, who at least tried, who offers comfort so freely. In the end, though, it feels hollow - it really does feel like neither of them deserve anything good, at least not for 19 years, to make up for the 19 years the demon-girl lived in that fucking kennel.

But she's selfish, she doesn't want to give Mira up (she just found her, another part of her soul, a hole she didn't know she needed filled, and now the only other part of her soul she will ever have).

"I think we deserve each other," she says eventually. They'd both hurt the last third of their soul, they'd both supported each other. They were all the other had, now. For better and for worse.

Mira pulls her closer with a sniff, and wrapped in her arms Zoey finally manages to sink into sleep.

---*---*---

The staring girl (Rumi, a person, what it could have been if it wasn't a demon) stares at the demon. This is nothing new, but Miyeong also turns to stare at it. Has it said the wrong thing? New master is frowning but there's none of the tightness in her face that indicates she thinks the demon is in need of correction. So. Probably not?

The demon looks back down the odd puffy bag that Rumi had partially split open. The Golden Honmoon sizzles against the flesh of its calves, but if it kneels on where the puffy bag still has two layers it's not as bad.

"O...kay... then," says Rumi. She is still staring. She stares a lot (the demon doesn't curl up, but it's a near thing. No one has ever looked at it for so long before). "What do you call this Celine?"

The demon freezes. New master had told it to call her something, in that first bewildering day where she had struck off its chains and brought it out of the kennel, but it had been too overwhelmed by the warmth of the hanok and the taste of the freshly cooked food to remember. It looks to her frantically, but she gives no instruction. Because she told it already. And it forgot. Because it is bad. And now she is waiting for it to answer because Rumi asked it a question but it doesn't know the answer and-- "N...new... master?" it ventures, because being disobedient is worse than being wrong.

"No!" exclaims new master and the demon drops into position for correction, forehead touching the ground. Its forearms burn from their position on the ground above its head, off of the protection of the puffy bag, but it dares not move them. It was bad it was bad it was bad. Everything new master did for it and it still didn't remember what she had told it to call her.

"No," she says again. Her voice is coming from right above its head and it can't help flinching (it had thought, for a moment, that maybe it wouldn't get corrections, if it left the world with the kennel. Now, all it can hope is that she'll be... gentler). Then there are hands on its wrists and it cringes as it is yanked out of position. "There's no need for that. You are burning yourself," she says as she pulls it upright.

The demon keeps itself pliable and obedient as she maneuvers it and lifts its arms to inspect them for damage. For a brief second it glances up and accidentally meets Miyeong's eyes over new master's shoulder -- the expression on her face is like Mira's, the first time she saw it, in the kennel. It drops its gaze back to the puffy bag - staring at humans is not allowed, lest it start to hunger.

"You can call me Celine," it is told once its arms have been thoroughly inspected. The demon's eyes nearly bug out of its skull. It can't! But it was given a direct order. The sheer disrespect! Does it dare disobey? Celine (augh!!!) seems to notice its discomfort and adds on, "or Ms. Kang." The demon nods, relieved.

(Ms. Kang, it thinks. It now belongs to Ms. Kang. It was going to be going home with Ms. Kang, who said it was a persona and might not do corrections after all and feeds it fresh food and holds it like a baby sometimes. Its heart is still racing from the fear of moments ago but there is also a warmth in its chest that is entirely new.)

Ms. Kang looks down at where it is sitting and frowns. "Your legs-- is the sleeping bag adequately protecting you from the Honmoon?"

Now, the demon should tell the truth, say that the bag protects it as much as it deserves, that the pain is bearable with these layers between itself and that burning gold. But it's not a lie to look at the ground and say, "it hurts." And, well. If that results in Ms. Kang sweeping it back up into her gentle arms and asking Rumi to "zip" two bags together. It that leads to Ms. Kang sliding into the combined bags with the demon curled up on top of her. Well. If that's what Ms. Kang thinks is best, then that's what's best.

The demon pays no heed to Rumi and Miyeong's whispered conversation. It is warm, and it is held, and it matches its breaths to Ms. Kang's as it drifts off into the best sleep it has ever had.

[kenkuheart]

Rumi just stands there, immobile, staring down the crazy lady advancing on them with a knife, so Mira yanks her out of the way and slides in between Rumi and this new threat. She’s done the same thing before a thousand times, easily, and Rumi should know by now how to use this opening to reposition. But the only sound is Rumi’s back thumping against the wall, and one set of footsteps getting closer to them.

Mira spares a second to glance over her shoulder and sees Rumi - eyes huge and white, one hand clutching at her chest, looking way too much like she had looked backstage at the Idol Awards with Takedown ringing in their ears.

“Just run,” Mira hisses. She can’t afford to check again to see if Rumi will - not now that Celine is moving to close the gap. Mira sweeps her arm, bringing the gok-do’s blade down in one smooth arc to make her back the fuck up.

“Mira, think about Zoey!” Celine calls out to her. “She needs you to focus on what’s real!”

(Behind her, Rumi lets out this choking sound which Mira still cannot afford to investigate.)

She thinks she can keep this Celine here for a little while at least - the kitchen door acts as a natural chokepoint, letting her keep Rumi safely behind her, and while she doesn’t have the same mobility as this Celine will, Mira’s gok-do gives her a much greater reach than the knife. Mira realises this, and she watches Celine realise it, and she knows that both of them are coming to the same conclusion: that, despite all the advantages of her weapon and the layout of the room and the unsteadiness from other Celine’s limp, Mira is going to lose.

Mira’s weapon is an extension of her soul. It had taken months of slow, humiliating progress, feeling like she was slamming her head into a brick wall to get even the tiniest wisp while starlight rushed to wrap itself around Rumi and Zoey’s hands. When she finally managed to do it, it had felt like opening a door and stepping into herself for the first time. Like Rumi and Zoey could see her properly, without any of the bullshit - her heart, her intention made real. 

Evil Celine is relying on a kitchen knife. But her weapon doesn’t have any inhibitions about hurting people. That’s what it comes down to.

Celine takes a series of small, fast steps forward, in and out of Mira’s range, jabbing towards her gok-do with the knife. For a second, it feels almost like they’re sparring again out in the courtyard, drilling the same footwork over and over again until Celine said the lesson was done for the day. It’s that ingrained muscle memory that’s sitting in the driving seat of Mira’s brain now, making her drop her knees low and swing the pole-arm up and across to block the blow. 

(“Please,” Rumi’s gasping from behind her. Not - Mira doesn’t think - to her, or even at Evil Celine. Mira hears it, and she mentally slots that away with all the other problems that need to be resolved later.)

Horrifyingly, Evil Celine gives Mira a short nod of approval. Then she moves backwards and drops into her own stance, knees bent, back ramrod-straight, feet parallel and pointing straight ahead. Mira’s feet unconsciously move to mirror Celine’s.

“Whatever you think you know about your ‘Rumi’, it’s just another of Gwi-Ma’s tricks,” Celine says, another quick jab that Mira easily parries. 

“How do you know you aren’t the one falling for Gwi-Ma’s trick right now?” Mira tries. “Attacking one of your own students - turning on another Hunter?”

“I know my duty,” Celine snaps, eyes flashing, and she makes another attack. Straightforward, another move that could have come straight out of their drills, bobs forward and slashes to one side, and Mira forces her backwards. Celine staggers back unsteadily, and the adrenaline rushing to Mira’s head wants to press the advantage. 

She doesn’t.

After a moment, Evil Celine drops the pretense and hops forward to make another series of quick thrusts with her knife - Mira moves her gok-do to block them easily, up, down, left, right, keeping her eyes on the blade exactly as Celine had drilled into her.

(“Watch the sword, not my arm, Mira,” Celine had said, tapping the flat of the blade against Mira’s shoulder to emphasise her point. “Don’t ever lose track of where the danger is.”

And Mira, like a good student, had learned her lesson.)

She watches the knife slash upwards, a wide telegraphed arc that Mira easily deflects, shifting her weight onto the balls of her feet to do so. Which is about the time Mira realises Evil Celine must remember having taught a similar lesson to her own Mira, judging from the left hook Celine’s empty hand sends crashing into the side of her head.

Pain explodes through her. Celine is inside her guard now, sending a second punch right on the heels of the first. It feels almost exactly like being hit by a small truck, and Mira staggers under the force of it. Her knees crumple, and the floor rushes up to meet her.

At that point, Mira figures it’s more about staying alive than anything else. She lets her gok-do fall, and blink out of existence before Evil Celine can get her hands on it, then rolls to one side as Evil Celine follows, her long legs pinning Mira into position as she raises the knife hand.

Mira doesn’t give a fuck about duty, not if this is what it looks like. But she knows her friends. She knows Rumi. And this Celine doesn’t have a clue.

Rumi’s hand closes around Celine’s wrist, the other wrapping around Celine’s upper arm, and she drags Celine off Mira and to the side. Rumi grunts softly as she uses her whole bodyweight to keep control of the knife arm, and to duck her head to avoid Celine raking her eyes. Mira rolls over, pushes herself up and promptly kicks Celine’s bad knee as hard as she can.

They make an undignified, slow mess of it - the real Celine, if she were here, would have something to say about their technique - but between the two of them, the knife is kicked out of reach and Evil Celine is effectively immobilised as Rumi grapples her into a mockery of a hug.

“All that talk about how dangerous Rumi is,” Mira scoffs. Now that there’s time to notice things about her body again, she notices the strong copper taste filling her mouth and she realises that her lip is bleeding. “And you didn’t think she might be stronger with a family who love her?”

Celine, like a coward, stays silent.

—

Celine sits alone in the kitchen and watches through the window as the lights in the bakgeori go out. There is another structure in the yard, set a few metres back from the angeori, which her brain skitters away from naming. She wants to scream, or hit something, or burn the whole building down, but she has spent the last three hours trying to calm two teenage girls who have every reason in the world not to trust her, and her anger would do nothing to make them feel better.

She doesn’t want to sleep. She doesn’t want to lay down in another bed without Miyeong, much less one that has been used by this Celine. But she doesn’t want to sit here either, staring at the blank spaces their family photos should fill.

Slowly, she walks over to the small hut the girls called the kennel.

The locks on the doors have been pried off, someone wanting to make sure the space couldn’t be reused easily. There would be nothing to stop her from going inside. 

Instead, she stands there and rests one hand against the wood. The first memory that comes to mind is of their old house, adopting the same posture outside the small playhouse where Rumi was hiding out with her sleeping bag and a backpack full of snacks. The boys had both been teething, and Miyeong had woken Celine up in a panic to say that Rumi had left a note saying that she was running away because they didn’t love her any more. Granted, they had soon discovered that Rumi’s version of running away hadn’t involved leaving their garden, but the panic had been immediate. Celine remembers how Rumi had shouted back to them that Celine didn’t care about her now that she had her own babies, and Miyeong had to hold her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. Celine remembers having wanted to laugh, too. It had seemed ridiculous at the time - they’d loved Rumi so much the whole Honmoon had turned gold as testament to just how loved she was.

It seems less ridiculous now. 

The first world had been bad enough, a Celine who had never done enough to protect their girl - not from her patterns, and not from the idol industry, and not from Celine herself if the three girls’ reactions had been anything to go by.

If she opens the door, she’ll have to know just how much worse things could have been. She’ll have to live with knowledge for the rest of her life. She’ll have to go home and look Rumi, Hajoon and Seojoon in the eyes; she’ll have to tell Miyeong exactly what she saw. Who Celine could have become without her.

—

Sunlight spills through the canvas tent, making the insides glow and the demon wakes up to the gentle sensation of someone stroking its back.

The demon, brain still fuzzy from sleep, glances up and sees Ms. Kang looking down at it. Sees, at the same time, how its sharp claws are grasping at Ms. Kang’s bloody shirt, how its sharper teeth have been allowed to dig against Ms. Kang’s throat.

It is going to be bad to Ms. Kang, just as it had been bad to Mira back when Mira first arrived at the hanok and had not understood what it meant for the demon to be a demon. It does not want to be bad, not if it means losing the warmth and the gentle touch, but even if it can still keep those things - how it has been allowed to keep them now, despite Ms. Kang’s blood under its nails - then it thinks that it still wants to not be bad.

(At the time, biting Mira hadn’t felt good. Mira had just been there, and her hands were right near its mouth, and its heart had been fast and sick in its throat, and there had been nothing stopping it from biting. So. And then the correction had also felt bad, and the way Mira had needed to show both the demon and Master that she would not make the same mistake again had felt bad, and then Mira had helped Zoey learn how the demon should be treated and that also involved a lot of feeling bad. 

But sometimes, in the in-between times, the demon had been able to look at Mira and remember the fright all over her face, and that part had not felt bad at all.)

The demon cannot be good, not the ways people can be good, but it wants. It wants. It wants Ms. Kang to know how much it wants, what it will do to keep her warm and close and safe from its horrible claws, for as long as Ms. Kang wants to be kept. So it shrinks back as much as it possibly can, sinks its teeth into its fingers to stop itself from biting and scratching, and rolls off Ms. Kang’s body onto the inside of their sleeping bag nest.

It cannot quite stop itself from whimpering as the burning starts.

“Oh, sweetheart, no,” Ms. Kang says. Her hands reach out towards it, but then stop, hovering in the air just a few inches from the demon’s shoulders. It could lean forward and be touching Ms. Kang. It could do it on purpose, to this woman who calls it sweetheart.

It doesn’t.

“I’m sorry,” Ms. Kang says, which makes no sense at all. “I know how difficult this must be but please let me hold you. Just until you’re safe. Please.”

The demon bites down even harder. It does not want to be bad– but Ms. Kang is asking, Ms. Kang is saying please like she wants something from the demon– and the demon is hurting and it does not have to hurt, not when Ms. Kang wants this – so it cannot be so bad to crawl away from the burning and onto Ms. Kang’s lap once again.

Ms. Kang does not hold it like a baby this time. Ms. Kang tries very hard not to touch it at all.

“Thank you,” she whispers to the demon all the same. “It’s just until we can get you someplace safe, where you won’t be hurt, and then you’ll never have to let me near you again, I promise.”

The demon makes a tiny high-pitched sound in the back of its throat, the kind that Master called manipulative, and Ms. Kang’s face crumples in on itself for the space of a heartbeat.

“Good girl,” she says, which makes even less sense than the apology.

Around its fingers, the demon mutters, “... don’t want to be bad.”

“What?”

It pulls its fingers away briefly. “I don’t want to be bad.” Pops them back in.

“You aren’t.”

“I need my muzzle,” the demon whispers, not bothering to remove its fingers at all. Ms. Kang does not correct it, but she does let out a small, sharp exhale.

The demon doesn't want to be bad to Ms. Kang, and the muzzle can stop it. Biting its hand can stop it, but only for as long as it takes for Ms. Kang to wrap her hands around each of the demons, tuck her thumb into the middle of the demon’s palm and gently tug its hands away from its unsafe mouth. Which is not very long at all.

(Ms. Kang’s hands are so warm. The demon feels every point of contact between its skin and Ms. Kang’s like a thousand fireflies, like every single part of it is bursting into light.)

“Need it to stop biting,” the demon says again, when Ms. Kang does not answer. Back before Ms. Kang came to their world, whining like this would have been dangerous and very bad indeed, but Ms. Kang just nods slowly.

“We can go and get it,” Ms Kang agrees. “If you think that it will help you feel safe, so you don’t bite yourself.”

(Another strange thing. The demon does not know if hearing all of Ms. Kang’s strange thoughts will ever feel normal.)

And then Ms. Kang says the very strangest thing of all. She looks at the demon and says, just as simply as she’d read off the names of all the snacks last night so the demon could choose: “But if you don’t want to wear it, maybe you’ll feel more comfortable knowing that you can bite me if you feel like you have to. What do you think?"

[zoloteh-volossya]

Zoey breaks the speed limit on every road from the store to the hanok.

There's a distant corner of her mind worrying about things like her reputation as an idol and how Celine (their Celine) will react if she comes back to tens of thousands of won worth of speeding tickets, but most of her attention is occupied by an all-consuming panic. After Mira's warning (a Celine who had killed her Rumi - an unthinkable idea; Zoey's mind skitters away from the full weight of it. Celine has always been such a steady - if not particularly affectionate - presence in Rumi's life, she cannot imagine--) they'd heard the scuffling and grunting sounds of combat. There had been a horrible crunch and Mira's unmistakable cry of pain and then nothing from the phone except for Celine's indistinct voice and then the Honmoon had started shuddering and shuddering and Rumi had sunk into it like a stone into water and left Zoey standing in the parking lot all alone.

Celine's trusty sensible sedan roars into the courtyard and Zoey barely remembers to put it in park before she is sprinting towards the angeori. Mira's phone lies abandoned on the porch, call still connected. Nearby, there's a small blood spatter (too small to be from anything serious, Zoey thinks, hopes, prays, but Mira has always been the weakest of them when it came to hand-to-hand, and there are many many ways to hurt someone that don't involve too much blood). The hallway is empty as Zoey barrels through it but she sees a blur of color in the kitchen and skids in to find Mira and Rumi (both still alive, thank god) in an inelegant heap on top of this version of Celine. Zoey's heart is still beating a mile a minute in her chest as she notes the kitchen knife lying on the floor less than a meter from this Celine's outstretched arm, the rapidly purpling bruise around Mira's neck, and the blood covering Mira's face.

"Zoey," shouts the imposter Celine, "help me! You cannot let yourself be fooled! The one you call Rumi is a demon!"

"Yeah," says Zoey distantly, remembering that awful moment behind the stage of the Idol Awards, how Rumi's patterns had glowed a lurid pink as her voice tore the Honmoon, how Zoey had raised her shin-kal and nearly... "We know that."

Those selfsame patterns are nothing but pale scars now, occasionally flickering with the light of their new Honmoon. They're on full display as Rumi's muscles bulge from the effort of holding this Celine's arm flat on the floor (away from the knife, which doesn't make any sense, she can summon her ssang-geum, why would she need to grab a knife?)

(No demons have gotten through their new Honmoon. That she'd gone for a knife at all means that she really had been trying to kill--)

"I'll, uh, go get the rope," Zoey offers. She was a Girl Scout; she knows her knots. She doesn't know how to hogtie a person, but thankfully there are a number of helpfully illustrated websites on the internet with extremely detailed instructions on that very topic! Celine fights it with an animal desperation, but there's not much she can do once it's the three of them against her.

Zoey cannot shake the feeling of horrible wrongness as she looks down at their seonsaengnim, trussed up on the floor like an animal and glaring up at Rumi with a hatred that Zoey has never seen on Celine's face before. She cannot square the glowering woman on the floor with the first person to truly look at Zoey and see someone worthy of attention. (She's never ever told anybody, but she used to envy Rumi her parental guardian - Celine had been strict, yes, but she'd also always been so clearly proud of everything she had accomplished, had been present in Rumi's life in a way that Zoey's parents never quite managed.) This stranger is far more alien than even the weepy crier, because the Celine Zoey knows would never, ever raise a weapon against Rumi.

Or Mira. With the threat taken care of (and Zoey cannot believe she's thinking about Celine like that now), she can turn her attention to her partners. Rumi looks shaken but uninjured. Mira, on the other hand, looks awful. Her nose has clearly been broken in at least two places, the blood trailing down her face to join with the blood from her lip, which has split. Her face is rapidly bruising around her nose, her mouth, and at least one black eye. What's most frightening, though, is the ring of bruises - already purpling ominously - all around her neck.

"Oh my god, Mira, are you okay!?" asks Zoey, "Your neck, your voice..."

Mira winces. "I'm fine," she croaks, and winces again.

"I'm sorry," says Rumi, and she looks stricken. "I don't know what happened, I just froze, I--"

"Came through when I needed you," rasps Mira. "Twice."

Rumi still looks guilty, and Zoey tries to smile at her encouragingly. Having your not-mom genuinely trying to kill you is probably incredibly traumatic, it makes sense that tripped Rumi up.

"I'll grab the first aid kit," she offers, because Mira's injures do need to be looked at.

"Good idea," says Rumi, stepping forward and reaching her arms out to Mira's face. "We'll need to reset your nose."

"Stay away from them!" shouts Celine. "Mira, do not let it touch you!"

There is genuine fear - and concern? - on Celine's face when Zoey turns to look at her. Which is nonsense, because, "You're the one who did this to her!"

"Unfortunate but necessary. I just needed her to stay down long enough for me to deal with the demon. Once it's gone its hold on you will fade." The impostor meets Rumi's gaze and her beautiful face twists into a sneer that Zoey has never seen on their Celine, not even when she was talking about shareholders. "The me of this world should have killed you long before things got to this point."

"Hey!" snaps Zoey; Mira steps between this evil Celine and Rumi protectively.

And Rumi says, "I asked her to."

---*---*---

Bobby practically skips through his morning routine. He'd been called directly! By Kang Celine!! It's an open secret in the industry that she is planning to debut a successor trio to the Sunlight Sisters, one she's scouted herself and personally trained. And somehow, she knows about him and wants him to be involved!

Well, maybe. Everything depends on if he can ace the interview and impress Kang-nim and the group. It's his best opportunity since his disagreements with (and subsequent ejection from) his previous company, and his savings are running low. No pressure!

He runs the comb through his slicked-back hair one last time and adjusts the lapels of his best suit. It sits awkwardly on him now - he's put on weight since he last wore it. The part of him that will always be an idol despairs, before he shoves that voice all the way into the back of his mind. He'd never say such things to one of his charges, so he shouldn't be thinking that way about himself. 

Punctuality is very important, especially for a manager, so Bobby gets to the interview location - an office building in Gangnam - 17 minutes early, and then waits around the corner until 10 minutes before the meeting time to actually walk in. Kang-nim arrives shortly afterwards, followed by two teenage girls - one with long, shockingly pink hair and the other wearing baggy pants and a shirt that Bobby struggles to describe for a moment before settling on "stylistically interesting."

"Shin Byeongmin?" Bobby would never say it aloud but Kang-nim looks tired as she addresses him. Her makeup is expertly applied but cannot quite hide the deep bags under her eyes, and her eyes themselves look bloodshot. "It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I'd like to introduce you to Mira and Zoey."

Bobby smiles widely and bows. "The pleasure is all mine! You can call me 'Bobby.'" The girls smile back at him, but their expressions are strained. 

Kang-nim gestures to an upholstered chair. "Please, sit." She takes the other upholstered chair, and the girls both sit at one end of the fancy couch that takes up much of the room. The first questions are ones that Bobby anticipated - about his idol career (brief), his experience with management (likewise), the reasons for his departure (raising too many concerns about his charges' schedule), his priorities as a manager (his groups' wellbeing and success). The following questions make sense but are oddly specific - how he would handle a situation in which the group is late to a performance (profuse apologies), whether he has first aid training (yes?), would he enforce a diet mandated by the label (he hesitates at this, but ultimately that was part of what drove him from his last job, so he says no and is relieved by the pleased smile that spreads over Celine-nim's face). The oddest thing about the interview is how distant Kang-nim seems. She asks the questions but often doesn't seem like she's fully following his responses, as if her mind is elsewhere.

Once Kang-nim finishes her apparent list of questions, she turns to him and asks if he has any questions for them. Bobby flashes her a smile and turns to the girls. 

"I'd love to get to know you! Could you tell me a bit about yourselves?"

"Mira," says the girl with pink hair, folding her arms. "I dance." Bobby is surprised by her curtness, but maybe she's going for the cool girl archetype? It's not as broadly popular an archetype but fans who like it tend to be very dedicated. He can work with that. 

"Hi! I'm Zoey!" The girl with the interesting fashion sense smiles widely. "I'm from California and I'm a rapper! I'm also a lyricist and I do some production work and know how to play piano and violin. My hobbies include martial arts, parkour, skateboarding, and surfing and I really like turtles! Uh. Yeah!" She pumps her arm at the end, and-- it's cute. She's definitely the maknae of the duo(?). But there's something stilted and slightly manic about her demeanor. It's not genuine, she's forcing it, and she can tell he can tell because she mostly manages to stifle a wince once she's done. Mira shifts over towards her so that their legs are touching in a silent comfort and she relaxes slightly.

If Bobby is completely honest, he expected better of two trainees who had been singled out for training by Kang Celine herself. The Sunlight Sisters had been legendary in their prime, and he has to admit he was expecting to be meeting lightning in a bottle today. But! That's OK! He'll do his best for these girls regardless. 

"That's really cool! I'd love to hear some of your songs," he tells Zoey, and then turns to Mira with, "and see you on stage." He then turns back towards Kang-nim and takes a bit of a risk. "I am curious, though, Kang-nim. You've made it clear that you are planning to debut a trio. Is that still--" Both girls immediately stiffen, and Bobby stops, realizing that he has strayed into something sensitive. 

Kang-nim's face slides into a carefully expressionless mask, though her eyes seem pained. "Yes, that was the plan. Unfortunately, the third member of the group is no longer in this world."

Oh. Shit. "My sincerest condolences," Bobby says, painfully aware that he has royally overstepped. No wonder the girls seemed off, if their groupmate had died recently. When did it happen, that it was still affecting them so? His mouth moves before his brain can catch up, and he finds himself saying, "When did—" He cuts himself off in horror, but it's too late. 

"Yesterday," says Mira tersely, and what the fuck. What the fuck!? Their groupmate and presumed friend died yesterday and they were still meeting their prospective manager like nothing had happened!? What was Kang-nim thinking, she... she had kept performing after the death of Ryu Miyeong, hadn't she? Is she that dedicated to the business?!

Fuck it. Bobby has already stepped in it so soundly this interview that there is no chance he's landing the job. Might as well try and say, "Kang-nim, are you sure it is a good idea to be having these sorts of meetings so soon after that? They should have time to grieve."

"Unfortunately, we don't have that sort of time. I'd already begun making arrangements for their debut. They'll be moving into the company dorms tomorrow." Kang-nim grimaces. "They need to launch soon if they're to be positioned to compete in next year's Idol Awards."

Bobby cannot believe what he's hearing. "Surely a couple of weeks is not too much of a delay. Kang-nim, you know what it is like to lose a groupmate, surely--"

Kang-nim freezes at that. Bullseye. She takes a deep breath, looks over at the two girls curled up together on the couch, and says, "The best way to deal with such feelings is to be so busy you don't have time to wallow in them."

Which. Certainly explains some things.

Before Bobby can come up with a suitable retort, all three women's heads snap towards the window in unison.

"Excuse me," says Kang-nim. "I need to step out and attend to something. Girls, you stay here and ask Bobby-nim any questions you have for him." She strides authoritatively out of the room, leaving Bobby alone with two grieving girls on a couch.

An awkward silence descends upon the room. At a loss for what to do - he's a stranger to these girls, it's not his place to offer comfort - Bobby deploys his time-tested teen taming technique. "Do you girls want some snacks?"

The two of them look at each other, and then back at him. Zoey nods.

The office building has, in its lobby, a basket of complimentary snacks. Bobby, confident in the knowledge that he is not getting hired here, swipes the entire thing and slinks back to the office.

Mira and Zoey demolish a box of Pepero together, and it gladdens Bobby's heart to see them perk up a bit. Then they inhale another. And another. In the end they work their way through over half the basket before they finally slow down.

"I do have a question," says Zoey as she finishes a bag of turtle chips. "If we wanted to donate a third of our profits to charity, could we do that?"

"Of course," says Bobby, wondering why they were asking him, "once you've paid off your debt to the label."

"That'll be quick, since Celine covered our training," says Mira.

"Do you have an idea of what charities you'd be interested in supporting?" Bobby asks.

Mira and Zoey glance at each other, and then Zoey looks away, shoulders rising. "Support for victims of domestic violence," says Mira eventually. "Shelters and stuff, I guess?"

Bobby keeps his smile fixed on his face, but a chill runs down his spine. The third member of their group just died - young, only a teenager - and they were talking about donating a third of their money to combating domestic violence. What happened to their third!? He'd assumed that it had been an accident or a disease, but now...

He doesn't get a chance to ask. Kang-nim strides back into the room, for some reason limping slightly. "Well, girls," she says, "what do you think?"

They meet each other eyes. Mira nods, and then Zoey joins in. Their smiles towards Bobby are small, but genuine.

"Congratulations, Shin-maenijonim," says Kang-nim. "I'll send you the details later today." She claps a hand on his shoulder. "Take good care of them."

"We'll be in your care!" say Mira and Zoey, bowing.

Bobby's mind spins as he automatically bows back. He's utterly baffled - he argued with his interviewer and still ended up hired!?

... He should maybe apologize for swiping the snack basket.

---*---*---

"Absolutely not," says eomma, sitting up in her sleeping bag. "What in the world are you thinking, Celine?"

"I am thinking that I have hurt this child horribly," says not-maman, "and now she is being forced into constant contact with me. It would be understandable for her to--"

"She's a demon, not an idiot," says Rumi, and not-maman turns towards her, frowning at the interruption. "It's clear she knows you're the one who got her out of that situation, not the one who did all that to her."

Rumi is much more familiar with animals than people (are demons people? or do they lose something in the becoming?) but it's very clear from the way that demon-her flinches and cowers that she is terrified of people in general and of immediate painful punishment of any sort of mistake in particular. It... weighs on Rumi, that the other maman, who had been so kind and attentive to her, must have been the cause. That the only reason she had been nice to Rumi was the golden honmoon. That any version of maman at all would be capable of the sort of cruelty that would inspire such fear.

But this version of maman has been nothing but gentle with demon-Rumi, and demon-Rumi obviously can tell the difference between them. Rumi has been volunteering at an animal shelter since she was 14 years old, she knows what an animal that does not want to be held acts like. Demon-her certainly behaves oddly at times (chewing on her fingers - a stress response? anxiety?) but she hasn't been tense or fidgeting or looking for a way out of the hold. It's silly for this maman to think that--

Except, Rumi realizes with horror, it's not. Because this maman had hurt a Rumi. Had raised her without eomma, as her only mother, had obviously loved her deeply despite the whole demon thing, for her grief to be so apparent. And then... how had she described it last night? The patterns had spread, that version of Rumi had transformed into a demon, had been destroying the Honmoon. Rumi knows what must have happened next.

She tries to imagine her maman in that same position, and realizes immediately that being forced to kill Rumi would have broken her. To then be dropped into a world with a version of her daughter that looks just like hers had in her final moments? One who has been terribly abused, by another version of herself?

A great deal of this maman's behavior suddenly makes horrible sense.

(Rumi doesn't really remember having patterns. She remembers remembering having had patterns, remembers the palatable relief surrounding her childhood and how her mothers had doted and fussed over her in a way they never really had for Hajoon and Seojoon. But it was a risk, past tense, that held no weight on her current life. It's only now that she's realizing the true magnitude of that little patch of discolored skin. She is a success story, but this maman had no eomma to turn the Honmoon gold with, had ran out of time during her attempt with the next generation, and her Rumi had died for that failure. And the previous maman--no, the previous Celine--hadn't even tried, and now Rumi is looking at what she would have become, if it were not for her parents' efforts and a mystical barrier she cannot even see.)

Before not-maman can reply - or scold her for her rudeness - Rumi shimmies out of the sleeping bag and unzips the tent. Demon-Rumi's muzzle is sitting on a stump nearby, covered with a layer of morning dew, which Rumi wipes off to the best of her ability. The demon snatches it out of her hands once she returns, buckling it on with obvious relief on her face.

The demon curling up to fiddle with her muzzle gives Rumi a clearer view of not-maman, sitting up from the sleeping bag in her torn and bloody shirt. Demon-her doesn't seem malicious, but her claws have done quite a bit of damage regardless. If this were the shelter, Rumi would just clip them, but--

Wait.

She can just clip them.

"We should go to my apartment," she says.

This version of maman seems to consider it, before shaking her head. "We need to stay on Jeju. I don't want to be too far from the dangsan namu, I think my... world shifting... is tied to it."

"Good thing I live in Jeju city, then," says Rumi, and not-maman blinks at her in mild surprise. "It's farther from the the hanok than we are now, but still on the island. It has a toilet, a shower, a refrigerator, a couch to sleep on, central heating, changes of clothes, we wouldn't have to hike for an hour just to bring things to you..."

"It's a good idea, Celine-ah," says eomma, and that seals the deal. While eomma and Sunmi-imo set about disassembling the tent, Rumi heads down the mountain to fetch her car (and call Young-min to beg him to take notes for her in the classes that she'll be missing while dealing with this situation). She's never been more thankful that her mothers overrode her desire to live like all the other students and insisted on renting an apartment for her. She would NOT be able to explain this to a dormmate.

Rumi's car is a trusty sensible sedan that her parents got her once she'd learned to drive. She'd wanted something fancier (or at least faster) (they could certainly afford it) and maman had almost agreed, but eomma had pulled up a website of accident safety statistics and that had been that. While the car is technically capable of seating five people, it's a tight fit, especially since demon-Rumi still needs to sit on maman's lap instead of the middle seat.

Demon-her seems spooked by the car. She glances around herself frantically as not-maman slides in, then freezes when not-maman draws the seatbelt across her back. Rumi tries to drive as carefully and smoothly as she can, which is difficult on the potholed gravel roads leaving the hanok. The roads get better as they get closer to Jeju City, though, and while demon-her still has her head buried in non-maman's shoulder when they finally pull up to Rumi's apartment complex, she is staring out the window with unconcealed curiosity when Rumi gets out to open the door for them.

Rumi had been concerned about how they were going to go about sneaking the very odd-looking version of herself into her apartment, but thankfully it's quite easy. Not-maman had changed into a clean shirt up on the mountain, and demon-Rumi is wearing an old hoodie of Rumi's, and with her face pressed firmly into not-maman's shoulder the muzzle isn't really visible at all during the brief climb up the stairs.

Once in the apartment, not-maman sits herself and the demon down on Rumi's couch with an audible exhalation of relief. Sunmi-imo checks not-maman's shoulders for fresh scratches, but it seems that demon-Rumi kept her hands balled into fists for the entirety of the hike and car ride. When not-maman gently unfolds them, there are puncture marks in her palms.

Sunmi-imo sighs and pulls out the first aid kit again, while Rumi goes to the cabinet where she keeps supplies for her cat, Derpy. Her nail clippers are sized for a cat, not a demon, but you work with what you have. She also grabs her nail file and, on a whim, some bottles of nail polish.

Not-maman and eomma are talking in low tones as Rumi walks back into the room. Demon-Rumi is perched rather precariously on not-maman's legs, staring wide-eyed down at Derpy, who is currently asleep in Rumi's knocked over waste basket (again).

"Hey." Rumi plops herself down beside her alternate universe self. Not-Rumi immediately averts her eyes. Rumi fixes her dealing-with-nervous-shelter-visitors smile to her face and says, "Can I clip your claws?"

"...Clip?" asks Demon-Rumi.

"Trim the ends off." Rumi helpfully holds up the clippers for demonstration.

Not-Rumi recoils, pulling both hands against her chest and curling up around them. She looks up at not-maman, who says, "That's not necessary."

"Why not?" asks eomma.

Sunmi-imo folds her arms. "It's a good idea, unnie. She scratched you up pretty thoroughly yesterday." The demon curls in on herself further, darting a guilty glance to not-maman's shoulders.

"She should be able to defend herself."

"From what!?"

"Me."

"Unnie, you cannot seriously believe--"

As an argument breaks out above them, the demon licks her lips (stress signal, Rumi thinks) and whispers, "I don't want to be bad." She thrusts one trembling arm out towards Rumi and screws her eyes shut, obviously bracing herself. "...Cut them off."

"Great!" Rumi chirps, and gently takes the proffered hand. It's shaking so badly she has to steady it with one hand as she takes a look at what she's working with. The claws are unlike any she's ever seen before - there's no clear demarcation where the skin ends and the keratin sheathe begins. Instead, the tapered point of the claw seems to extend smoothly out of the tip of each finger. She has no idea where the distal phalange ends (does it extend further than is typical for a human finger bone in order to support the claw structure?) and the deep purple color means she can't see the quick.

For safety's sake, Rumi decides to just take off the minimum required to dull the claws. The demon flinches violently at the first cut, and Rumi grasps her hand more firmly and hurries through the rest of the claws, trying to get it done before she changes her mind. By the end, though, the demon has relaxed a bit and opened her eyes to watch, so instead of hurrying to the next hand Rumi pulls out the nail file and smooths the cut edges into a nice gentle curve.

When that hand is done, the demon presents the other without a fuss. She smiles down at her trimmed claws once they're complete, and then excitedly turns to show them to not-maman.

"Look! I can't hurt you anymore."

Not-maman looks... slightly pained, but the corners of her eyes crease with affection regardless. (Behind her, Sunmi-imo looks smug.) "I can see that."

The demon whirls back around to face Rumi, and then begins scrabbling at her muzzle. After a moment she is able to unbuckle it, at which point she - holy FUCK - unhinges her jaw in a way no human ever could. Rumi jerks back from the mouthful of very sharp teeth that suddenly appear right in her face and there is a blur of motion as eomma lunges--

The demon shrieks as she is hauled backwards off of not-maman's lap onto the floor of Rumi's apartment. She desperately tries to scrabble off the linoleum but eomma is holding her down, golden light swirling around her other hand, coalescing into the shape of an arrow. As Rumi gapes at what must be a Honmoon weapon, not-maman tackles eomma, shoving her off of the demon and sending them both crashing to the floor.

(On the rare occasions where Rumi has seen her parents fight, it has always been in terse sentences and strained silences, a couple days of tension in the house before they reconcile and everything is right again. It has never been like this, eomma with a weapon, maman wrenching her arm behind her back and pinning her to the linoleum, eomma shouting It tried to eat my daughter, maman's eyes wide and teeth bared.)

The demon lurches upright as soon as she's freed, and while Rumi cannot see the Honmoon she can see how the demon's flesh immediately begins to redden and char. (Sunmi-imo wades into the fight and oh god Rumi's parents are physically fighting each other--) Rumi reaches out and pulls the her demon-self into her lap. Demon-Rumi falls into it willingly, her new position placing those tusks of hers right by Rumi's neck. But she doesn't do anything there except gasp and whine in pain, newly-trimmed claws scrabbling harmlessly against Rumi's back. (Sunmi-imo successfully hauls maman off of eomma, but earns an elbow to the stomach for her troubles and doubles over and maman is winding up for another blow and Rumi yells--)

"STOP!"

[kenkuheart]

Mira makes a sound like a deflating balloon and Zoey whirls around so quickly that she loses her balance and accidentally smacks this other Celine, and then they’re both looking at Rumi.

Looking at her, because they know.

Which. Okay. Rumi said it so that— So that someone would know, even if this Celine isn’t the same Celine who looked at her, or didn’t look at her, and took the sword Rumi held out to her, and—

“Asked her to what?” Zoey’s eyes are huge and wet.

Rumi looks away.

"Rumi?"

"Don't let it trick you, Zoey, it's just--"

"If you don't shut the fuck up, I will gag you," Zoey spits out, furious and verging on hysterical. "Rumi, what do you mean, you asked?"

Rumi's shoulders have risen, unbidden, all the way up to her ears. She tries to shrug, because that feels like the kind of thing that someone unbothered would have, but instead the movement feels all tight and jerky and her body folds in on itself.

She's calm and in control. So. She straightens up. “I’ll get the first aid kit.”

“Don’t—“ Mira starts to say but then she breaks off as her nose makes this wet, crunching noise that sounds like it hurts.

(For Rumi. Because of Rumi. Because there was a Celine who looked at her Rumi and saw the patterns and did what Hunters were supposed to do.)

(Rumi. After a moment. Remembers to breathe.)

By the time she gets back, Zoey and Mira have dragged the other Celine into the pantry and are standing in the kitchen, staring at the door like they're scared she's going to break out and do something.

They are scared, Rumi realises. They're scared of this Celine.

She kind of wants to laugh. She kind of wants to cry. She kind of wants to go to this other Celine and tell her everything's going to be okay, which is - okay, probably not what someone coping well would think, Rumi knows that much, but--

Rumi understands, is the thing.

It's fine. This Celine is just. Fine. Not evil or crazy or whatever. Someone gave her a thing that looked like a baby except it had demon patterns, and so she'd fixed the problem the way Hunters were supposed to fix that kind of problem, and that had been that. It makes sense.

Rumi's hands are shaking. The room starts to sway. Adrenaline crash, the part of her brain that's still vaguely aware of her own body tells her, and Zoey's hands are guiding her to sit down and focus on the breathing techniques Celine drilled into them when they were teens. Other Celine cries out, begging Mira to get Zoey away from Rumi, and they all ignore her.

(Celine doesn't say 'Rumi'.)

(Maybe that's better. A version of herself so young she didn't even have a name yet. This Celine would have seen the patterns and realised what she had to do, and never needed to doubt her decision.)

Infuriatingly enough, the stupid nostril breathing thing that they have happily made fun of for years actually works, and by the time Rumi feels like herself Zoey's already finished tending to Mira.

"We can't keep her tied up forever."

"The fuck we can't," Mira snaps back. Or tries to, anyway; her voice comes out all stuffy and nasal and partly muffled by the ice pack she's holding to her face.

"Call it a citizen's arrest for beating the crap out of Mira--" Zoey begins. Mira makes a disgruntled noise but doesn't object. "-- But Mean Celine is staying right there until we can kick her ass home. She tried to kill you and newsflash, Rumi, we're not okay with that!"

As gently as she can, which isn’t very gently at all right now, Rumi says, "I am."

"Rumi--"

"I have to be," Rumi says. Her voice hitches, which isn't fair, because she's okay with this. She's okay with knowing that there is a version of Celine who killed her Rumi as a baby and another Celine who calls her Rumi her daughter, and Rumi's own Celine, lost in some other world, who didn't love her but couldn't kill her. Who did everything to protect the Honmoon right up until the moment it most needed protecting, and then hadn't done anything at all.

--------

As they follow after New Celine, Zoey grabs hold of Mira's hand and Mira tangles their fingers together and squeezes tight. It's the kind of thing they've done billions of times already, but it hits differently now.

Now she knows, doesn't she? Mira is it, for Zoey. All she's ever going to get. And Zoey has to try and be everything for Mira, too, because they're never going to find the third part of their harmony.

Zoey's inner soundtrack makes a giant comedy record scratch sound effect at that thought.

They had found their third, hadn't they? Sort of. They knew where their third was the whole time they'd known each other, at least, even if they hadn't known that was who Rumi was, or that she was even enough of a person to be Rumi and not the demon in the first place. She was never lost, not the way she is now, and she wasn't doing any kind of 'Someday my prince will come, if by prince you mean two teenage idols with magic weapons' montage.

Mira must feel the shudder Zoey's trying to suppress, because she squeezes their hands together again, so tight that it starts to hurt. The pain helps - it's grounding, somehow, drawing Zoey's attention away from her inner monologue and back to her body, and she bumps her shoulder against Mira's arm in a silent thank you.

"How bad was the fight?" Mira says, as soon as they're out of earshot.

"We were lucky," New Celine answers, and it doesn't look like she's avoiding their eyes exactly but she also isn't meeting them. "Not very many."

"But you got hurt."

New Celine does something with her face, and her tone gets sharper in a way that would have had Mira and Zoey apologising and preparing to run extra laps if this Celine was still their teacher. "It's been more than twenty years since I’ve even seen a demon. Forgive me if I'm a little rusty."

But this Celine isn't theirs, and as soon as she sees the way Zoey's shoulders scrunch at the sound of her disapproval, she closes her eyes and holds her hand to her mouth like she thinks she might be about to throw up.

"... Um, should we get you some water, or–?"

"No," Celine says. Her voice is distant, and she keeps her eyes closed, but she does at least drop her hand. "No, I'm sorry, girls, I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”

Like what? Zoey wonders, and she knows from the answering crease in Mira’s brow that this is something the two of them will save to rehash later.

“It’s fine!” she says, brightly. Mira doesn’t answer but she does give New Celine one of her disaffected one-shoulder shrugs that look cool and elegant when Mira does them and vaguely twitchy when Zoey tries to copy her. They’re both meant to convey the same thing, she thinks.

New Celine just sighs.

“Change of plans, I think,” she tells them both, and leads them back towards the exit. A few of the employees they pass bow in greeting but New Celine either doesn’t see them or doesn’t care if they think she’s rude since Real Celine will be the one living with the consequences. Mira and Zoey don’t have that luxury and have to scramble to catch up with New Celine’s long strides.

“What - oof - What kind of change, ssaem?”

“Weapons practice?” Mira asks, not quietly enough for the receptionist to not turn to stare at them.

“For self-defence!” Zoey hurries to add. It’s the lie that the Real Celine has used on occasion too, and the receptionist reacts the way people always do, that look of understanding and sudden sympathy as they remember what happened to the other Sunlight Sisters.

The memory makes Zoey’s stomach clench. None of those people know anything about Rumi, about the kennel. If they did–

(Zoey had known, and she’d still–)

“No weapons,” New Celine tells them. “Actually I was planning on taking you to open new bank accounts–”

New bank accounts? Zoey mouths to Mira, who pulls the face that means Zoey’s missed something that Mira will have to explain later. 

“We can do that any time, we need to learn how to fight.”

New Celine doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at Mira’s impatience. Maybe that’s a good thing, Zoey doesn’t know, but New Celine has been doing this thing where she doesn’t quite look at them, doesn’t quite look away either, and the lack of reaction is starting to make Zoey’s stomach twist. 

“Why do you need to know how to fight?”

“Uh, because of all the demons?”

“Just the bad ones!” Zoey yelps. “Just the bad ones, not any nice demons!”

Zoey doesn’t need an explainer for the look on New Celine’s face at that. For a moment, New Celine looks almost exactly like their own, the nights when she would leave them alone in the hanok while she went to pay respects at the graveyard, and Zoey and Mira would stay up late watching movies and promising that they would never leave each other or their third partner all alone. And Rumi had been– Chained up. Outside in the kennel, probably. Zoey can’t even be sure of that in her own memories, because if she hadn’t been specifically told to supervise the demon then it had been easier to ignore it.

“Guess again” is all New Celine says to that.

The change of plans is, apparently, bringing them to a nearby park. It’s busier than Zoey would have guessed, since it’s the middle of the working day, but there are a lot of moms and their little kids, and for a second Zoey thinks about joking with Mira about what the mom collective must be thinking about them, but right before she puts the biggest, stinkiest foot in her mouth to ever be put, she remembers—

This Celine is Rumi’s mom.

She pokes at that thought a bit more, and it feels like prodding a bruise. Rumi’s mom made us dinner. Rumi’s mom is going to help us move into the trainee dorms. Rumi’s mom brought us to the park, even though she knows what we did to her daughter.

Celine sits directly on the grass. Zoey follows immediately, dropping into the familiar posture, back straight, eyes closed, hands folded – she can do this, she can be good enough, she can learn from Rumi’s mom and take it seriously and not ruin everything. She can.

They wait, perfectly quiet, for Celine to tell them if there’s something specific she wants them to meditate on or if she just wants them to strengthen their connection to the Honmoon. And then they keep waiting, and wait some more, and Zoey tries to empty her mind as best she can but it’s hard when her head is superimposing Rumi’s mom, Rumi’s mom, this is Rumi’s mom over every memory she has of Rumi.

Eventually, she cracks open one eyelid and sees that Celine isn’t paying any attention to them at all. Zoey isn’t sure if she’s just lost in thought or genuinely people-watching, but after a moment, Celine (Rumi’s mom, her brain supplies, unhelpfully) notices Zoey’s eyes on her and gives her a very small, very sad smile.

“You girls aren’t too tired?”

Mira just blinks at her. “For sitting in a park? I think we can cope.”

“Um, why did you bring us here, anyway? Is it special to the Honmoon or something?”

“Not to my knowledge.” New Celine, as she has done all day, doesn’t quite look at them when she answers. “Do you see the people down there?”

Zoey shifts to get a better look. There are some toddlers chasing each other around the climbing frame, a mom pushing her daughter on the swings. A few more kids crouched down to poke at something in the grass, and someone’s mom yelling at them to leave whatever it is alone. Further away from the play equipment, spreading out along the same slope that they’re sitting on now, there are clusters of students chatting and eating snacks. An elderly couple in full hiking gear are making their way along the hiking trail.

If there’s something weird about them, Zoey can’t see it. They look just like people. Normal people.

“I… think so?” Zoey tries.

Mira, who complained that her glasses didn’t match the girl crush aesthetic she was going for, says nothing. 

“Hunters are supposed to come in threes, for balance, and that hasn’t been the case in your world for a long time. You’re about to inherit a Honmoon that’s already very badly damaged, and you won’t be able to repair it without– As a duo.”

The without, from Rumi’s mom, rings in Zoey’s ears, and her stomach feels all knotted, so Zoey scrambles for the right thing to say.

“We know!” Is her smile too big? She means for it to be reassuring, like she understands the responsibility she’s taking on, but Celine and Mira don’t smile back. “I mean, we know it’s going to be tough, but we’ve got each other, right?”

“Duh,” Mira says, and Zoey feels her grin get less stiff.

(She knows, yeah. It’s still nice to hear.)

But New Celine hasn’t quite finished yet. She looks down at the little babies playing in the sun, the couples lying on the grass, the old man holding hands with his wife, and says, “A lot of people are going to die.”

Zoey feels herself jerk backwards at that, like New Celine’s just punched her right in the solar plexus. For a second, it feels like all the blood in her body rushes to her face, and she’s left reeling, trying to find steady ground beneath her.

“Most of them will be strangers,” New Celine is continuing, her voice sounding very far away. “To everyone else, they’ll just disappear. You’ll hear about them on the news, see their families pleading for information, and you’ll have to live with the knowledge that you didn’t save them, and get up the next day and do it all over again.”

Zoey shakes her head, which means nothing. Shakes to shake, to stop her hands from shaking, she doesn’t know. Mira clutches Zoey’s arm and Zoey clings back to her as well, and they both just sit there, holding one another in the middle of the park.

“Why are you telling us this?”

For maybe the first time all day, Celine meets her eyes properly and Zoey can see how red they are.

Rumi’s mom, you’re looking at Rumi’s mom–

“You need to be prepared,” Celine tells them. “When everything goes wrong. When it all seems hopeless. When Gwi-Ma talks to you both, tells you that you should just give in, that what happened to your Rumi is causing this. You need to know…”

She trails off, and Zoey feels her attention slide right past the two of them, down towards the little kids playing in the dirt. A little girl in a puffy pink coat is holding something up to show her mom - a stone, maybe, or a leaf. Zoey used to have a little jewellery box she filled with cool rocks and shells she found. She hasn’t thought about that in years.

“You need to believe there are things in this world worth fighting for,” New Celine eventually settles on.

--------

The Hunters freeze at Rumi’s shout and so does Ms.Kang, shoving the curly-haired Hunter away from her. Away from the demon.

“I have DOWNSTAIRS NEIGHBOURS!”

Ms.Kang turns towards the demon - who cannot get away, is stuck between the shouting and the angry Hunters and the burning and a familiar white-hot tension in master’s face, and the demon is bad, the demon is bad, the demon is bad—

And then Ms.Kang’s hands are hauling it up away from Rumi, who is still yelling something the demon does not understand about her security deposit, and drags the demon down the hall and into the bathroom. The demon is bad and snivelling and manipulative, the demon is bad and it needs to be corrected, and Ms. Kang shoves the demon into the shower cubicle and turns on the cold water and takes the soft sweatshirt it had been allowed to wear because it is bad and it is not allowed nice things, and it is bad.

It is bad, and its chest hurts to be bad, and it hurts because Ms. Kang—

It hurts. The demon is choking on it, how much it hurts, and its chest is aching, and noises are coming up out of its throat unbidden, and it is bad, and it cannot stop. Its head hurts and its stomach hurts and it is wailing in a way that cannot be allowed, and Ms. Kang is leaving it there in the cold–

The demon flings its arms out towards Ms. Kang, who tries to say something. The demon does not know what it is – it is not listening; it is bad – but Ms. Kang catches hold of both the demon’s wrists and holds it there, under the cold water, while the demon shakes.

The Hunters know. The long-haired one Rumi calls eomma. Miyeong, the Hunter it killed.

They know, and they know that the demon needs to be killed, and Ms. Kang–

Ms. Kang—

An animal howl rips out of its throat. Ms. Kang stares at it, still gripping its arms, mouth open as she says more words the demon cannot take in. It feels as though the sound has jarred something loose inside its chest, every bad demon thought it has ever tried to keep secret, and all of them are trying to spill out of its mouth at once. The demon howls again, and chokes on it, and tries to pull its arms free, and snaps with its ugly sharp teeth at the air, and Ms. Kang does not let go.

Ms. Kang does not let the demon go.

The demon does not know how long they stay there, in the cold and wet, only that at some point the shower is turned off and Ms. Kang releases its arms before another violent sob tears out of its mouth again, and it collapses into her lap.

The demon is crying, it realises.

It doesn’t know if it has cried before. It knows that it has never been allowed. But they know it is bad - the Hunters, who know it killed one of them – and Ms. Kang, who–

Ms. Kang who hit the Hunters, to save it.

The thought feels bigger than there is room in the demon to hold onto it: Ms. Kang, who knows what the demon is, had stopped the Hunters from killing it. Ms. Kang had fought them off. The demon had been corrected with cold water before, but never like Ms. Kang is correcting it now - still being held, Ms. Kang and the demon together in the cold.

The demon continues to snivel, and Ms. Kang continues to not correct it, until finally it feels that all of its tears have been used up, and Ms. Kang - gently - sits them both up.

“We should go,” she tells the demon - because the demon has ruined this place it was allowed indoors, this place where there was the promise of more snacks, more soft things, more, more, more. The demon just reaches up, and Ms. Kang scoops it against her front and carries the demon that way, so the demon can feel how Ms. Kang’s breath hitches.

More hot, fat tears slip from its face and pool onto Ms. Kang’s shoulder.

The Hunters are waiting for them. When Ms. Kang opens the door, the one who helped clean the demon’s cuts is holding towels and more clothes, and the one the demon killed is holding her Rumi. The demon glances up and sees them waiting, and drops its head back to Ms. Kang’s shoulder.

“We can leave,” Ms. Kang says hurriedly. “We can go back and camp out there – or find somewhere else to stay – Just don’t hurt her, please, Miyeong, don’t–”

“The muzzle stays on,” the Hunter it killed says. She presses her mouth closed in one tight, angry line, and looks as though she wants to say something else, but does not.

“Miyeong–”

“Rumi could have died, if you think I’m going to let you—”

“Eomma! I’ve been bitten worse at work, okay? She didn’t even touch me!”

“We agreed we’d do this later,” the other Hunter says. “Come on, let them dry off first.”

The other Hunter follows them both into the bathroom, where Ms. Kang wraps the demon in the biggest, fluffiest towel it has ever seen and starts to pat it dry. She does not hit Ms. Kang, and she does not try to hit the demon, so the demon tries not to flinch when the other Hunter comes closer. 

“Okay, kiddo, no biting. How’s your back?”

The demon blinks up at her.

“The burn,” the Hunter says. “... You know you were burned, don’t you?”

The demon has been burning ever since it first came into this world. The other Hunter had hurt it, it knows, but that was fair after what the demon did to her, and everything since then - the shower, and the crying, and Ms. Kang – had been so much that even the pain had blurred together with all the rest of it.

“Kiddo, why did you think your Celine dragged you in here?”

The demon glances up at Ms. Kang’s face. It feels very small and very, very stupid. Back in its world, Master had taught Mira and Zoey how to treat their injuries and the demon - because it i a demon and it is bad and not to be trusted - had listened to their lessons, sometimes, and had thought bad thoughts about the things it would like to happen as Master described all the ways she has been hurt, the ways Mira and Zoey will be hurt. They had lessons, lots of them, about how to splint their bones and wrap their wounds; they had been taught to run cool water over their burns, and the demon remembers this and feels an electric thrill all the way down to its toes.

Ms. Kang doesn’t do corrections.

The shower isn’t because the demon is bad. Ms. Kang wanted to help, Ms. Kang wanted the demon not to be hurt – had carried it up the mountain, and let it sleep on top of her, and fought the Hunters, and stopped the burning getting worse, and had done all those things while the demon hurt her.

Ms. Kang does not want to correct it.

Ms. Kang wants—

The demon scrunches up its toes and lets Ms. Kang check its shoulders, carefully patting it dry as she does. The other Hunter watches them silently.

“I’m not going to ask why you’re only talking to Miyeong–”

“She’s her mother,” Ms. Kang snaps back; the other Hunter ignores her (ignores her! Ms. Kang!) and carries on talking.

“--And not me, but I’m with her. We can’t risk your Rumi killing someone, and if you can’t keep the muzzle on her–”

“I can wear it,” the demon promises. “I can– Ms. Kang, I can keep it on.”

For you, the demon thinks with a dizzying force to the thought. Ms. Kang, I can do it for you.

Ms. Kang turns her face towards the demon’s. “You shouldn’t have to.”

“I want to be safe,” the demon tells her. It isn’t used to wanting, is even less used to doing so out loud, and as soon as the words leave its mouth it wants to curl back up into a ball on Ms. Kang’s lap and stay there forever.

But it is true. Ms. Kang had taken it out of the kennel, and away from the burning, and the demon had shredded her. And Ms. Kang had held it tight and fought the Hunters, and the demon had tried to fight her. If its claws and fangs, everything sharp and ugly and horrible about it, can be clipped away so easily, then maybe Ms. Kang can hold it again – maybe Ms. Kang can let it curl up, can press her own arms around the demon’s body so that they are touching so much – the demon can be safe, for Ms. Kang.

Ms. Kang just looks down at the demon, her hand hovering over the demon’s cheek. She could be touching it, the demon thinks, if it is nice and not spiky and safe. It would be nice, to be touched by Ms. Kang like it is something precious that can be held softly. It would be nice to be held forever.

“I want you to be safe, too,” Ms. Kang answers.

[lady-of-the-spirit]

In regard to your "Celine is actually Rumi's bio mom but no one but the sunlight sisters knew" au. I imagine Celine just...disappears after the events of the idol awards. Huntr/x decides to cut contact with her for the time being, so they can sort things out amongst themselves. After a few months, the girls decided it was finally time to talk to Celine.

But when they finally arrived at the hanok...nobody was there. From the training grounds to even Mi-Yeong's grave. Nothing. But it's been months, if Celine was truly gone then more people would have noticed. After some investing, they found out from her secretary that Celine is currently in France. (I like the headcanon that has Celine grew up in France before joining the Sunlight sisters) Rumi goes through a myriad of emotions as she tries to call Celine again, time differences be damned! After a few minutes, someone finally picks up but it wasn't their mentor...it was someone else. An angry voice that told Rumi that Celine doesn't want to speak to her before hanging up.

And that's about all I got.

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH (the post in question)

Celine would absolutely vanish after the idol awards. after just being able to confirm Rumi and the girls are okay, alive, she respects their wishes to not contact them, and just. disappears. the confrontation with Rumi, all of this, just brought everything she had ever been running from back to the surface. (her daughter asked her to kill her. her daughter thought she could ever hurt her. she had hurt her daughter, driven her to this point, making her think Celine didn't love her when she does, she loves Rumi so much, her loving Rumi is why Rumi lived past her first day of life, but looking at Rumi and her patterns only ever reminds Celine of the worst experience of her life, her weakness and failures. even when it brought Celine her beloved daughter, she can't look at the patterns without remembering.)

she knows she messed up, she knows how much she's failed them, and they don't even know how much she's lied to them all, so she can't tell them now. she can't make herself the victim.

the best thing to do is to leave.

OOF OKAY HMM who is the person on the phone.......

most obvious option is Thirdlight. in my daydreams about this au I imagined her being dead, and generally I dislike aus where Thirdlight is still alive bc it usually is to make her the cool aunt and bash on Celine in the process. BUT I am open to it. alternatives: 1) Thirdlight and Celine having some big fight in the aftermath of Rumi's birth (and Mi-Yeong's death) and Thirdlight quitting the idol world and rarely if ever having contact with Celine in the following years but either Celine tracking her down all "I didn't know where else to go" or Thirdlight, after watching the shitshow of the idol awards on tv (and dealing with her own demons??), tracking CELINE down wanting to know what the hell happened/if Celine is okay, finding her in France... or 2) Celine and Thirdlight stayed together despite Thirdlight's reservations about raising Rumi and faking her being Mi-Yeong's kid but eventually Thirdlight backed out of the idol world, thinking Celine would be okay handling things by herself, with calls on holidays, postcards, sometimes visiting, never giving Rumi a hint about her true parentage. Thirdlight immediately calls Celine up in the aftermath of the idol awards, wanting to know what the fuck happened and being faced with Celine devastated, borderline suicidal in a way Thirdlight hasn't seen since Celine confirmed her pregnancy all those years ago.

other options??? uhhhh Celine has had family members in some fics I've seen, I remember one where she had a brother she was still close with. oof what a horrible extended family reunion. I generally believe that Celine had pretty trash parents but??? siblings aren't out of the question.

I'm very uncreative atm so oc sibling or Thirdlight are my main two options rn but maybe there's a secret third option. thank you for sending this PLEASE feel free to send more thoughts 👀❤️

[bloodyshadow1]

If you want it to be a thirdlight route where she left because of rumi she could be some kind of an antagonist. You could make it so she has a conservative role over celine post movie. I'm not sure if that's a thing in Korea or France, but I could see thirdlight taking that role if celine is so messed up after the night of the idol awards, borderline suicidal so she'd need to be in the care or someone until she's better.

Normally it would probably fall to rumi, but if she's going no contact with celine, she could refuse calls from her estate assuming it was celine trying to get in contact. That let thirdlight spin the tale of an ungrateful daughter so she's granted sole custody of celine.

Just some thoughts

[lady-of-the-spirit]

I typed out a long reply to this post but my work wifi is ass and it didn't load I'm so annoyed.

I am intrigued by this idea but I think 2 things might get in the way of this idea: 1) the length of time it would take for the whole process of legal guardianship to be worked out and guardianship granted and if that would match with the length of time it would take for the girls to decide to start talking with Celine again. 2) Celine herself and if she would be in a bad enough place to legally put herself in the hands of someone who tried to kill her Rumi. Also unsure if courts would look at Thirdlight, who has presumably been MIA in Celine's life for 20 years or so, and go sure, give her all the power over the CEO of a huge music company right away. (Though this is me having skimmed an outline of both Korean and French laws of guardianship and assuming the best of the legal process.)

So alternative: Thirdlight who is not legally Celine's guardian but has still worked her way into Celine's life enough after tracking her down to be an unofficial caretaker. She genuinely wants to get Celine back on her feet. Celine still being wary but also too exhausted and distraught about everything to say no, and... she really missed her friend, despite everything. Thirdlight says she's changed her mind about Rumi after seeing the idol awards. Celine is selfish enough to want to believe her, if only to have a friend back.

Thirdlight genuinely does want Celine to heal and process her trauma and wants to take care of her. Unfortunately, she is lying about changing her mind about Rumi. Rumi did this to Celine. That thing has been hurting Celine since the very beginning, since its conception. Celine had the heart to love it anyway and look what it did to her - tore her heart apart and drove her back to her worst. It doesn't even know what Celine sacrificed for it! Thirdlight is convinced Rumi is a demon playing the long con, manipulating Celine to love her and feeding off of that love for her with the goal of shattering her and feeding off her soul (which considering what the Saja Boys were up to a few months ago is not an unfounded fear). She thinks if Rumi stays away from Celine, if she keeps Rumi away from Celine, Celine will finally get the chance to clear her head, heal from her trauma, and they can do what they should have done when that thing ripped itself out of her.

[bloodyshadow1]

I could see the time being an issue with an official conservatorship. I could see an unofficial way to do it is if someone in the company trying to do a coup against celine, but that might be too much of an investment.

If you really want to fuck everyone up, you could make it so it isn't just thirdlight who's still alive. Maybe the other 2 sls just walked away and it's easier to 'kill' them off as their lives as idols and hunters died. After, if celine gave birth to rumi, less shot of miyeong to die during childbirth or right after rumi was born.

Imagine rumi having an idealized version of her while that version also acts as a wall between her and celine. Imagine the heartbreak. Also just having to realize celine walked away from both of her soulmates fir her to make rumi feel more guilty. Again, might be too much, but it keeps the blender blades sharp

[lady-of-the-spirit]

Toxic SLS leaving Celine reminds me of @fakelawyerbug deadbeat Mi-Yeong au except reverse bc Mi-Yeong and Thirdlight both leave the idol world instead of Celine but still because of Rumi's birth

They both want their sister back and see demon Rumi as toxic and bad for her - which can be blamed on both her being a demon and her conception, a traumatic moment for all of them. They couldn't stop Celine from keeping Rumi when she was born but now that Rumi has driven Celine away, surely now she'll see that demon is no good for her.

RUMI IS ABSOLUTELY IN THE BLENDER RIGHT NOW. THE WOMAN SHE THINKS IS HER MOM IS NOT ONLY ALIVE BUT ACTIVELY PREVENTING HER FROM REUNITING WITH CELINE. AND ALSO. SHE HATES RUMI. HORRIBLE.

[fakelawyerbug]

Oh amazing things happening here 😈

(Side note, even without a conservatorship, if Celine is deeply depressed and can't care enough to like... pay attention to her finances, they could get her to turn them into her legal reps.

Obviously revokable but that wouldn't be an issue until she was well enough to like... care about whats happening)

Oooh imagine the duo throwing the truth of Rumi's parentage and birth in Rumi's face. Telling Rumi exactly what happened and how it affected Celine and how if she were kind and cared about Celine at all, she would leave Celine alone for the rest of her life.

(Ignoring that Celine seemed to perk up at any news of Rumi even if Celine never contacted her and never moved to phone her.)

[kenkuheart]

I've been chewing on this idea all day, thinking about why a living Miyeong would be willing to register Rumi as her daughter but still disappear, and I think there's a couple of terrible options?

So maybe Miyeong doesn't know that the one who attacked Celine was a demon. Maybe Celine couldn't speak about what happened. Maybe Celine didn't even know - remembers the attack in fragments, can't tell if the purple was real or just her mind using the colour that they've learned to mean danger to fill in the gaps.

The pregnancy feels a continuation of that same violation. Celine's body is no longer her own, and her life will be ruined if anyone finds out, and she doesn't know if the thing moving inside her is even human. There might be a demon inside her, and if that's true then Celine can't just have this be over the way Miyeong and Thirdlight seem to think that she'll be able to put it behind her after giving the child up for adoption, because Celine can't just let some innocent couple bring a demon into their home without knowing the risks. She'll be stuck forever in the worst moment of her life.

Maybe there are reasons why it makes sense for someone else to be the child's mother legally. Celine's visa status could be put at risk by the scandal, and Miyeong and Thirdlight know that what happened has Celine suicidal and traumatised. Even if Celine were able to survive, they still couldn't protect the Honmoon if she has to leave the country.

Or maybe they're trying to stop someone specific from finding out. If the man who attacked Celine is in a position of power and influence - either over SLS if it's their manager or a celebrity, or Celine specifically if it's someone with ties to her family - then Miyeong and Thirdlight see Celine panic at the idea he might learn about the baby and claim it as his own, force a paternity test, have his name next to hers in all the newspapers, be part of her life forever.

And there isn't a lot that Miyeong and Thirdlight could do to make this situation any better so Miyeong jumps at something she could do to help. It's just paperwork, really, Miyeong could solve this problem by saying one little lie and they can figure out the rest between themselves, as soon as Celine's ready. Claiming the child was hers would just give Celine time.

When the baby is born, Celine makes a choice and covers her daughter's shoulder. For the first few weeks, Rumi is permanently swaddled with her little arms tucked out of sight. The only baby grows Celine puts her in have long sleeved, and even though Miyeong and Thirdlight offer to help with changing the baby or washing her, Celine refuses for as long as it takes until Miyeong registers Rumi's birth.

Learning about the marks after that moment is a deliberate betrayal. Miyeong and Third could have forgiven Celine for bringing the demon into their home - Celine still wasn't herself after being attacked, and seeing what had done that to her would be shocking. But waiting like that, making sure that the demon officially exists so it can't just quietly disappear, knowing what she was holding and saying nothing, letting Miyeong destroy her reputation not just for a rapist but for a demon too..?!

The Sunlight Sisters fall apart.

Finally, twenty five years later, so does Celine.

Miyeong and Thirdlight have almost stopped hoping that Celine would one day free herself from the shame she's been trapped in ever since the attack. They might have only been reunited because Celine hit rock bottom but they're older and wiser and have no intentions of letting that thing drag Celine back down when there's a chance they could get her back.

(Bringing Celine to buy groceries or fill a prescription becomes a minefield - Golden playing on the store radio, kids wearing Huntr/x t-shirts, the demon's face staring out at them from the magazine rack. No matter how hard they work to distract her, her eyes always stray back towards that familiar purple hair.)

(But it does still do her good to be out of the house. After every shopping trip, Celine seems stronger, more present, closer to her old self.)

[lady-of-the-spirit]

okay locked in I can respond now

so in my planning for this au (before this spin-off took off)(bc all this is now an au of my au and i love it) was that it is essentially the same world and timeline as canon, just with this one difference. Mi-Yeong being registered as Rumi's mom rather than Celine was something that happened after both Rumi's birth and the death of Mi-Yeong/Thirdlight by demons. The SLS knew about the baby's father being a demon and were trying to figure out what the best course of action would be after Rumi's birth (kill her, raise her, a third option) when demons attacked and Celine loses her soulmates.

In this scenario, Celine registering Rumi as Mi-Yeong's baby was both a way to push the trauma down - creating this lie that nothing bad happened to her and she can create distance between herself and Rumi by pretending to be her aunt, not her mother (which ofc doesn't work because she ends up being Mom to Rumi anyway, even if Rumi doesn't know how true it is) - and also hide what happened from the public. how could Celine be seen as the tragic sole surviving Sunlight Sister on top of a single mother to a baby out of wedlock (god forbid journalists or paparazzi ever come close to guessing the truth)?

if it's Mi-Yeong's baby, though, the tragedy of her death so soon after having a child, now tragically orphaned, balances out the scandal of Mi-Yeong having a secret child. more than if it were the still living Celine.

HOWEVER I do like the idea of it being an issue of Celine's visa as well so perhaps I will steal that idea to add to her list of reasons if you don't mind 👀

UGHHHHH HER SISTERS LOVED HER SO MUCH AND THEY FELT SO BETRAYED WHEN THEY FOUND OUT THE TRUTH.....

"we would have still loved you. we wouldn't have turned you away. we would have helped regardless!" but it's too late and their anger turns them bitter and spiteful and drives them away from their soulmate. they don't think about how she'll likely be raising the next generation of hunters on her own, with them off the grid. putting the weight of the next generation on her shoulders alone. she was their leader. they know she can handle it. (seeing the demon become one of the next hunters nearly makes them run back to Korea just to shake Celine's shoulders and ask wtf is she THINKING.)

but now she's hit rock bottom again and they can't leave her again. this time they genuinely don't think she would make it if they abandoned her. at least before she had something to live for (even if they still think the damn thing was corrupting her from day one). now she's just on her own. they've gathered that much. so they can't leave her. she's theirs again and they're not letting go. especially not to go back to that demon who doesn't even appreciate all the love Celine has to share. how Celine's love for her is the only reason she's even alive.

(SLS having a very warped unreliable narrator perspective on Rumi and they would have this perspective even if they knew how Celine raised Rumi to think of her demon patterns. bc of course Rumi should hide her patterns and hope to get rid of them. she's complaining that Celine made her feel ashamed of being a monster?)

(Celine getting better seeing Rumi and huntr/x merch out in public ughhhh she's so proud of her girls she loves her daughter so much....)

[kenkuheart]

Feel free to run with the visa issue all you like :)

Yeah, I was just wondering about the scenario proposed upthread where Miyeong was still alive - and, presumably, had spent at least 5 years hearing about global megastar Ryu Rumi, Ryu Miyeong's daughter, and just... letting it slide? The one last kindness she's willing to give Celine, until Thirdlight shows up at her door with Celine - pale and skinny and exhausted in a way that has all three of them flashing back to twenty six years ago.

Agreed with you about Celine using that narrative as a way to avoid dealing with her own trauma from the attack. Rumi is Miyeong's daughter, it says so on all her paperwork, and Miyeong's daughter has no connection to that horrible night or all the months that followed when Celine's own body betrayed her. Celine can tell Miyeong's daughter that she doesn't know anything about her father without it carrying any implications. Rumi could be happy, as Miyeong's daughter, and Celine could care for Miyeong's baby and never need to remember anything about Rumi from before Miyeong left.

And Celine didn't trust them. They were there the whole time, doing everything they could to protect her secret, to help her feel more in control after what was taken from her. They were the ones holding her hair back every time she was sick, making excuses for their hiatus, bringing her favourite foods when she stopped eating. And Celine had known - had looked at the demon that ripped its way out of her and decided not to say anything, and to keep hiding it from them.

They argue and they can feel that one unforgivable thing rising up in their mouths, and maybe in their anger they end up hurling it towards her. What else had she lied to them about? Maybe they manage to bite it back, but they know that if they stay then it will only get worse between them.

The trouble is that they don't know how to walk it back. For years, they live with their own shame. They couldn't save Celine when she was attacked; they couldn't help her when the demon was born; they left her alone, hurt, with the demon spawn and never looked back. So when Celine breaks again, caring for her isn't just about reuniting with their missing soulmate, it's absolution for the guilt that kept them away from her for years.

But they're also operating on outdated knowledge of Celine, plus a bunch of assumptions since Celine is struggling to talk about what is going on, and all they can tell is that the demon said something that made Celine feel like everything was her fault. And that old guilt, not quite settled, could at last be relieved.

They're defending Celine the way they should have stuck around and defended her all those years ago when they spit out the truth to Rumi to make sure she understands why she can never call back. And Celine knows that Rumi said, that night of the Idol Awards, no more lying, but...

But Celine had wanted to forget. Hadn't been ready. And now the decision about when and how has been taken away from her.

Miyeong and Thirdlight are certain that if they can just arrange things so she's able to heal, then they can look at helping Celine build the life she should have had at their side. But their idea of managing that situation is built on assumptions about Rumi being a trigger - so they shut down the phone calls, take the radio out of the kitchen since This Is What It Sounds Like seems to be playing every time they turn it on, even cancel the newspaper delivery since Celine always looks through the entertainment section and withdraws deeper into herself every time.

(But. Celine knows she cannot reach out to Rumi, does not deserve to speak to Rumi ever again, and she also knows those moments of one-sided connection - a song, an interview, a magazine photo spread - cannot really hurt Rumi and therefore do not count as her breaking Rumi's request to be left alone. Sometimes Celine finds herself tapping out the beat to How It's Done, humming the bridge to Golden, picturing every note like a tiny prayer floating through the strings of the Honmoon towards Rumi. Be safe, be loved, be happy, every note finding its place in the harmony of the world.)

[romanimp]

I'm tired of hearing about Young Kirk and Young Spock. I want a (good) show about young shithead Science Lieutenant Janeway falling in BFF love with Tuvok while on adventures together and there's ZERO ROMANCE. I MEAN IT. NO ENTERPRISE LOVE BOAT ALLOWED.

[romanimp]

I'm talking ZERO love interests for Janeway as far as the eye can see. People of all genders keep flinging themselves at her but she refuses to let herself do anything more than have a pathetic wank because of her angst about Tau Ceti Prime. She channels everything into raw chaos bisexual energy with Tuvok just enabling her at all times.

[romanimp]

T'Pel asking with pure Vulcan sarcasm if they had fun and in the middle of Tuvok replying that Vulcans only do their duty not have Fun, Janeway (still slightly hungover and wearing sunglasses) slings an arm around his shoulders and says, "SO MUCH fun. You should've been there, T'Pel. You should've seen the way your man risked it all to save my sorry ass from a sentient liquid people. We almost died again."

T'Pel: "Again?"

Tuvok: "....we meditated after."

Janeway: "AND we meditated after!"

[romans-art]

like this.

[lady-of-the-spirit]

In regard to your "Celine is actually Rumi's bio mom but no one but the sunlight sisters knew" au. I imagine Celine just...disappears after the events of the idol awards. Huntr/x decides to cut contact with her for the time being, so they can sort things out amongst themselves. After a few months, the girls decided it was finally time to talk to Celine.

But when they finally arrived at the hanok...nobody was there. From the training grounds to even Mi-Yeong's grave. Nothing. But it's been months, if Celine was truly gone then more people would have noticed. After some investing, they found out from her secretary that Celine is currently in France. (I like the headcanon that has Celine grew up in France before joining the Sunlight sisters) Rumi goes through a myriad of emotions as she tries to call Celine again, time differences be damned! After a few minutes, someone finally picks up but it wasn't their mentor...it was someone else. An angry voice that told Rumi that Celine doesn't want to speak to her before hanging up.

And that's about all I got.

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH (the post in question)

Celine would absolutely vanish after the idol awards. after just being able to confirm Rumi and the girls are okay, alive, she respects their wishes to not contact them, and just. disappears. the confrontation with Rumi, all of this, just brought everything she had ever been running from back to the surface. (her daughter asked her to kill her. her daughter thought she could ever hurt her. she had hurt her daughter, driven her to this point, making her think Celine didn't love her when she does, she loves Rumi so much, her loving Rumi is why Rumi lived past her first day of life, but looking at Rumi and her patterns only ever reminds Celine of the worst experience of her life, her weakness and failures. even when it brought Celine her beloved daughter, she can't look at the patterns without remembering.)

she knows she messed up, she knows how much she's failed them, and they don't even know how much she's lied to them all, so she can't tell them now. she can't make herself the victim.

the best thing to do is to leave.

OOF OKAY HMM who is the person on the phone.......

most obvious option is Thirdlight. in my daydreams about this au I imagined her being dead, and generally I dislike aus where Thirdlight is still alive bc it usually is to make her the cool aunt and bash on Celine in the process. BUT I am open to it. alternatives: 1) Thirdlight and Celine having some big fight in the aftermath of Rumi's birth (and Mi-Yeong's death) and Thirdlight quitting the idol world and rarely if ever having contact with Celine in the following years but either Celine tracking her down all "I didn't know where else to go" or Thirdlight, after watching the shitshow of the idol awards on tv (and dealing with her own demons??), tracking CELINE down wanting to know what the hell happened/if Celine is okay, finding her in France... or 2) Celine and Thirdlight stayed together despite Thirdlight's reservations about raising Rumi and faking her being Mi-Yeong's kid but eventually Thirdlight backed out of the idol world, thinking Celine would be okay handling things by herself, with calls on holidays, postcards, sometimes visiting, never giving Rumi a hint about her true parentage. Thirdlight immediately calls Celine up in the aftermath of the idol awards, wanting to know what the fuck happened and being faced with Celine devastated, borderline suicidal in a way Thirdlight hasn't seen since Celine confirmed her pregnancy all those years ago.

other options??? uhhhh Celine has had family members in some fics I've seen, I remember one where she had a brother she was still close with. oof what a horrible extended family reunion. I generally believe that Celine had pretty trash parents but??? siblings aren't out of the question.

I'm very uncreative atm so oc sibling or Thirdlight are my main two options rn but maybe there's a secret third option. thank you for sending this PLEASE feel free to send more thoughts 👀❤️

[bloodyshadow1]

If you want it to be a thirdlight route where she left because of rumi she could be some kind of an antagonist. You could make it so she has a conservative role over celine post movie. I'm not sure if that's a thing in Korea or France, but I could see thirdlight taking that role if celine is so messed up after the night of the idol awards, borderline suicidal so she'd need to be in the care or someone until she's better.

Normally it would probably fall to rumi, but if she's going no contact with celine, she could refuse calls from her estate assuming it was celine trying to get in contact. That let thirdlight spin the tale of an ungrateful daughter so she's granted sole custody of celine.

Just some thoughts

[lady-of-the-spirit]

I typed out a long reply to this post but my work wifi is ass and it didn't load I'm so annoyed.

I am intrigued by this idea but I think 2 things might get in the way of this idea: 1) the length of time it would take for the whole process of legal guardianship to be worked out and guardianship granted and if that would match with the length of time it would take for the girls to decide to start talking with Celine again. 2) Celine herself and if she would be in a bad enough place to legally put herself in the hands of someone who tried to kill her Rumi. Also unsure if courts would look at Thirdlight, who has presumably been MIA in Celine's life for 20 years or so, and go sure, give her all the power over the CEO of a huge music company right away. (Though this is me having skimmed an outline of both Korean and French laws of guardianship and assuming the best of the legal process.)

So alternative: Thirdlight who is not legally Celine's guardian but has still worked her way into Celine's life enough after tracking her down to be an unofficial caretaker. She genuinely wants to get Celine back on her feet. Celine still being wary but also too exhausted and distraught about everything to say no, and... she really missed her friend, despite everything. Thirdlight says she's changed her mind about Rumi after seeing the idol awards. Celine is selfish enough to want to believe her, if only to have a friend back.

Thirdlight genuinely does want Celine to heal and process her trauma and wants to take care of her. Unfortunately, she is lying about changing her mind about Rumi. Rumi did this to Celine. That thing has been hurting Celine since the very beginning, since its conception. Celine had the heart to love it anyway and look what it did to her - tore her heart apart and drove her back to her worst. It doesn't even know what Celine sacrificed for it! Thirdlight is convinced Rumi is a demon playing the long con, manipulating Celine to love her and feeding off of that love for her with the goal of shattering her and feeding off her soul (which considering what the Saja Boys were up to a few months ago is not an unfounded fear). She thinks if Rumi stays away from Celine, if she keeps Rumi away from Celine, Celine will finally get the chance to clear her head, heal from her trauma, and they can do what they should have done when that thing ripped itself out of her.

[bloodyshadow1]

I could see the time being an issue with an official conservatorship. I could see an unofficial way to do it is if someone in the company trying to do a coup against celine, but that might be too much of an investment.

If you really want to fuck everyone up, you could make it so it isn't just thirdlight who's still alive. Maybe the other 2 sls just walked away and it's easier to 'kill' them off as their lives as idols and hunters died. After, if celine gave birth to rumi, less shot of miyeong to die during childbirth or right after rumi was born.

Imagine rumi having an idealized version of her while that version also acts as a wall between her and celine. Imagine the heartbreak. Also just having to realize celine walked away from both of her soulmates fir her to make rumi feel more guilty. Again, might be too much, but it keeps the blender blades sharp

[lady-of-the-spirit]

Toxic SLS leaving Celine reminds me of @fakelawyerbug deadbeat Mi-Yeong au except reverse bc Mi-Yeong and Thirdlight both leave the idol world instead of Celine but still because of Rumi's birth

They both want their sister back and see demon Rumi as toxic and bad for her - which can be blamed on both her being a demon and her conception, a traumatic moment for all of them. They couldn't stop Celine from keeping Rumi when she was born but now that Rumi has driven Celine away, surely now she'll see that demon is no good for her.

RUMI IS ABSOLUTELY IN THE BLENDER RIGHT NOW. THE WOMAN SHE THINKS IS HER MOM IS NOT ONLY ALIVE BUT ACTIVELY PREVENTING HER FROM REUNITING WITH CELINE. AND ALSO. SHE HATES RUMI. HORRIBLE.

[fakelawyerbug]

Oh amazing things happening here 😈

(Side note, even without a conservatorship, if Celine is deeply depressed and can't care enough to like... pay attention to her finances, they could get her to turn them into her legal reps.

Obviously revokable but that wouldn't be an issue until she was well enough to like... care about whats happening)

Oooh imagine the duo throwing the truth of Rumi's parentage and birth in Rumi's face. Telling Rumi exactly what happened and how it affected Celine and how if she were kind and cared about Celine at all, she would leave Celine alone for the rest of her life.

(Ignoring that Celine seemed to perk up at any news of Rumi even if Celine never contacted her and never moved to phone her.)

[kenkuheart]

I've been chewing on this idea all day, thinking about why a living Miyeong would be willing to register Rumi as her daughter but still disappear, and I think there's a couple of terrible options?

So maybe Miyeong doesn't know that the one who attacked Celine was a demon. Maybe Celine couldn't speak about what happened. Maybe Celine didn't even know - remembers the attack in fragments, can't tell if the purple was real or just her mind using the colour that they've learned to mean danger to fill in the gaps.

The pregnancy feels a continuation of that same violation. Celine's body is no longer her own, and her life will be ruined if anyone finds out, and she doesn't know if the thing moving inside her is even human. There might be a demon inside her, and if that's true then Celine can't just have this be over the way Miyeong and Thirdlight seem to think that she'll be able to put it behind her after giving the child up for adoption, because Celine can't just let some innocent couple bring a demon into their home without knowing the risks. She'll be stuck forever in the worst moment of her life.

Maybe there are reasons why it makes sense for someone else to be the child's mother legally. Celine's visa status could be put at risk by the scandal, and Miyeong and Thirdlight know that what happened has Celine suicidal and traumatised. Even if Celine were able to survive, they still couldn't protect the Honmoon if she has to leave the country.

Or maybe they're trying to stop someone specific from finding out. If the man who attacked Celine is in a position of power and influence - either over SLS if it's their manager or a celebrity, or Celine specifically if it's someone with ties to her family - then Miyeong and Thirdlight see Celine panic at the idea he might learn about the baby and claim it as his own, force a paternity test, have his name next to hers in all the newspapers, be part of her life forever.

And there isn't a lot that Miyeong and Thirdlight could do to make this situation any better so Miyeong jumps at something she could do to help. It's just paperwork, really, Miyeong could solve this problem by saying one little lie and they can figure out the rest between themselves, as soon as Celine's ready. Claiming the child was hers would just give Celine time.

When the baby is born, Celine makes a choice and covers her daughter's shoulder. For the first few weeks, Rumi is permanently swaddled with her little arms tucked out of sight. The only baby grows Celine puts her in have long sleeved, and even though Miyeong and Thirdlight offer to help with changing the baby or washing her, Celine refuses for as long as it takes until Miyeong registers Rumi's birth.

Learning about the marks after that moment is a deliberate betrayal. Miyeong and Third could have forgiven Celine for bringing the demon into their home - Celine still wasn't herself after being attacked, and seeing what had done that to her would be shocking. But waiting like that, making sure that the demon officially exists so it can't just quietly disappear, knowing what she was holding and saying nothing, letting Miyeong destroy her reputation not just for a rapist but for a demon too..?!

The Sunlight Sisters fall apart.

Finally, twenty five years later, so does Celine.

Miyeong and Thirdlight have almost stopped hoping that Celine would one day free herself from the shame she's been trapped in ever since the attack. They might have only been reunited because Celine hit rock bottom but they're older and wiser and have no intentions of letting that thing drag Celine back down when there's a chance they could get her back.

(Bringing Celine to buy groceries or fill a prescription becomes a minefield - Golden playing on the store radio, kids wearing Huntr/x t-shirts, the demon's face staring out at them from the magazine rack. No matter how hard they work to distract her, her eyes always stray back towards that familiar purple hair.)

(But it does still do her good to be out of the house. After every shopping trip, Celine seems stronger, more present, closer to her old self.)

[the-fallen-blue]

And we're up to part three of Dream to Nightmare AU. Previous installments can be found at Part 1 and Part 2. To recap:

Celine has swapped places with a version of herself from another universe, where Miyeong never died, and the Sunlight Sisters created the Golden Honmoon when Rumi was four, removing her patterns. This alternate Celine has been living her best suburban mother of three life for decades and is devastated by our Celine’s life, seeing in her every cruelty and failure that alt!Celine always feared herself capable of. She is currently taking a sanity break under the sacred tree after getting sobbed at by Rumi and then menaced by Mira. Meanwhile our Celine has been tormented by having everything she's ever wanted and being utterly unable to trust or not hate herself for a second of it. Currently she is freaking out about alt!Rumi referring to the removal of her patterns as “fixing” her, marking the fifth time since Celine woke up that she has been perilously close to a panic attack that she should probably just go ahead and have at this point, it’s not like her day could get worse.

---

“Rumi,” says Celine, forcing the words past the thick knot of her larynx, reaching out to hold those clean, unmarked hands, hoping that her own aren’t shaking. “Please know this. There is no version of you, in any universe, who needs to be ‘fixed.’ There has never been anything wrong with you.”

But Rumi does not match her gravity, does not seem to be taking her message on board at all. She says, disarming, maybe even a little exasperated, “No, Mam– sorry, Celine – I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not some messed-up teenager at your Foundation, come on. I don’t know what things are like in your universe, but you know there isn’t any version of you or Eomma who’d want me to hate myself for anything, especially not something I didn’t choose.”

A wild, hysterical laugh bubbles through Celine’s chest, crawls shivering up her throat, and she locks her jaw against it until she’s able to trim it down, file away the sharpest edge of madness and shape it into an almost innocuous, half-unraveled, “Aren’t there?”

Rumi smiles at her like she’s making a dumb, obvious joke, like she’s teasing Rumi that grass is red and trees grow underground, and she apologizes, “I’m sorry, though, you’re right. That wasn't great phrasing. I just mean, I’m obviously glad I’m not dead, or enslaved to some kind of mythic demon king. But I’m not dead, and I’m not enslaved to a mythic demon king. That hasn’t even been a risk for me for longer than the twins have been alive! But it’s like it’s still the only thing they see when they look at me.”

At least they can look at you at all, when you need them to -

- but she can’t say that, can she? This world's Celine is no better than her, could have shown this Rumi no better love when she was just as committed to ‘fixing’ her from helpless infancy.

Because yes, Celine remembers that exact terror. She remembers very little else, injury and sleep deprivation stealing away the days and details, but she remembers the terror. Restless, helpless crawling in her skin before Rumi could speak, the first few desperate years of gut-knotting nausea once she could, when Celine asked, over and over, if the young girl in her care ever had strange impulses she didn’t understand, or heard words that didn’t seem to come from anyone around her. She can still feel the echo, if she tries, of the white-hot throat-searing panic of that little purple zigzag first growing an extra zig.

But the years had worn by, and Rumi had never felt Gwi-Ma’s influence, and they had discovered that the patterns only grew when Rumi stole a toy from a boy at school or hid from her teacher or lied to Celine about breaking a vase and Rumi was so good, such a brave and well-behaved child who never wanted to lie or steal or hurt anyone. And so at some point, somehow, the overwhelming dread had faded, eased into the background, left the patterns just another thing to manage. She'd taught Rumi to push her anger down, to hide her flaws and fears, to keep herself safe from other hunters until the girls could reach gold, and yes, she’d still been worried, she would never not worry for Rumi, but isn’t that just the nature of caring for a child? It wouldn’t have been fair not to let her go, it wouldn’t have made sense not to trust her. Celine had done everything she could for Rumi, and Huntr/x was doing so well, gold was so close, and Celine had to believe that was good enough.

And then Rumi had showed up in the safest and most sacred place a hunter could be, pain blazing magenta off her skin regardless, thinking that she needed to die, that Celine had spent her whole life waiting for that permission, that excuse, and Celine had learned that she hadn’t had a clue what white-hot panic truly was. Had finally seen, in that single moment, the whole magnitude of her twenty-five-year crime, finally felt the weight of her unconscionable failure, the cold, sick truth that even at the very beginning, when she’d had the sense to be afraid for Rumi, she had been so catastrophically wrong about just whose influence she should fear.

She does not know how to begin to explain that to this Rumi. How to make it clear to her that no part of her was ever the problem.

Eventually, she settles on, “The Rumi in my world has had patterns her whole life,” because she has always, at least, been able to give Rumi honesty. “And she’s never lost herself, not for a moment. Even when the Honmoon tore and Gwi-Ma’s voice was everywhere, when half of Seoul fell under his influence, Rumi still looked him in the face and defied him.”

Even when Celine failed her. Even when, if she’s reading between the lines correctly, Zoey and Mira did too, succumbed to Gwi-Ma’s whispers once they turned to a booming mind-cracking roar. Rumi had lost both her partners and done her duty regardless, had defied fear and despair all alone. Celine can’t imagine the strength, cannot imagine where Rumi found it, can only be thankful that Rumi was able to save all three of them, that there is so much more to her than what little Celine could give her (than everything Celine took from her) as ignorant teacher and inadequate guardian.

Rumi turns, though, instead of responding, and says, laughing and conspiratorial, "Whoops, busted."

And Celine follows her gaze to the door, and Miyeong is there, and Celine’s neck spikes electric and clammy while everything else clenches cold.

And Miyeong looks at her and says, voice cracking, "Your Rumi what?"

---

“So,” starts a voice, bright and sudden and barely two meters from Celine’s ear, and she almost jumps out of her skin.

It’s Zoey, cross-legged next to her, her hands up in a gesture that is equal parts pacification and alarm of her own, obviously not anticipating the violent twist and haphazard flailing roll to her feet that Celine just performed any more than Celine had expected Zoey’s presence.

“You are… very quiet,” manages Celine, as her pulse slowly sputters back to normal.

“That is actually a pretty uncommon thing for people to say about me,” says Zoey, cheerful now that she sees Celine is alright. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I’ve never been able to sneak up on our Celine.”

She hasn’t moved from her spot on the ground, ankles loose over her shins and arms sprawled behind her, so Celine slowly settles herself back down against the roots. “I’ve survived worse. What did you come out here to say?”

“Oh! Right. Lunch in an hour, and then we’re taking a break and don’t argue you’re outvoted, and also we might have found something! There's a sort of diary slash incident report by a hunter from right around 1600, who couldn’t decide if – it’s super vague but we think maybe she was pregnant and didn’t know if she wanted to keep it? Anyway she prayed for insight over some big possibly baby-related decision and, get this: she was granted a vision of another life, where she’d made different choices." Her smile is wide and eager. "Sounds kind of promising, right?”

“Not a replacement of another version of her? Just a vision?”

A slight shrug lifts Zoey’s shoulders. “We're not sure yet. It’s pretty slow reading, even for Rumi. Took us half an hour just to guess about the pregnancy thing. Well, it took Mira and Rumi half an hour. I can’t read hanja to save my life, so I get to come out here and sit in the sun.”

Celine, who spent ten years agonizing over Rs and outfits and honorifics in a futile battle to be Korean enough that she knew even then had been lost before she ever started, is almost as taken aback by Zoey’s casual, unbothered admission as she had been by Mira’s reprimand.

She arcs an eyebrow, but what she says is just, “You mean you decided I needed a babysitter.”

“¿Por qué no los dos?” says Zoey breezily. “How’s the journaling going? I don’t suppose you’ve asked for divine insight on a major life decision lately.”

Celine shrugs. “Not unless you count whether we should keep shutting down the annual pestering about a reunion tour.”

“Ohmygod.” Zoey bolts upright with such sudden force that Celine stumbles back again. “Oh. My. God how did I miss this how have I been sitting on this for an entire day you kept writing. How many tours did you say? Was it three full releases? Four? You have new Sunlight Sisters songs. Multiple albums of new music.”

Celine watches her, fascinated - is she actually vibrating?

“Please, Celine. Please I have to hear them. Any of them. Or all of them. Or just one please I could live with just one, I will cook for you I will polish your shoes I will pick every weed out of the garden with my bare hands I will fly home and buy you sixty pounds of Sour Patch Kids and sort them all by flavor and guard them from Mira with my life I will do anything, Celine. Literally anything I cannot survive in this world knowing there are new Sunlight Sisters tracks and I have not heard them, please.”

“Zoey –”

Zoey throws herself forward into a bow, forehead in the grass, still going. “You can have my firstborn and my secondborn, you can have my entire collection of skateboards even the whale shark pinboard signed by Tony Hawk, I will, I will even promise never to sing a Disney lyric in your presence again please Celine –”

“Zoey.”

Zoey rolls her head a little, peering up at Celine with an expression that suggests she’s trying to be surreptitious about gauging the effectiveness of her tirade (if so, she is failing).

“I don’t think I could really show you any of our later songs," Celine starts, "they’re all three-part harmonies, and this isn’t really an ideal acoustic environment,” because she's not going to say that the Sunlight Sisters wrote for the Honmoon, wrote celebration and connection and hope, and those are not things she can wrap her fingers around or hold in her heart and throat like this, not in this world that is far too broken for one Hunter’s voice to fix.

And now Zoey is doing aegyo at her, voice pitched and pleading. "Not even one?"

Celine levels her best Mom Look in return. “Does all this nonsense work on your Celine?”

Zoey’s back to breezy cheer like she never left it. “Even if it doesn’t, aren’t you claiming to be the nicer version?”

“Okay, how about this,” Celine sighs, surrendering to the inevitable while there’s still a little dignity left between the two of them. “I have a few friends I get together with and play weekend gigs around the city, would you like to hear one of those songs?”

“I would like that very much yes please thank you,” says Zoey, very quickly, as she folds herself into a pose so formal and attentive and intent it might even impress Sang Hana.

Celine takes a moment to center herself, closing her eyes and mentally shuffling through her catalog of recent work. Last Call will probably do; not too long, the vocals carry the melody, and it’s a simple narrative with a mournful undertone that actually suits the last thirty-six hours’ mood.

She hums a scale, lets her voice warm up and her breath even out, and finds her note. And this, at least, is easy in any universe.

“Wind outside, and the shadows long...”

Everything else falls away, and Celine anchors herself in the music, slides up and down the staff, hold and trill and pause, painting the slow story of a lonely soul in a dingy bar, and with that picture, hinting around the edges of another, underneath, of long-held bad habit and the moment it finally lets go and the unexpected loss that still follows in its ending.

And then, when she drops into her chest for the second verse, suddenly, a harmony slips in. Zoey is humming, low and steady, wrapping under her melody, dipping when her vocals rise and catching them when they fall, soft behind Celine’s silences and sober under every melancholy note. She keeps pace like she’s known the piece for years, a backing track that enhances without drawing attention to itself, a sweet-toned shadow in perfect compliment to the lyrics' throughline of sorrow.

Celine opens her eyes for the last verse, and watches every color of Honmoon shimmer between them as Zoey catches her gaze. The younger Hunter's posture is choir-perfect but far more relaxed, her eyes are still, and there’s a small, soft smile pulling at the edges of her mouth, something far more settled and mature but somehow just as intense as all her vibrating begging from three minutes earlier.

Celine’s own Honmoon has only ever reacted to Last Call, or any other piece with so dark a mood, with dim, slow waves and quiet reassurance. But when she lets the last note fade, she could swear this Honmoon feels satisfied. No, outright smug.

Zoey shakes her head, though, almost like waking up, and says, slowly, “That was Chunaengjeon.”

Maybe it’s unfair for Celine to be surprised, but – “You know it?”

“There is an alternate dimension,” continues Zoey, like she hadn’t even spoken. “Where Kang Celine of the Sunlight Sisters,” and she’s not exactly getting louder but she is certainly gaining punch, “is remixing Joseon-era court music into radio-ready pop-emo tracks, like some kind of Korean Serj Tankian,” she throws her hands up for emphasis, “and playing them with a garage band! For maybe thirty people a night at random bars in Jeju!”

Celine, who understood about seventy percent of that sentence but one hundred percent of Zoey’s mounting outrage, objects mildly, “We do parks during festivals, too. A birthday party, once.”

Zoey curls up in a brief full-body cringe, and begs, “Please tell me you’re at least publishing to Bandcamp.”

“I don’t know what that is,” says Celine, still perfectly mild and probably sharing far too much of this Honmoon’s satisfaction.

“Okay,” says Zoey, pulling herself up with a sudden breathlessness and an equally sudden grim determination. “New plan. We get our Celine back, and also we get you back home, after you have fully recorded every song you have written in the last twenty-five years in hi-fi in the penthouse studio, and not one minute sooner.”

[kenkuheart]

Celine volunteers to make lunch, and Zoey tags along - ostensibly to help, although she seems a lot more interested in asking about Celine’s band than she does in peeling the carrots Celine hands her. 

Celine doesn’t mind as much as she thought she would - it’s been a while since she’s had the chance to talk about the band like this at all. The boys find it “cringe”, but they’re at that age when anything their parents do is terminally embarrassing, and all Miyeong really wants to know is that Celine is enjoying herself with her friends, as if she’s a preschooler being dropped off by her mother. Rumi, with a handful of memories of big parties and glittering dresses and nothing of what they had shielded her from, used to try to wheedle the three of them into doing another comeback, although that faded into a similar embarrassment as the twins by the time she reached her own teen years. Sunmi, out of all of them, understands most why Celine has drawn the line where she has - how she can be capable of loving the game but hating the business in equal measure - and even then, there’s always more interesting gossip for them to talk about than Celine’s garage band.

Zoey, though, is as bright as she is enthusiastic, and she spots connections and references Celine hasn’t even fully articulated in her head. Celine has always written like this - Miyeong calls it her “crow tendencies”, stealing little bits from other songs and stitching them to her own ideas like she’s feathering a nest, but Celine thinks of it as being more like what the songs are about. Celine doesn’t write about falling in love; she writes about how people have always fallen in love, and she’s just part of that same tradition. She makes sense in the world. She doesn’t know how else to say it but that.

“I still cannot believe you don’t at least have some kind of album,” Zoey says disbelievingly, the culmination of a rant that has toured three musical eras, two languages, another plea for Celine to at least write down the lyrics to some of the Sunlight Sisters’ later works pretty please with a cherry on top, and a brief segue into Huntr/x’s discography. “How do people even find out about you?”

“Normally because they’re in the bar.”

The look Zoey gives her is deeply unimpressed. “I cannot believe that even alternate Zoey doesn’t get to see you play live. I would be frothing at the mouth to hear about this, oh my God, I would absolutely never shut up about getting to see an actual Sunlight Sister play live in her MCR tribute act whenever I want.”

“I value my privacy,” Celine says evenly, instead of asking what that’s supposed to mean. Her family’s privacy, really. It isn’t as though Dispatch would exactly be trawling through random Jeju bars looking for former idols, but she’d still been careful, not wanting to draw any attention to why this particular idol might be on Jeju in the first place, much less who she might be living with. 

It might be different - she might be prepared to be just a little bit braver - if only it wouldn’t mean drawing the wrong kind of attention to the boys, who still have to go to school and see their friends in this place. As it is, it’s better that she and Miyeong continue to be discrete, even if they have their own small circle of friends and likeminded women, until the boys are able to escape off to university with their own reputations intact. 

Zoey sticks out her bottom lip and bats her eyelashes up at Celine in another shameless display of aegyo. “But not the feelings of your number one fan?”

Then her sad face cracks and Zoey just giggles, looking far too young all of a sudden. Hair escaping from her buns and a sweatshirt with a cartoon tiger printed on it, something that Rumi might have chosen for herself a few years ago. So full of potential, so young, and pushed into working as an idol instead: it’s such a waste.

Someone like Zoey - someone with this much passion and knowledge - should be supported to nurture her talents properly. Celine doesn’t know how this other version of herself can’t see that.

But. The girls - and yes, fine, she mostly means Rumi, but all three of them have made it clear that they don’t fully understand how culpable their Celine is in their experience of the industry - don’t want to know. They’ve made that much clear. Rumi’s already rebuffed her first clumsy attempts to help her; making sure they at least eat well before they get called back to their normal lives is about as much as she thinks she will be allowed to do.

Without thinking about it, Celine tugs open the cupboard where the sesame oil should live and finds it full of pans. 

Of course, she thinks wryly. Celine has spent close to thirty years playing the role of sous chef and contentedly losing every argument about how the kitchen should be arranged. This world’s Celine will never have had a reason to shape her life around anyone but herself.

“... That was kind of a heavy sigh,” Zoey observes. “Or, like, not that heavy? But for sure a sigh of some description that feels weird considering it seems to be triggered by looking at, like, three saucepans?”

“I don’t suppose you happen to know where your Celine keeps the sesame oil?”

Zoey just shrugs. “Nope, sorry,” she says, and Celine can’t bring herself to be even the slightest bit surprised.

She starts opening more cupboards, Zoey watching helplessly as she looks.

“I’m just saying,” Zoey ventures, “That this seems like maybe it is not about the saucepans? And you’re entitled to your privacy and whatever, but maybe also this is something that could be what we’re looking for?”

“The pans?” 

“Or the part where you kinda consistently freak out whenever we talk about being an idol?” Zoey cringes as she says it (Of course, of course, it’s like a drumbeat in Celine’s ears). “Like maybe there’s some conflict of a personal nature - that’s for sure none of my business, I know - but also should maybe be on the list of big personal things going on in your world?”

“That’s not– I’m not conflicted.”

“Um,” Zoey says. (And cringes. Celine hates herself all over again.) “We’ve known you for less than 24 hours and in that time you’ve burst into tears five separate times, so…?”

Celine shuts the cupboard door she’s currently looking into (glassware, over by the sink, instead of where it should be - closest to the fridge, ever since Rumi adopted that disgusting teenage habit of drinking straight from the carton). She does so very carefully and slowly, making sure not to slam it, and takes a deep breath before she speaks.

(Even to her own ears, her voice is unnaturally tight.)

“Yes, Zoey. I was upset to wake up in another world, with no warning and no idea how to get home, and to discover that everyone I knew in my world is dead, or hates your Celine - and my children were never even born - and Rumi–” Celine breaks off, throws a hand up in the air to try and encompass everything she feels about a version of her daughter sent out into a world of demons and sasaengs without anyone to keep her safe. 

“--But if you’re suggesting that I’ve wondered for a second about giving up my family to go back to that life, then you’re wrong. And if it is some kind of personal conflict that made us trade places, then it certainly wasn’t mine.”

(It’s anger, mostly - it’s anger and it’s fear and it’s frustration, and knowing all of these things does not do enough to keep the words inside her head - but it isn’t until Celine hears herself say it that she can really feel the spike of horror it warrants. This other Celine, the wrongness of her empty home, being shown a world where she has everything. Her friends, her family, Miyeong. 

Why would the other Celine even consider coming back to this?)

“Okay, awesome,” Zoey says, far too brightly, giving her a double thumbs-up for no apparent reason. “That is! A thought we are maybe not going to share with Rumi right now!”

The lack of resistance cools Celine’s anger as quickly as it first came over her, leaving her feeling stupid and tired all over again. “No, that’s fine, I know this is… difficult for her. I’m sorry.”

Like a little owl, Zoey just blinks before opening her mouth. Whatever it is that she’s about to say is quickly cut off by Mira and Rumi’s conversation as they arrive, Rumi’s head bent over a phone screen as they bicker about which part makes up the radical. They both squint slightly as they look between Zoey and Celine.

“... You didn’t have to cook. We can take care of that,” Rumi says eventually. The words are polite, the tone is distinctly not.

“Can you take care of finding the sesame oil?” Zoey asks, and then by way of explanation she tells Celine “I may have been slightly banned from the kitchen after the gochujang smoothie incident.”

This time, Celine makes absolutely no effort to hide the way her lip curls. It gets a snort from Rumi all the same, who reaches past Celine’s hip to pull out a familiar bottle. 

“A place for everything–” Rumi starts to say.

“--And everything in its place,” the three chorus.

Celine’s hand closes around the neck of the bottle. “Thank you,” she says, turning back to the stove before any of the girls can see her eyes start to sting. Five times in 24 hours, is it? “Zoey said you girls found something promising.”

“It could be,” Rumi says, noncommittally. “We aren’t sure if she really swapped, or just had a vision or dream. Did you…”

“I thought this might be a nightmare,” Celine volunteers. “At first.”

Rumi’s eyes are like sharp, bright needles, and Celine feels like the butterfly they’re pinning into place. “Because of the Honmoon?”

Perfectly honestly, Celine says, “No.”

“Change of subject, change of subject,” Zoey chants. “Sooo! Who wants to hear about Celine’s garage band?”

—-

“Miyeong,” Celine breathes.

(Stupid. As though Celine hasn’t already seen her - as though Celine hasn’t already pressed the filth of her into Miyeong’s skin like it was nothing, not a fault or a betrayal or manipulation. As though Celine had any right to do so at all.)

She becomes suddenly, intensely, aware of Rumi’s hands, still held in her own. How soft this Rumi’s skin feels, how calloused and ugly her own hands must feel for her. Celine pulls her hands back and tucks them awkwardly against her side, then stands up so quickly she cracks her knees on the underside of the table. 

“Became a GOAT of a hunter, apparently,” Rumi says, which makes so little sense that Celine’s head snaps back in her direction. Miyeong, sensibly, ignores her comment and takes another faltering step into the room.

“Your Rumi–?”

“She defeated him,” Celine tells her. The same awe, the same fierce pride that she has no right to feel, even setting aside all the ways she has failed Rumi over and over - it was never meant to be hers to feel. (She does, all the same. Rumi has made a habit of inspiring people.) “She was alone, and hurt, and without any Honmoon to guide her. And she won.”

Miyeong’s fist flies to her mouth. The stifled noise she makes is… not proud.

“She was by herself? And you just– Let her?”

The idea of letting Rumi do anything - on that night, under that tree - doesn’t feel correct, really, but the recrimination does.

Celine’s memories of that night are blurry and incomplete. Repetition and shame have carved the image of Rumi holding out her sword (“Do what you should have done a long time ago”) into Celine’s brain with white-hot clarity (“Why couldn’t you love me?”) but after the Honmoon was gone, her grasp on events is less firm. Flashes of violence, interspersed with blind panic.

The Honmoon had splintered, then shattered, then was gone entirely in the blink of an eye. And Celine had stayed rooted where she was, on her knees in the dirt, reaching out towards the place Rumi had been, making contact with nothing.

She doesn’t know how long she had stayed there, in the dirt. Long enough that the first demon, taking advantage of the gap where the Honmoon used to be, had caught her by surprise. Celine had gone to reach out to the Honmoon and felt nothing, and then it had been upon her.

And then it had not. Her fist had closed around a rock, and the rock was wet, but she could breathe again. So she had done exactly that, lay there, gasping for air.

Shortly after that, she had been holding her homi. A second demon was lying at her feet, but it had not been Rumi and it had not pleaded so—

And then she was in her car, heading towards Jeju City, dialling Rumi, Mira, Zoey, even the girls’ manager in the hopes that someone could confirm Rumi was still alive, and getting nothing. Not until after the radio started confusedly reporting Huntr/x’s special appearance to support some new boy group, and the new Honmoon had snapped around her like an elastic band, and finally the girls’ manager had answered his phone and been full of compliments about the girls’ new single. 

And a few hours after that, Rumi had texted to say that she was fine, and so were the other two. So Celine had looked at the message for a long time and then turned the car around, and that had been that.

Instead of trying to explain any of that, Celine just looks hopelessly at Miyeong. “She did well. Brilliantly.”

“She’s my baby!”

“I’m twenty-five,” Rumi says, unhelpfully. “Also, that other me has magic powers, so that has to help.”

Miyeong takes another step forward, and another. One trembling finger jabs into Celine’s sternum, hard. “You promised me,” Miyeong cries. “You promised, you promised she would always be safe, you promised you would never let Gwi-Ma take her–”

“She never even heard his voice!”

“Did you even try to protect her?”

(And Celine is twelve and seventeen and twenty-two all at once. Celine is bracing her arms against her father’s desk and emptying her head until it doesn’t even notice the pain. Celine is watching the easy way Miyeong pulls Sunmi onto her lap and tucking her hands into her pockets to make it clear that she’s giving them space. Celine is lying on the couch in their shared apartment, waiting for the sound of Miyeong’s key in their front door so she can pretend to be asleep.)

(But. Celine is also forty-seven years old, and well-aware of every fault and failure that has brought them both to this moment.)

As honestly as she can, she answers, “Never well enough.”

[the-fallen-blue]

"Okay," says Rumi, before either of them can say anything else, moving directly in between them so they both have to take a half-step back. Miyeong blinks and changes her focus and scolds “Rumi,” and it’s a little annoyed and very toothless, not remotely the response warranted for physically interfering in her mother’s business, and so, of course, Rumi ignores it.

She just continues, like Miyeong hadn’t spoken at all, “Two things to consider, Eomma: first, she did not actually promise you anything, you met this woman roughly twelve hours ago. Second, she’s been crashing out that entire time so this isn't exactly a fair fight.”

Absurdly, Celine is more offended by the second half of that latter statement than the first. As though she hasn’t successfully wrangled teenagers far more belligerent than this version of Miyeong while sleep-deprived and punch-drunk and, on two separate occasions, actively dizzy from blood loss.

“Third,” adds Rumi, while Celine is still processing her objections to the first two, “your baby, for a twenty-five-year-old value of the word, is right here, and I am perfectly safe and entirely fine. I'm already jealous of the other Rumi's magic powers," and she slips into a pout, "don't make me jealous that you care about her more too."

Miyeong seems genuinely stymied by the unserious pout and the even less serious accusation both, and Celine recovers just a little faster. “That was three things," she tells Rumi, and then, more sternly, "And I don’t need you to defend me.”

“You keep saying things like that and you keep being wrong,” says Rumi, unconcerned.

Miyeong finally manages to pull back together something resembling sternness, and she frowns at Rumi. “This isn’t your place, Rumi-ya,” and then looks up at Celine, “She should not even have told you any of this.”

“She,” parrots Rumi, “didn’t. You and Imo did when you decided to have a private conversation in the middle of the kitchen.”

“Rumi,” Miyeong says, pure exasperation.

Celine steps sideways, so that Rumi is no longer between them, and says, as steady and honest as she can, “Miyeong. The Rumi of my world never had you. She didn’t have Sunmi. She didn’t even have Eunbi and Hana, because I couldn’t trust them with her patterns. All she had was me, and you know that could never have been enough. And still, despite everything she didn’t have, despite my influence, she became so much greater than any of us. She looked fear itself in the face and sang him down, she defeated the enemy that we have been fighting for five hundred years. Her hunters love her so much it built a new Honmoon from nothing. I know it’s not what you wanted for her. But can you not be proud of what she made herself, all the same? Does she not deserve to have that from someone with the right to give it?”

Miyeong does not immediately respond, but something has… shifted, in the course of Celine speaking; it feels suddenly like she's missed something important, somehow despite the fact that she was the only one who could have said it. She glances at Rumi, who is wearing an uneasy frown that she can't remember ever seeing on the Rumi she knows, and then back at Miyeong, who is looking at Celine like she does not like what she sees, but in a way as alien to Celine as Rumi’s frown, something completely different from the anger of a moment ago.

Miyeong opens her mouth and lifts her hand toward Celine, about to speak, but then stutters to a halt before her outstretched fingers can close the gap. As of course she would, of course she should – now that she knows what Celine is she knows better than to let Celine touch her again – but Celine cannot guess why Miyeong would even get so far. Cannot speculate on what echo of this world’s Celine she might have been reaching for.

“… she sounds remarkable,” says Miyeong, softly, finally, her arm dropping to her side. “I’m sorry. Rumi is right, you owe me no promises. You’re a guest here, I shouldn't have spoken to you like that.” She shakes her head before Celine can respond. “I came to tell you that it’s time for dinner. If you haven’t ruined your appetites with illicit kimbap,” she adds, a light tease to them both, and she's not fooling anyone but she does put in a PR-solid effort at it.

“Hey, it was my kimbap, the twins made it specifically for me, nothing I do with it can be illicit,” objects Rumi, and her heart isn’t really in it either, not quite as scattered as Miyeong but worse at hiding it. They keep trying to banter their way into a better mood all the way to the angeori and Celine aches to fix it, to find the perfect words that will make them both smile and laugh and relax, to throttle whatever thing would dare to make her girls upset.

But of course, it’s her, she’s the problem, not the solution. In any universe, it’s always her, and it’s right, it’s proper, that this Honmoon will not let her draw her weapon, will not allow even the delusion that she could protect or heal or do anything but cause damage wherever she goes. Perhaps watching the stain of her spill out on this happy perfect world is what will make her finally abandon her self-serving pretenses that she could ever be otherwise.

She’s being melodramatic again. She lets herself indulge all the way to the doorway and then grudgingly shakes it off.

Inside, Sunmi is a still pillar of calm in a vortex of adolescent chaos, sedately temping mandu and garnishing japchae with a sprinkle of sesame seeds while the boys, clearly meant to be cleaning and setting the table, mostly jostle and chatter and throw napkins at each other. Even once they finally all sit and settle, Celine herself gets briefly caught up in a game of chicken with the quieter twin – Seojoon – who has a substantial pinch of noodles halfway to his face almost before Celine even picks up her chopsticks. There's clearly nothing for it but to slow her movement and stare down this ridiculous sixteen-year-old, who really seems to think she’s going to break and eat her mushrooms before he breaks and puts the food back on his plate. Eventually Rumi and Sunmi are both snickering, and Hajoon kicks his brother under the table to make him concede so the rest of them can eat.

The smile drops off Celine’s face when she sees the look Miyeong is giving her, probing and intent. Neither of them say much after that.

Instead, the boys give an update on some architectural project they have going out in the woods, a fort or a treehouse of some kind that Sunmi has a lot of opinions on for someone who can't assemble flatpack furniture without supervision. Once that back and forth is exhausted, their sister catches Sunmi up on the latest drama at work – an art museum, apparently – where a new exhibit is causing logistics headaches well beyond what Rumi considers reasonable.

“I’m sure it’ll all get sorted in a day once you’re back there to straighten them out,” reassures Miyeong.

“Oh, I won’t be back before the opening,” Rumi says easily. “I extended my vacation another week.”

The responses are immediate and overlapping from the entire rest of the table, “Nuna, what –” and “Really?” and “Kid, are you –” and “Rumi-ya, why, they’re going to think you’re not serious about your job, you can’t just –” but Rumi just shrugs casually.

“They’ll be fine, Tae-hwan and Yuna can handle things perfectly well without me, and gwajang-nim isn’t going to fire his favorite babysitter. Also, I’m definitely not leaving Alternate Dimension Maman here with you guys without even trying to help her get home, that would be so rude –”

Sunmi and Miyeong interrupt with immediate and identical "Rumi"s, angry and dismayed and largely drowned out by the loud, simultaneous "What" from the twins as their heads both snap toward Celine.

Celine levels a stare at Rumi, who looks… smug. It’s an unpleasant expression, and Celine says, cool and disappointed and without really thinking, “Rumi, that was unworthy of you.”

The table is dead silent in the wake of it, and Rumi’s face drops from self-satisfied to genuinely stunned.

“I… we don’t know how long you’ll be here, right?” she says, after a moment, a little tentative. “They had to know. You can’t just play-act for days or weeks, it wouldn’t be fair to you or the twins.”

Miyeong and Sunmi are looking at Celine very strangely.

"You have a defensible reason, then," she says anyway, holding Rumi's gaze, "and yet you forced the issue as soon as you saw an opportunity, without patience or care, so that no one could question you. Which means that either you don't actually have faith in your reasoning, and so acted recklessly toward your brothers; or you don't believe any of the other adults in the room have the right to question it, and so acted disrespectfully to your mother. Both are beneath you.”

“… huh,” says Hajoon, after another long pause, somehow the first one to speak. “Absolutely not our Maman whatsoever.”

“She’s right, though,” says Rumi, reluctantly, and she turns to Miyeong and bows slightly in her chair, “Sorry, Eomma. Celine,” she adds, inclining toward her as well, and then ruffles Seojoon’s hair. “Sorry, hooligans. I was being a jerk.”

“You’re good, nuna,” says Seojoon, swatting at Rumi’s hand and trying to comb his bangs back to order, and Hajoon adds, “It was worth it just to see that look on your face,” and then ducks wildly out of the way as Rumi makes a noise of outrage and attempts a retaliatory noogie.

“Also.” Seojoon smoothly leans out of the way of his siblings’ flailing. “We would never have forgiven a single one of you, if we found out we were actively in Sunlight Sisters: Into the Hunterverse and you hadn’t told us.”

“Yeah we definitely need to know everything about this,” agrees Hajoon, who has managed to get both hands around his sister’s wrist and is now simply trapping it a little ways from his face, while Rumi placidly pretends to ignore him and starts eating a dumpling left-handed. “Oh, like, hey, what are we like in your universe? Can your Seojoon actually talk to a girl without stuttering?”

“Can your Hajoon walk across a parking lot without falling on his face?”

“That was two years ago and there was ice, let it go Seojoon –”

“You slid ten meters and it took three of us to pull you out of the snow, Hajoon –”

“Some decorum at the dinner table, please,” cuts in Celine.

“Sorry Maman,” they chorus together, and Rumi’s hand is released, and then Hajoon politely corrects, “Not-Maman,” and Seojoon finishes the thought, “sorry for that, also.”

“I suspect,” says Celine, looking down at the boys, ignoring Miyeong’s eyes burning into her across the table, “that you two are trouble in any universe.”

—

Rumi, Celine suspects, does not in fact want to hear about Celine's garage band. She engages very little as Zoey spins up her rant again, and keeps slipping into a pensive expression, fiddling occasionally with her sleeves. But it's not open hostility anymore, at least, and since she is engaging a little (and Mira is very clearly keeping an eye on her), Celine decides to trust her partners' judgement on the subject change.

"Keeping the Hunter legacy alive even after gold, huh," is Mira's laconic summary of the whole thing, once Zoey is done, and Celine can't tell if it's approval or sharp edges. Possibly both.

"Maybe if anyone ever heard any of it," grumps Zoey, whose opinions are much clearer.

"Strictly speaking," says Celine, "bar patrons are in fact 'anyone'."

"And an all-kill is everyone and therefore better," says Zoey, cheerfully, and then her eyes go wide, and she says, "Wait. I'm having an incredible thought." She pulls another spiral notebook out of absolutely nowhere, slaps it down next to her plate, stands up, and disappears down the hallway.

Rumi and Mira exchange a fond glance, and Rumi says, "Better clear the table."

Mystified, Celine helps them stack dishes next to the sink – not a single sliver of carrot left to scrape off, which is satisfying and distressing in equal measure – just in time for Zoey to slide back into the room, quite literally, her socks slipping smooth on the tile for a full meter past the threshold.

She has a guitar in her hands, a custom job, cream-colored lacquer with three galloping horses in sumukhwa style, a wild dynamic ink wash of red and black and brown stampeding from the waist to lower bout, and Celine stares, stupefied.

That guitar was sold.

That guitar was sold, it was the first thing Miyeong ever bought with her own money and it was pawned for groceries in the bitter lean stretch between the breach-of-contract fees coming due and the move and Celine had sat in the shame of it for years, and this Celine still has it, this Celine dares to keep it when she failed Miyeong's daughter so badly, and the guitar is being passed to Rumi and she's plugging an adapter into her phone and checking the tune (it's in perfect tune, this world's Celine sits over this guitar and tunes it) and Celine is homesick and heartsick and Rumi has never held, will never hold that guitar.

It fits perfectly in her hands.

"… memorized, you know, that one Baridegi poem," Zoey is saying to the girls.

Rumi says knowingly, "The one you spent two hours trying to archive because the scanner wouldn't get the doodles in the margins right?"

"Completely worth, I cannot disrespect a fellow doodler."

"And you want to remix it?"

"Ish," says Zoey. "Mira, you remember that beat you were playing with on Friday?"

Mira obligingly taps out a few phrases of a rolling, energetic rhythm and Zoey nods "yeah yeah yeah," excited, mostly to herself, and starts scribbling furiously in the notebook, occasionally muttering quiet lyrics in at least two languages. Mira leans back in her chair, evidently content to wait on Zoey's work, but Rumi's left hand starts shaping tentative chords on the neck of Miyeong's guitar.

Celine slips out of the room, and then out of the building entirely.

The garden is as old as the hanok, and for most of that time, to Celine's knowledge, it's been a subsistence plot, a supplement for the resident hunters who needed roots or nuts or tea. When she and Miyeong moved back in, everything was so overgrown that they'd had to tear it all out and build from scratch, and so Celine had planted flowers of every hue and season instead, bright under Miyeong's line of viburnum, cheerful on the sitting room table when she brings bouquets in for her wife.

This garden, to her eye, is much the same as her mentors left it. She sees snow peas, scallion, squash, carried mindlessly forward for twenty-five years, no soothing color or living, growing love, nothing but pointless lonely habit. There's a four million won suit in this Celine's closet and she has no one to feed and she never had to sell Miyeong's guitar, she doesn't need fucking backup radishes.

Celine mutters a childish and unsatisfying "tas de merde" at the vegetables and goes back inside.

"So it's about leaving a home that wasn't right for you but if you can accept that, you can build something better," Rumi is summarizing, eyes scanning the notebook, as Celine leans at the threshold of the kitchen. To all appearances they didn't notice she was gone.

"Very on-theme," Mira nods.

"Also very hashtag relatable," says Zoey, and this time Mira and Rumi nod, because of course they do.

"So, what if we do something like…"

Rumi has the notebook in front of her, and she taps the body of the guitar a few times in the same rhythm Mira showed them earlier and puts her hands on the strings, and the sound is a little off and tinny through the phone speaker but –

– but Rumi is good at this.

Celine's own Rumi loves music, of course, is a skilled musician herself and always has been – a strong voice carrying through the house as she cleans her room or burns lunch, first chair in her university orchestra – but Celine has never seen her compose. Never seen her sit forward, eyes bright and fingers tripping over themselves to get the notes out as she strings one chord after another after another, until they cascade into an irresistible tour of exactly the emotion she wants felt. Has never seen her glow with fierce joy in the back-and-forth with other artists just as skilled, switches and adjustments and arguing her case until a dragging phrase turns perfect.

"How about four bars of melody and then we have Zoey cut in –"

Celine's never looked at her Rumi and seen this profound longing for music, not as a hobby or a diversion or a daily paycheck but something as deep and essential and unconscious as breathing, something she could not be alive or sane or in any way herself without.

"Maybe start the bridge with the C, no, Rumi, give me that, like this, and then we could bring in some ghost notes –"

Celine could be a shadow in the hanok twenty-eight years back, haunting a tight little circle of three, overworked and underfed and exhausted and not caring about any of it for an instant, feeding off each other's excitement, passing around Miyeong's shiny new guitar to demonstrate a point, caught up in the sound and the connection and the thrill of making something beautiful, and it didn't even matter that the label would never let it see the light of day because once the music was crowded up in her chest there was no other choice but to let it out.

"Make it a slant rhyme. Order and expectations breaking down in the story and the verse –"

They're an hour into their first draft, and it's already a work of art, and they'll never be allowed to perform it for anyone else, not even thirty people in a soju bar two hours after dark, and Celine aches.

[kenkuheart]

If Celine is a ghost then she’s one of those vengeful ones, straight out of the horror movies Sunmi pretends not to show the boys. The kind that destroy everything around them. The longer the girls sing, the more out of step with this world she feels, and the more that awful rage inside her threatens to spill out. She wants to tear out that fucking vegetable garden, wants to take a pair of scissors to her other self’s wardrobe, wants to grab that guitar out of Rumi’s hands and smash it until there’s nothing left.

She feels like a dog. Like a dog on a chain, one that wants to growl and bite at anything that comes close, something dirty and half-rabid that shouldn’t be allowed inside. A fucking dog, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what to do with herself, so she stays where she is, watching the girls pull music out of the air. 

Zoey scribbles something down and starts to rap in easy, American English. Celine is not as out of practice as the girls might guess - it’s surprisingly useful at work, especially when liaising with international partners - but she still has to concentrate to understand what it means.  “I’ve been told my heart is the size of my fist, never learned to block but I always hit. Huntr/x here to break your walls down, got all I need with my girls and a four-count.”

“Sick,” Mira says, then starts to tap out a beat on the table. “Go back to the bridge, I’m thinking we should try something like this instead…”

“Ireona, ireona, and I’ll keep on running,” Zoey sings. “Nananana—”

“Can’t go home again,” Rumi finishes for her. Her voice is clear and rich, even like this, with no warning and no warm-up, crowded around Miyeong’s guitar.

Celine doesn’t mean to make a noise at that but she must, because Rumi twists around to look through the doorway straight at her, and the other two follow.

She knows, on some level, how ridiculous she must look - skulking around the hall, like some kind of thief - and that does more to pull her out of her head than the distrustful glare Rumi shoots towards her.

“It sounds beautiful,” she tells them, which is true.

Rumi does not look the slightest bit appeased.

Zoey, on the other hand, almost glows at having received a compliment from Kang Celine of the Sunlight Sisters, and if Celine spends a second more thinking on what that must mean about how this world’s Celine has trained these girls then she will not be able to stop herself from fetching the scissors. 

“Wanna join us?” Zoey offers. “We can give you a writing credit but interdimensional royalty payments are not in my power to authorise.”

“What a shame. I’ll just have to content myself with my garage band,” Celine teases, mostly just to hear Zoey grumble about it all over again. True to form, Zoey starts to lay out all the reasons why Celine’s band is a calculated personal betrayal of the other Zoey, and the need to set up “at least a YouTube page, I am begging you” until Mira, finally, nudges her and nods towards Rumi.

“Oh, right, we should get back to it,” Zoey chirps. “If you’re sure..?”

“I’m sure,” Rumi mutters, and gets a kick to her shin for her troubles.

Celine decides not to draw any attention to it and politely retreats back into the hall, letting herself fade into the background again. The girls’ voices carry further than she thinks they realise, a hiss and a yelp and then a very deep sigh and more laughter, bickering, the guitar starting up again. Together, Rumi and her friends begin to harmonise, and a thousand strands of light arc towards the three of them as though the world cannot bear to be apart from them a second longer than it needs to.

Celine is not needed here. She turns her back and heads towards the office.

Yesterday, when she was looking everywhere for some sign of her family, she’d opened the door to what should have been her own office and paused just long enough to see that there was nobody there. Today, she lets herself take her time noticing each of the differences between this office and the one at home. There are lots; the merry chaos of Miyeong’s various projects and the kids’ art is gone, leaving the room perfectly impersonal. The only sign of life at all is the laptop on the desk.

It’s password protected, which she should have expected. She doesn’t bother guessing at what it might be.

She takes a seat in what turns out to be, annoyingly, a very nice desk chair with the sort of lumbar support she could only dream of, and pulls out Zoey’s notebook again. Instead of going back out there again for a pen, she pulls open the desk drawer and finds, sitting on top of a blank memopad, her counterpart’s phone.

Three strong, clear voices drift through the hall towards her.

“We should do something with the flower imagery,” Zoey’s saying. “Flowers for a funeral, flowers for Valentines’ Day…”

“Medicinal flowers,” Rumi says. “There’s chamomile, mugwort, ginseng–”

“--Famously a root.”

“Roots, rootless, is that anything? Like, it’s not just that your home wasn’t right, it was never really your home in the first place?”

Celine sits at the desk and listens to the girls say I love you and then drifts over towards the office door and closes it. She turns the lock. A pointless, stupid thing in a house that has one occupant. She sits back down and fishes out a charging cable for the phone and turns it on. Her face, luckily, is enough to unlock it.

As Zoey mentioned yesterday, there are twelve missed calls and even more text messages - most from Rumi, although there’s another one from someone called Lee Kyunghee with a question from Legal that Celine cannot waste any energy trying to understand. Celine swipes away the notifications without reading them and finds the email icon.

It feels like an impossibly long shot, the idea that Sunmi might still use the same email address, but the thought of turning her back on the one person left who would understand the wrongness of this world makes her whole chest feel tight.

TO: [email protected] FROM: [email protected] SUBJECT: Help

She opens a new email and starts to type, only to pause at the sight of this Celine's email address. It's clearly a work email, she knows enough not to hope otherwise - but the simple, easy cruelty held within that SL Entertainment is, like all the rest of it, unfathomable.

----

The boys - naturally - take this as a compliment and visibly preen over it. Little peacocks, both of them, but Celine finds there’s no real heat to that thought, and neither Miyeong nor Sunmi seem particularly inclined to discourage them.

In fact, Miyeong looks at them like— Celine cannot let herself think about the way Miyeong is looking at her sons, worried and indulgent and faintly exasperated all at once. Certainly Miyeong had never looked at Rumi like that back in Celine’s world; Miyeong had never known a version of Rumi old enough to ever really be irritating. 

(Celine knows that time has blunted her few memories of Miyeong and Rumi together, knows that Miyeong had felt overwhelmed and exhausted like any other new parent. But whenever she thinks back to Rumi’s birth, the only thing she can picture is Miyeong staring adoringly at her little girl.)

Her eyes dart quickly towards this Rumi, dark hair mussed up from her scuffle with the boys, and finds that Rumi is looking straight back at her. Celine feels uncomfortably aware of her own body, then. Her palms prickle, hot and itchy. Her knees hurt from where she hit them against the table, and her back hurts from too much time spent hunched over Moon Yongsu’s journals, and her head hurts from everything else. 

Everyone at the table is looking at her.

She thinks it, and then feels foolish for thinking it, because the others aren’t staring. They’re looking at one another too, but Celine as well - Celine more than any of the others - and it has been a while since Celine last shared a meal with anyone else.

“So why did you come here? Was it to warn us about some kind of apocalypse you need us to stop?” Hajoon asks, with an entirely inappropriate level of excitement.

Seojoon leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Ohhh! Is this some kind of multiverse team-up where you had to ask our Maman for help to save your own universe?”

Celine does her best to hide her skepticism that this world’s Celine would be able to contribute anything valuable in the event of a disaster. 

“No, it most certainly is not.”

“All the universes?”

“The Honmoon has shuffled Hunters off to visit other worlds before,” Sunmi cuts in, talking so breezily that it almost seems like something that happens to her all the time. “Not for any kind of emergency end of the world type purposes, before you ask.”

“Then why, just for fun?”

“The Honmoon is supposed to bring everyone together, it wouldn’t just drive Maman away,” Rumi says firmly. The effect is only slightly spoiled by the way she turns to Celine for confirmation. “Right?”

“Nuna, what do you know about the Honmoon?”

“That’s correct, Rumi. The Honmoon does not play pranks,” agrees Celine. Warm, honeyed light touches the twins’ shoulders, brief but affectionate. Sunmi and Miyeong look to one another, and then at Celine, but whatever coded message the two of them are trying to exchange Celine cannot imagine.

“Does that mean you don’t know what your Truck-kun was?”

Sunmi tweaks Seojoon’s ear. “Try again, this time using real words.”

“Ow!”

“Truck-kun’s an isekai thing,” Rumi translates. “You get hit by a truck, and when you die you get shoved into a TV show or a video game or something. Which cannot possibly be less relevant, because we’re not a TV show and also Maman is not dead.”

“Sometimes people just get put in a coma.”

“Enough, Hajoon,” Miyeong says, and then - for some reason - turns to make eye contact with Celine. 

Hajoon ignores her completely. “Can we at least know what kind of alternate dimension you’re from?”

Miyeong has not stopped looking at Celine, her dark eyes heavy with something Celine cannot name. Miyeong’s teeth dig into the corner of her bottom lip, and the sight of that old habit settles heavy as a stone in Celine’s gut. She had forgotten. Years of seeing that same expression on Miyeong’s face, before concerts and contract negotiations and life-or-death ambushes alike, and Celine had never even realised this part of Miyeong was lost to her before now.

She stares back, adrift.

Then pulls herself together. “Your mother asked you to stop,” she reminds him.

“My mother isn’t here,” Hajoon shoots back, but with no heat - none at all - just the tiny smirk of a sixteen year old who thinks he’s outsmarted an adult.

Celine’s chopsticks stutter in her hand, clinking lightly against the side of the bowl. Whatever Miyeong says in response, she misses. 

(It would be ridiculous to let this one rude comment from an ignorant child affect her. As though she hasn’t had far worse said to her by the girls, with far more intent to hurt her feelings, and this is surely worth even less of her attention.)

If she were in her own home, in her own kitchen, she would be able to look through the window towards the treeline, and watch the sunlight stretch across the sky to meet every Hunter who had ever gone before her. A whole mountain full of bones, and the Honmoon that would have outlived them all. Seen in that light, it has always been easy to focus on what really mattered.

Celine has not meditated on that since the night of the Idol Awards, and there doesn’t seem to be any point in starting now. Instead, she turns her gaze towards the pictures hanging on the wall. She doesn’t linger over the pictures of the boys; they belong to this other world, and have nothing to do with her. Even some of those with Rumi have no equivalent in her own world: Rumi as a toddler playing tea party with Sunmi; Rumi in her graduation gown, clutching a bouquet of flowers; Rumi sitting on a bike, dark hair peeking out from underneath her helmet, Miyeong behind her holding onto the seat. Celine looks past those too.

The one that does snag her attention seems almost familiar, Rumi in her yellow bucket hat holding Miyeong’s hand in front of the Seonim bridge. In this house, it’s displayed next to one of Miyeong’s childhood photos, her and her brother standing in exactly the same place. Celine remembers bringing Rumi to see the Cheonjeyeon Falls when she was about that age, had walked with her over the exact same bridge, had told Rumi to keep her eyes peeled in case they saw any nymphs. Back in her own home, in the chests of drawers where she kept the photo albums and keepsakes, there was a picture of Rumi there too.

In that picture, as in every other one Celine can remember taking, Rumi is all alone.

By the time she has sufficient air in her lungs to talk again, the conversation has moved on. Sunmi has also decided that she will be staying with Miyeong and her family “for the duration”, which Celine does her best not to bristle at - as though she’s in need of supervision, as though Sunmi needs to keep her from ruining this perfect little family—

(Celine finds herself remembering, with white-hot shame, her earlier lapse in judgment. How she couldn’t be trusted to police herself.)

(She hadn’t known. It had felt– unreal, like a dream or a hallucination, where consequences could be avoided just by wishing them gone, and Miyeong had been dead too long to be hurt by her. But explaining that, to this Miyeong, to this Sunmi, feels impossible.)

At some point, it has been decided that Sunmi will take the guest room, Rumi will stay with Miyeong and Celine will take over Rumi’s bedroom. The bakgeori is out of the question - Miyeong just shakes her head and says something about a plumbing issue while the boys look sheepish - and her offer to take the couch, any couch, or the living room floor, is refused as well. 

“You’re our guest,” Miyeong says, with a firmness that still manages to catch her by surprise. “And we do have some manners, despite the absolutely appalling impression our children might have given you.”

The boys squeak indignantly at that. Rumi, ears still pink with embarrassment from having to be corrected for her earlier thoughtlessness, wrinkles her nose but doesn’t object.

This Rumi had never moved over into the bakgeori where the trainees traditionally slept, and so the room Celine was shown to still has several children’s books on the shelves amongst several Suneung study guides and practice papers, faded Pokemon bedding and sheet music peeking out of a ringbinder covered in panda stickers. Force of habit has her going to straighten the papers up, and the sting when she realises that there are no lyrics is no less muted than any of the others.

Rumi doesn’t sing. 

The thought itself has its own kind of violence. Rumi, a version of Rumi who had grown up loved and happy, would have chosen – art, or history, or art history, Celine isn’t entirely clear. A steady job, a pet cat, a home in Incheon and time to go visit her family. When Rumi was very small, she used to totter on her chubby little legs to sit on Celine’s lap and demand her favourite nursery rhymes, and that had been how Rumi first learned to sing, her hand poking at Celine’s mouth to try and copy the shape of it. And sometimes Celine had been overtaken by silliness and pretended to nibble at those little fingers and Rumi had shrieked with delight, and sometimes she had not and they stayed working at it until their two voices blended together, and that had been lovely too.

Rumi - a version of Rumi given more choices than back in Celine’s world - would not have wanted those things.

Celine runs her thumbnail over some of the crease marks, then puts the papers out of sight.

She is lying down on a too-soft mattress, staring up at the ceiling and wondering whether she would be able to let herself out and return to the archives, when a knock sounds on her door. Celine sits up, convinced that it must be Miyeong, come to collect the apologies Celine owes, or Rumi, back with more questions.

“Come in.”

Not Miyeong, not Rumi, not even Sunmi come to continue needling her– It’s Seojoon, hair still damp from the shower, who enters, nudges the door shut with his heel, and sits on the foot of Rumi’s bed as casually as if he does so without waiting for any further invitation.

“I can’t sleep.”.

“Have you tried going to bed?”

He gives her a half-hearted smile, clearly unaccustomed to listening to the Celine he knows, and looks down at his hands. The skin around his thumbnail is pink and sore, and Seojoon carries on picking at that while he talks.

“Did your Seojoon ever break his arm?”

Celine says, truthfully, “No, that never happened in my world.”

“I was twelve. Couldn’t play baseball for months.” He carries on picking at himself until the skin starts to look raw, and without thinking about it, Celine tugs his pyjama sleeve down to cover his hands and Seojoon starts toying with the cuffs instead. 

“But even after the cast came off,” he says, “I still couldn’t play properly, and my arm wouldn’t work right.”

“That all sounds perfectly normal.”

“Yeah, I know, you told me. My you told me, I mean.” Seojoon tips his bodyweight towards her, and for one horrifying second, Celine almost thinks he’s trying to rest his head on her lap, or cuddle, or something else that Rumi has long since grown out of, but instead he just bumps his shoulder against hers and pulls back. 

“I only had to wear the cast for a bit, and even then I still couldn’t do anything. Maman hasn’t had to fight demons in years, and now the Honmoon’s sent her off to some other world to do it–”

“The Honmoon did not send anyone to fight demons,” Celine tells him, feeling some of her earlier frustration thread through her voice. “Gwi-Ma was defeated in my world, and even if that were not the case, I retired from that a long time ago and the next generation of Hunters took on that mantle. And even if, somehow, some demon did appear – and even if the other Hunters were not able to dispatch it – then your Maman’s soul will still have been strengthened through everything that connects her to the rest of the world. Tradition, art, community, they’re all ways of feeling those connections, not having to fight for it.”

Celine thinks of her own routine, back in her own world. Tea to greet the sunrise. Meditations out in the courtyard, watching the night sky. Caring for the hanok and tending to the graves, and watching the girls knit more souls together into the fabric of the world. Countless small moments where she feels the soil beneath her fingers and the breeze on her neck and she could reach out and wrap her hands around the soul-strings and feel the rightness of it.

“Your mother loves you,” she tells him, and her voice does not catch on the same words she must have said to Rumi a thousand times over. Talking like this, with a stranger’s son, still sits more comfortably with her than Rumi’s earlier attempts to console her, and she shifts so they’re both sitting on the side of the bed, staring at Rumi’s crowded bookshelf. “That love she feels - for you and your family - that’s what will bring her home.”

The boy’s shoulders hitch, just the once. She doesn’t reach out to touch him, not like Miyeong must - or his Maman, or Imo, she thinks, a little spitefully - but Seojoon takes another deep breath and nods.

It is almost a very nice moment, but when the door swings open a second time to reveal his brother trying to balance an armful of comic books and several DVDs, Celine doesn’t hesitate to point right back where he came from.

“It’s for research!”

“Bed.”

[tcgpocketmon]

Illus. Asako Ito

[secondtolastrow]

Man when Rumi fully registers and accepts how her mom treats Celine she is gonna have a breakdown that the person she has been told to idolize and that everyone adores is a monster.

I believe she will eventually get through to Celine but she’ll need Mira, Zoey’s, and even thirds help.

I do believe that Mi-Yeong has some sort of love for her daughter and it’s gotta be hard for her to keep Celine in line and try and make a relationship with someone she doesn’t know.

I do think Miyeong loves Rumi! I think she loves Celine, too. She’s just really awful at prioritizing that and having relationships like a healthy human being

Her love for Rumi is even more complicated than what she’s usually got going on because, like, she missed all of Rumi’s… personing. She loved this fetus, and then this infant… and then she skipped all the parts where Rumi developed a personality, missed all the memories created, and now there’s. Someone! Big gap between who she thought she had and who she now has, very jarring, Miyeong is handling that transition so normally she promises

(Lowkey I think Miyeong is much nastier to Rumi one on one than anyone is aware of yet)

And. Yeah. It’s pretty rough on Rumi to cope with the gap between Miyeong’s ghost and her reality too

As for Celine… her girls have a hard time giving up. She taught them that

[kenkuheart]

It's like there's this pit inside Miyeong that's been there as long as she can remember, and if she can keep putting good things inside it then it stops hurting for a little while. But then sooner or later, she feels it return and the only way to feel like she isn't just going to fall in and keep on falling forever is to do something to get control.

Celine and Third had been able to distract her from that gnawing emptiness for longer than anything else. The knowledge that they needed her, the whole damn world needed her, and when they were on stage Miyeong could feel herself light up with all the love their fans had for her. Still. The height of fame had brought more pressure, more expectation, more people wanting to tell them where to go, what to do, how much to eat, and before long Miyeong had found herself needing that outlet again.

When she first found out that she was going to have a baby, it had seemed so clear. There would finally be someone who could love her unconditionally. Not like Third or Celine, always exchanging little glances when they thought she couldn't see, claiming that they didn't put each other first. Her baby would love her, would need her, would never leave her. This was what Miyeong had always needed: someone who would fill up that pit inside her and make it so that she would never feel that desperate clawing hunger ever again.

The Rumi she meets as an adult doesn't act at all like the little girl Miyeong had wanted.

"You poisoned her against me," she accuses Celine.

"You aren't the daughter I wanted," she tells Rumi.

(She's in the middle of another argument with Celine, hating herself for getting this mad, hating Celine for pushing her to this out-of-control place again, and saying things more to win than out of any real plan when she reminds Celine that she came back in her 24 year old body. Still young enough she could easily meet some cute guy and try for the family she was supposed to have.)

(Celine can't quite stomp the fear out of her expression before Miyeong sees it.)

[secondtolastrow]

Thinking about your evil Miyeong thoughts and a version of Rumi who has spent her whole life looking for moments of connection with her dead mother (things like braiding her hair to look more like all the photos, taking comfort in every time Celine says "You have Miyeong's eyes"). Wondering if maybe the thing that makes her Miyeong's daughter was how ready she is to lash out at the people closest to her. ("It's not about your insecurities, Mira!")

And. Once she knows. There’s a way it makes her feel sick, a punch to the chest, an uncomfortable weight to make her fix her smile in place, whenever someone tells her she’s just like her mother.

They don’t know Miyeong, usually, know some of her music and a few interviews, and it’s always complimentary—just like the people who tell her they’re so glad she isn’t as foolish as her mother are entirely ignorant and wrongheaded about it—but. It still means something to her

Rumi bit Celine, one time, and Celine hissed a breath out through her teeth and asked her why she thought that was an appropriate response, and that was when Rumi had realized both how hard she’d done it and that she was too old to communicate through biting.

She hurt her.

(Why couldn’t you love me? like Celine had ever loved anything more.)

(Like that was a good thing. Like it wasn’t an ugly, possessive reassurance for Rumi to want that. Like—God, she knows she’s getting in her own head about it, but—)

It’s not just Celine. There’s something mean in Rumi, something she never learned, just always had.

It’s that time she told Zoey to just stop trying so hard, didn’t she get that it was annoying? Knew exactly which needle-thin cracks it would dig into and she did it anyway, because she needed Zoey to stop asking her to come swimming with them.

That time she nearly bit Mira’s head off for going in her room without asking. That time she made Zoey cry when she was seventeen. That time she put that gutted, awful look on Mira’s face—she can go on.

And maybe if she didn’t learn it, then she inherited it.

And Celine—Celine makes so many excuses for her mother. Says she deserved it as she yanks her shirt to cover up the bruise. Says her mother loves her.

And doesn’t Rumi live them?

[kenkuheart]

And Rumi has always known it was there, that thing inside her that was cruel and selfish and, well, demonic. She saw it every time she changed her shirt, her father's gift to her written in dark purple lines along her arm.

There has always been something evil and wicked and wrong within Rumi, and she has always known that one day it would just be gone. Turning the Honmoon golden would wick away all those wrong and awful parts within herself, like when she was very small and Celine would carefully kiss away all her ouchies.

After the bruise incident, Celine spends the next few weeks apologising to Rumi that she isn't available to meet her alone for coffee, or dinner, or even lunch in Celine's office at SLE. Mostly out of spite, definitely not meaning it, Rumi asks if Celine would be available if Miyeong gave her permission.

The silence is very sharp.

(Mira refuses to be involved when Rumi floats the idea of hosting them both for dinner. "I get it," she says. "I do, and if you really think you can play nice the whole evening then I'm not going to stop you, but I can't be there while you do it."

And Rumi wants to snap at her - call her a selfish coward who's turning her back on them when Rumi needs her most.

But.

She swallows it back instead.)

The worst part is how nice and normal it is, having Miyeong and Celine join them in the penthouse. Rumi has ordered in, plenty of jjajangmyeon as Zoey remembers how Miyeong gave an interview almost thirty years ago calling it her favourite food, which Miyeong looks genuinely pleased by.

"That's so sweet of you!" Miyeong tells Zoey, who looks down at her bowl of noodles and mutters a thank you in a way that Rumi hopes comes off as shy. Miyeong is charming, gracious, even funny - she jokes with Celine about which of them counts as the eldest, and Celine jokes back (jokes back, Rumi hasn't heard her tell a joke since 2019).

Miyeong likes to tell stories, and they're exactly the kind of story that Rumi has been hungry for her whole life. This is the mother she's only ever learned in fragments, other people's memories, prepared to answer every question Rumi has ever had.

Still, the only thought in Rumi's head is: You hit Celine.

(Her mother tells a story from her own training days, and Rumi laughs at the image she's painted - three teens trying to evict some wayward ducks from the bakgeori before their teachers noticed, and realised they hadn't closed the building up properly. Miyeong and Celine are already laughing at the thought, Celine behind her hand, Miyeong bright and sparkling.

And then Rumi remembers all over again. You hit my Celine.)

The whole time, Zoey's anxiety is spilling out in little ways. Her fidgeting fingers are small enough to go overlooked, but when Miyeong starts speaking to Zoey directly, her knee, pressed against Rumi's, starts to bounce.

The more questions Miyeong asks, the more Zoey has to move, knocking into Rumi and making the whole table shift. Rumi can already see the tightness around the corner of Miyeong's mouth, and she doesn't trust what might happen if the mood slips, so she digs her elbow into Zoey's side.

"Can't you just stop," she tells her, and Zoey stills.

(When Miyeong and Celine are saying goodbye and preparing to head out, Miyeong takes Rumi's whole face in her two hands and says, "That's my beautiful girl.")

(Rumi looks back into her mother's eyes. Her own eyes.)

(She says nothing.)

[kenkuheart]

Evil Miyeong thoughts thread getting incredibly long so! Passing it back here!

Thinking about the girls just gently poking and pulling at Celine until like. She finally just has to say outright that yes, Miyeong hurts her, but it’s for her own good, really. And if it’s isn’t, it’s still Celine’s fault

And the girls just all staring at her because hey what the hell

(In reference to this thread)

Well, yeah! Celine should know by now not to keep making Miyeong lose control. It hurts Miyeong to be put in that position, and it's hurting Rumi and the girls now to find out like this just how weak and awful Celine has always been, and Rumi deserved to finally make some happy memories with her mother and Celine is ruining that for her too.

She should just go. Miyeong was right; Rumi really would have been better off without Celine, and meeting up with the girls like this was selfish.

The girls try to say something but Celine can barely hear them. Without thinking, she hunches her shoulders and clasps her own arms, and the movement pulls at the fabric of her shirt. The girls fall silent immediately - Zoey sucks in a breath - and then Rumi's fingers slowly push her collar back to see the extent of the blue mark beneath her collarbone.

White-hot humiliation floods through her at the look on Rumi's face, at having her faults exposed in front of the girls, and Celine tugs her shirt back into place and fumbles an excuse.

She has to go. She's barely out of the building before her phone rings, and Celine ignores the call without looking at the screen. She can't speak to any of them right now, she can't let them see any more of her shame.

By the time she fumbles through her own front door, she's refused another two calls and turned her whole phone on silent just so she could think. It hasn't helped. Her mind is still stuck on that moment, spinning like wheels stuck in mud, yes, she hit me, but-- The way Rumi had looked at her. The way all three girls had looked at her.

Miyeong is sitting on the couch, a few books beside her. That had been Zoey's idea, and Rumi had thrown herself into it so enthusiastically Celine was half-expecting them to build a whole library for Miyeong to catch up on her missing 25 years. As Celine walks in, Miyeong looks up and grins, her whole face softening.

Some of the tightness in Celine's chest eases.

"There you are," Miyeong murmurs. "What's got you all upset? Come tell your unnie all about it."

She waggles her eyebrows outrageously, still amused by their sudden age gap, and pats the seat next to her.

Celine sits. "More like my hubae now."

That gets a real laugh from Miyeong, and Celine grins back at her, and for a second they’re both teenagers again. Fifteen, sixteen, giddy with the idea that they were going to be magical girl pop idols, their futures wide and sparkling before them. It had been so easy then.

"Come on, what is it? Work stuff?"

"Oh, ah. Nothing serious. Rumi just wanted--"

"Rumi?" The smile slips away from Miyeong's face, and Celine feels the balance of the conversation shift. "You went to see my daughter?"

"No, no, she just came to the office--"

"And you didn't tell me?"

"That's not--" Celine starts to say, but stops herself. She's clutching her arms again. Maybe hard enough to leave marks. She needs to stop, she needs to control herself, she needs to stop playing the victim. She knows.

Miyeong's lips are pressed together in one tight line. "Go on, then. What did you and Rumi have to talk about?"

"Nothing," Celine says - stupidly. She forces herself to rest her hands flat on her knees instead. "No, not nothing, she just--"

(She was really mean, Rumi had said.)

"She's worried about you - about how you're dealing with everything, that's all."

(It scared me, Rumi had said.)

"So what did you tell her?" Miyeong's voice is taut, a thread pulled between two clenched hands. "How am I dealing with everything, Celine-ah?"

---

My mother hit Celine, Rumi thinks. It feels like a children's riddle, like there's some kind of trick that will make it make sense if only she just finds the right way of looking at it. The surgeon is the boy's mother. The bear is white. My mother hits Celine, and that's all right.

Rumi feels very much as though she's somewhere outside her own body, looking at the mess before them from far away, so when Celine starts to leave it takes her an embarrassingly long time to process both that this is happening and also that Rumi could do something about it.

Could have done, she thinks, with a detached kind of hysteria. Celine has already left. Celine is already on her way back to Miyeong, who hit her, and there is some trick that will make it so that sentence feels fine and normal and nothing like the world is caving in around her.

Helplessly, she looks over at her girls. Zoey's eyes are huge and shiny, and she looks just as wrecked as Rumi feels. Mira, though - Mira who looks distinctly not shocked, not appalled, nothing but vaguely uncomfortable - looks back.

"What, no 'I told you so'?" Rumi spits.

"Nope," Mira answers, popping the end of the word. "Did you really think I would?"

The answer, of course, is no. Rumi folds her arms, not interested in admitting that right now. Mira had known. Mira had figured this out already - no demons necessary - and Rumi couldn't even be mad at her for not warning them, because of course Mira had tried to do that as well, and Rumi just hadn't wanted to listen.

"Well, I didn't think Ryu Miyeong would ever hit my... Celine, so what the fuck do I know?!"

[kenkuheart]

Well you may not be able to write about this stuff in the original dream to nightmare au due to the third person limited pov you chose so I guess I’ll just ask you here: what is twins relationship with Rumi like and what are Sunmi’s feelings about Miyeong and Celine’s marriage? (like you said what did she feel like watching her soulmates fall in love and get married? What did she think of her place in their trio after that?)

I would ask more questions but I decided to keep it fairly simple for right now and not be overwhelming. Plus I’d love more alt!universe info.

Thanks for your ask, I do love thinking about how this universe might work!

Right up front, I think it's worth saying that while I have been thinking about this, I don't regard anything I'm about to say as being canon for the alt!verse - Dream to Nightmare's a collaboration and if it hasn't been written in any of the threads, then everything's fair game for anyone who wants to join in.

(I'll also say that I'm less invested in Sunmi and the twins as characters in their own right and more for how they can be used as narrative foils or otherwise draw out more interesting things about the canon characters. So that's the lens in which I'm usually thinking about them.)

So in the eyes of alt!SLS, the following things are established facts:

Demons are controlled by Gwi-Ma, and the only way to escape his influence is for the demon to be killed;

Rumi was born with patterns that would, if they were allowed to grow, turn her into a demon that Gwi-Ma would be able to control and torture

Turning the Honmoon gold relied on SLS being able to present an image of themselves that inspired everyone. Hiding all their faults and fears was the only way to reach gold and therefore the only way to save baby Rumi from a fate worse than death, eventually being turned into Gwi-Ma's puppet, as well as the lives of all the other people who would have died at the hands of the demons.

All of which means that alt!SLS as a whole are more indulgent than a lot of other parents would be towards Rumi. They're young and scared that she's going to die and traumatised from both the child soldier and child pop star of it all and guilty about not being able to give Rumi a normal childhood, and they find as many ways as possible to spoil her in all the ways open to them to make up for it.

For years, Celine kept a careful distance between herself and the other two, feeling that her filthy, perverted nature would harm Miyeong and Sunmi and that they needed to be protected from her. Celine was careful not to join in with the easy, casual touches and shows of affection that were normal for Miyeong and Sunmi. Miyeong's pregnancy upended that: Sunmi felt the most betrayed and angry, and Celine stayed and helped Miyeong as much as possible.

So, shortly after Rumi is born: Alt!SLS are this very tightknit group, protecting multiple secrets like their lives depend on it, because Rumi's life quite literally does. Nobody can find out that Celine is gay (Celine is several years off acknowledging to herself that she's gay at this point, to be fair, but she does manage to hate herself for her feelings anyway). Nobody can find out that Miyeong has a baby.

Whatever plans they might have drawn up before seeing Rumi's patterns are scrapped. Maybe they were going to have a relative or their mentors look after her until they could finish up their contracts and gracefully retire, so Miyeong could finally take custody of her daughter and raise her out of the spotlight, while Celine and Sunmi took care of the Honmoon between them. But the patterns are a ticking timebomb - it would be cruel to take any more time from Miyeong and Rumi while Rumi might fall to Gwi-Ma's control at any moment - and they also mean that SLS need to go for gold quickly.

So SLS only have each other, and they have to make sure the whole world sees them as perfect. This means that a lot of parenting duties end up being split between the three of them. Not completely equally, but Sunmi is far more involved with Rumi than she will later be with the boys - because Miyeong can't disappear from public view, and they can't bring too many other people into their secret without risking Rumi's life.

It's also worth noting that SLS are really young at this point - I've said in one of my posts that Celine is 22 when Rumi is born, and Miyeong and Sunmi would both be younger than that. So you have 4 years of three young women who only trust each other and who are trying to raise a baby together while also becoming the greatest pop group ever. And it's during that period that Sunmi watches Celine spend hours walking around their little house trying to stop Rumi from crying so Miyeong can rest, and then Sunmi watches Miyeong watching Celine and at some point when Rumi's only a few weeks old Miyeong hands Rumi over to Celine with a "There you are, go to Maman" and Sunmi is still just imo.

(Celine. Also looks so split open at Miyeong when she says this, like Miyeong has reached into the very heart of her and pulled it straight out, like this is the most precious gift anyone could give her.

And continues to believe that Miyeong means it fucking platonically until Rumi is fully ten months old and Miyeong pushes her up against the kitchen door and kisses her senseless. Sunmi, who was busy sterilising Rumi's bottles over the sink while this was going on, just rolls her eyes but still grins to see the way her friends both pull back and look all bashful at one another.)

So Miyeong and Celine are starting to form their own relationship, but they are so tight-knit with Sunmi and so tentative in the way they approach one another (or at least Celine is, still not able to believe herself deserving of Miyeong's love - Miyeong has always been bolder, more willing to take a leap of faith) that she isn't really on the outside of their new family, not yet.

It's not like she wants to date Miyeong or Celine herself. It's not even as though she isn't happy for them. She doesn't even necessarily want what they want - alt!Celine's happy ending is her suburban mother of three life, whereas Sunmi keeps her career in the entertainment industry. This means that a lot of Rumi's "normal life", post-golden Honmoon, happens away from Sunmi.

So Sunmi has upended all her values and beliefs to help save someone with patterns. Has cut herself off from other friends and family and anything other than the mission. Has been caring for the baby, doing some of the night-time feeds and baths and worrying over bumps to the head, like a third parent. Has achieved the culmination of 500 years of progress, every generation of Hunters sacrificing to get them there.

And then Celine and Miyeong want to walk away from that.

She's happy for them. She did this for them, and for Rumi, all the people the demons won't be able to hurt, and a little bit for all the little girls who won't have to give up their dreams of becoming doctors or vets or teachers to fight and sing. But.

Rumi's worth it. Rumi has to be worth it, this miraculous girl who caused all three SLS set aside the vow they had made to kill anything with patterns and from that achieve the goal of all the Hunters that have ever gone before them.

Celine and Miyeong are happily married and living overseas in Canada, while Sunmi stays in Seoul and builds her solo career. It offers Miyeong and Celine a little anonymity - all the attention is on Sunmi and they're allowed to fade more into obscurity - but it also means she gets to see the Honmoon light up in response to thousands of hearts at her concerts. Miyeong and Celine get to hear about that from her, but their main interaction with the Honmoon is the way it wraps around their little family.

Celine also spends a lot of this time getting into therapy and dealing with a lot of her own issues, and Sunmi watches her friends navigate deeper wounds than any of them would have guessed. That distance lets Celine get healthier and more confident as a parent, and also work through some fears about having some kind of cursed bloodline that Celine has never needed to voice until she and Miyeong are talking about Celine getting pregnant.

The twins are the result of a lot of planning and work, not a surprise that upends their lives. And Sunmi loves them, but she loves them straightforwardly - none of the fear or guilt or anger that had complicated her relationship with baby Rumi, but equally none of the intensity. Rumi had been their rallying cry, their inspiration to save the world from Gwi-Ma forever. Hajoon and Seojoon are just her friends' kids.

As for Hajoon and Seojoon, I wanted Rumi to be part of a three (so twins) but set slightly apart from them, just as she starts off the film with some distance between her and Mira & Zoey. So the age gap means that Rumi didn't play with her siblings the same way close-in-age siblings do, it was always more to entertain them rather than back and forth between equals. So now she's been out of the house at university and building her own career, she's in a better position to build a relationship with the boys that's more adult.

All of the things they know about demons and supernatural powers is tied up in this story about how Rumi was so special, they had to fix the entire world to save her. And the boys have never lived in a world with demons being real, they've never felt any kind of threat in that regard, but Rumi did have this connection and some early childhood memories of what that world had been like. They don't want their sister to have been killed by a demon king but they're also 16 and convinced that nothing bad can really happen to their family, and wouldn't it have been so cool to have real superpowers and to live in that world instead?

Just. A lot of what I think was happening in the dream world has their golden Honmoon being much closer to the glimpses of gold that we see in the film, where Rumi's hiding her patterns and keeping that distance between herself and the other two, and if she could just keep pretending to be perfect then the Honmoon would turn gold and things could straighten themselves out afterwards.

But it's worth it, right? Even if alt!Celine understands that Rumi was never 'saved' in that way, there's still all the hundreds, thousands of people, that main!Celine must have never been able to save.

It has to be worth it.

[the-fallen-blue]

Huh that's a lot sooner than I imagined Celine and Miyeong getting together. I had it pegged somewhere around Rumi being three, partly for the romance trope farce of them coparenting their child while Celine is in wild denial that that's what's happening, but mostly because being able to get that out in the open makes a good catalyst for gold. If the Honmoon starts from Hunters' love for each other, Celine's love for Miyeong has to be able to be honest and complete to get there, and it can't be while she's still consciously holding herself back from it (implications for Huntr/x left to the reader's discretion).

(I think this is part of a general sense I have that... in the film, Huntr/x hits all the same beats that the previous generation did, the demon boyfriend, the shame, the lies, the soooo close to gold and then the big fight, but they got it right where the SLS couldn't. It feels very, idk. sensible? fitting? if the golden universe is the one where the SLS actually did get it right - alt!Celine conquered her shame like main!Celine couldn't but main!Rumi did, alt!Jeongho made an unselfish choice the way main!Jeongho couldn't but main!Jinu did, etc etc. From this perspective alt!Celine having a specific big emotional revelation/catharsis that leads into a sudden change in the Honmoon just like main!Rumi did is tasty literary symmetry in a way that a slow build to gold isn't.)

I do think the third wheel of it all for Sunmi is significant, and makes sense as one of the core reasons that the universes played out the way they did. ie, in both universes, Miyeong admitted she was pregnant by a demon, and Sunmi left, and in both universes, Sunmi spent the entire time between then and Rumi's 100 days boiling in betrayal and abandonment and resentment. She was alone and Celine and Miyeong were living their perfect domestic life together. They probably didn't wait for her to be gone a month before they started making out on every surface in the apartment, glad to finally have her out of the way. They never cared about her or the duty that bound them all together as much as they did each other.

And then, in one universe, Sunmi has a moment where the doubt and the hope overcomes the fear and resentment and she goes back to them, and she learns that she was wrong. Celine has been just as angry and betrayed and just as upset with Miyeong as Sunmi was, this whole time. Miyeong has been wallowing in guilt and shame over Celine and Sunmi and their duty, and struggling with the weird sense of affection-obligation-empathy she feels for Jeongho that she also feels guilty is not actually love. Neither of them were happy, they were desperately lonely and sad. There's a huge argument and yeah Celine yells at Sunmi but she also yells at Miyeong, and all three of them needed to hear that for various reasons, and for Sunmi the reason was that it proved she did not, in fact, mean nothing to them compared to each other, that they were all equals in this big emotional mess.

And in another universe, before Sunmi can get to that moment, Miyeong dies. And Sunmi comes back, of course she comes back, she can't ignore that tear in her soul no matter how bitter she is, but Celine isn't mad at Miyeong. Celine is obsessing over the last piece of her, even though Sunmi knows Celine never wanted kids, not even in some hypothetical future when she isn't barely more than a teenager herself with hunting and a career to care about. Celine is totally indifferent to the fraud and bribery and blackmail that will be required to keep this kid, or the danger to herself if she gets caught at it, or the danger of such a scandal to the Honmoon, already so damaged by their initial falling out. Celine is insistent that this child cannot go into the system and can give no reason other than it would be a betrayal of the woman who already betrayed them both first. Celine is once again choosing Miyeong over their duty, over Sunmi, over everything else, because of course she is, that's what she's been doing for the better part of a year, that's just who she's been all along, she never really cared about Sunmi, neither of them did, it's confirmation of what she's always sort of suspected, what she's been certain of since Celine chose to go with the woman who betrayed her instead of staying with the woman who didn't.

But, like, even for the Sunmi who got to see that Celine and Miyeong weren't living a perfect life of partnered bliss without her... they settled, she didn't. Miyeong who always loved the energy and affirmation of performance and the hugs from ten-year-old fans and Celine who found her purpose and place in protecting people, she thought they were on the same page as her and they weren't. They did eventually start living a perfect life of partnered bliss and it is, mostly, without her. She's not going to let it eat at her, not like before, she knows where that leads, but still... this isn't the future she thought they would have, when they stood on that stage under a sealed, golden Honmoon, glowing in their unbreakable love. It is a way in which alt!Celine will probably never realize she let her Sunmi down, but it could be another small step toward main!Celine understanding that every world has its own flaws and compromises, if she lets it.

It has to be worth it.

funny enough one of the seventeen rewrites of the Celine half of my last post had Zoey casually mentioning alt!Zoey again and then looking at Mira and having a moment of horrified realization, and Mira being like "ok yeah alt!Mira is living through whatever but think of all the people who never died over twenty years of no demons. How many lives is that?" (the train alone, she doesn't say.) And then she goes on with total sincerity that any Hunter worth their weapon would make that trade, so she's not gonna feel bad about it. And uh. alt!Celine does not like that, for a variety of reasons, even though it should be pretty validating, right?

[kenkuheart]

Yeah, okay, I actually like that timeline better. The only reason I wanted something to have happened with Rumi as a baby is so that it could have also happened in the main timeline before Miyeong's death, and then Celine has just put that moment in a box and decided to never think about that ever again.

And maybe if main!Celine had talked about that moment with Miyeong, things could have worked out differently - it might not mean that Miyeong lives but Celine wouldn't have held herself back from Rumi to the same extent, wouldn't have been so convinced that she was imposing, taking moments that were never meant for her, if Miyeong had chance to make her intentions clear. And I think that main!Celine having nearly had the chance to make that connection, but losing it because she was hiding her faults and fears.

But that doesn't have to be a declaration of feelings. A kiss, or sharing a bed, or something else that in the alt!universe was allowed to grow into their marriage and in the main!universe is just a shameful memory of a time that Celine gave in to her weakness and took something that Miyeong would never have wanted to give her, if Miyeong had seen what Celine was really like.

And as far as Miyeong and Celine know, there's never been a child like Rumi - so they don't calm down and relax about all the frightening noises that baby Rumi makes the way parents of human babies eventually would, not until she's a lot older, so every time she so much as whimpers there's a panic that is this it is this Gwi-Ma is he taking her. So Sunmi comes back to two people who are sleep-deprived and miserable and have been panicking for months in her absence, and nobody is at their best when SLS reunite. That's part of why I think Celine needed something to be hurled at her in that argument/reconciliation about her sexuality - because otherwise there's still this unspoken secret between SLS that isn't resolved until later. But maybe it's better if it's just an accusation that Sunmi hurls at her ("We all know why you would stay - aren't you embarrassed to keep following her around like some kind of stray dog?") that Sunmi apologises for and then they don't speak about for. A While!

Main!Sunmi making so many of the same choices as alt!Sunmi. Their lives being similar in so many ways. Except in the alt world she was their aunt who wept a bit too loudly at Rumi's graduation and who comes to family dinners and gets tipsy with Miyeong and Celine and coaxes them into singing some of their old hits sometimes while the kids want to die from embarrassment, and then in the main world she doesn't even get the vicarious pride of seeing Huntr/x at the top of their game. (Alt!Celine being unable to acknowledge her own hypocrisy here, because she sees how alt!Sunmi flourishes in the spotlight and continues to work in the same business that she hates main!Celine for not leaving and for exposing Rumi to. Weird, Celine setting impossible standards for herself that she does not apply to other people, how unlike her.)

Well, all the people on the train and everyone else were strangers. Rumi is Celine's daughter. Believing that saving Rumi and saving the world are perfectly in alignment means that she never has to look at her own values and do the equivalent of main!Celine dropping the sword ("Do what you should have done a long time ago") right?

But why would main!Rumi tell alt!Celine that? She doesn't even know how she feels about it yet. How everything had been falling apart around her, and she went to the one person who always had the answers, and said Fix this for me because I can't do this myself. And Celine. Hadn't. Had looked at the Honmoon tearing itself apart and looked at Rumi with her patterns and claws and fangs, and still chose to gamble the fate of the whole world on Rumi.

I think the twins are in this weird position where they probably had a childhood of jumping off high things and swinging toy swords at demons like in their mothers' stories before they learned from other kids at school that magic isn't real and assumed that all their family stories about demons and supernatural powers were just made up. So Miyeong and Celine had to have had the talk with them explaining that those stories were all true at some point.

And yes, they want to be Special, but also they have no real model of what special looks like in practice - their mothers aren't still keeping up with superhero duties, Rumi is normal now, demons aren't an actual threat. So it's informed by a lot of their own assumptions/imaginations/cartoons, probably.

[the-fallen-blue]

At what point did the boys notice that Hunters are always women, and what impact did that have on how they thought they should behave to keep up, I wonder. And more importantly, did alt!Celine ever notice?

Weird, Celine setting impossible standards for herself that she does not apply to other people, how unlike her.

At this point I am fully prepared to believe of this version of Celine that Mira got caught making out with some girl once when she was seventeen and Celine was like “that’s fine. Being gay is fine and normal and I have no opinion about it at all. Just for the love of god do not let the public find out and also let us never speak of this again,” and then carefully did not reflect on what any of that might mean about her whatsoever. Sometimes women kiss other women and that is fine, apparently this version of Miyeong kisses other women and that is fine, it is deeply uncomfortable to think about but she does not have to think about it because it’s nothing to do with Celine in the first place and it’s certainly not related to whatever sick perversion she has going on.

Actually it is interesting to consider what could get through to her on that front. Her problem is all these instincts that were trained into her when she was too tiny to make rational assessments of anything, and she actually does okay when she’s able to stop and bring rationality back in. Her mentors taught her to recognize and corral anger, so despite being very angry several times, she hasn’t done anything she would regret or can’t take back as a result of it. She's sometimes able to notice “I’m being maudlin, how embarrassing” and pull herself off of the self-loathing edge, probably something she had to train herself into over the years in order to be present for Rumi. But the only thing so far that has let her engage mentally with her sexuality without spiraling is being actively attached to Miyeong’s face. Which Miyeong is probably going to be a little less cavalier about now that she knows this isn’t her Celine.

She [Rumi] doesn't even know how she feels about it [Celine not killing her] yet.

lol is Rumi outraged that Celine would be such a shit Hunter, would put Rumi in the position of being the person who destroyed the world because Celine didn’t have the strength to do her goddamn job? Is Rumi grateful and astounded that Celine chose her over literally everything, even though it meant willingly rendering everything Celine has ever been or done or sacrificed for utterly meaningless? Is Rumi mad at herself because what kind of asshole is mad at their mom for not killing them, and also what kind of asshole is glad that someone picked them over eight billion other lives? Is Rumi mad at herself because what kind of asshole is she for asking that of Celine in the first place? Yeah she’s definitely not sorting through all that any time soon.

(I think that there could also definitely be an aspect of, like, I came to you to fix this and you didn’t and that let me down, you’re my mom you’re not allowed to be a mere human, but I do think that Rumi is mature and emotionally intelligent enough that if she actually got as far as articulating that thought, she would be able to recognize and dismiss it as unfair pretty easily. Unfortunately “you were seriously gonna let me destroy the world!?” is a little more complex to process.)

And even more fun, Rumi's having all this angst over Celine's choice when I don't believe Celine actually made any choice whatsoever. She's a half-functional mess of denial, panic and confusion for that whole scene, I do not think she even considered that Rumi was genuinely a demon until after Rumi was gone; neither we nor Rumi actually know what Celine would have chosen, if she genuinely thought she was choosing between the world and Rumi. But maybe the denial, the inability to even conceive of the choice in the first place, already says enough. And it doesn't matter anyway, since Rumi isn't likely to realize Celine wasn't thinking there. Celine is always thinking! Celine doesn't panic! Rumi would definitely have noticed if Celine was not in control of the situation because that would be crazy and weird! (She should also be able to realize that that isn't fair or accurate if she thought about it for ten seconds. But is she gonna?)

[kenkuheart]

So the thing about the boys is that everyone in their family is female and everyone in their family is Special, and their growing awareness of the first part doesn’t necessarily connect to the second in their heads.

It’s not like they’re surrounded by grandfathers and uncles and brothers who are all non-supernatural to make this a gender thing, because their family basically consists of their mothers + their aunt so there's no men to be shut out of Hunter tradition, and seeing how alt!Rumi framed it as a superhero thing suggests that SLS haven’t been having those conversations about spirituality, the historic role of the mudang and how this was associated with women. The twins might believe that their mothers’ stories being about women is just a combination of the girl group pop idol lifestyle & the lesbianism, and hey, Rumi's dad was firmly part of that supernatural world as well, so it can't be closed to men.

But when it comes to alt!Celine's take on their behaviour - well, it's not easy to pinpoint the whole gender thing as a cause when so much of this is just unstated vibes that the boys might have picked up on but don't necessarily talk about or even consciously think about. She does make different choices with the boys than with Rumi, but how much is due to them being boys and how much is due to their age and her experience as a parent and the fact that they're growing up healthy without the threat of being taken by Gwi-Ma at any given moment?

At this point I am fully prepared to believe of this version of Celine that Mira got caught making out with some girl once when she was seventeen

lol that's what I thought you were going for in that part where Zoey was talking about the first time she'd ever seen an adult bow to a child - that Mira had snuck out to a gay bar (the same one Miyeong and Celine like to go to?) and Celine had needed to drag her back before Dispatch got a photo of Sunlight Entertainment's newest trainee kissing another woman.

But I figured the interaction was more like Celine got Mira away from any potential paparazzi, told her that she can't let anyone catch her in a situation like that, fully intending for that to be all she ever says to Mira on the topic forever thank you. Except Mira doesn't like letting things go unsaid, even (especially?) when those things are shitty judgmental comments, so she tries to push and Celine probably tries to shut the whole conversation down as inappropriate.

Because Celine thought she had buried all those twisted, selfish impulses a long time ago, and now - God, did Mira learn this from her? No, she's been so careful to keep all her faults hidden from them, to keep them safe from knowing that horrible wrongness in her heart. Mira just needs to be reminded to be careful, that the press will be cruel towards her but also towards Zoey and Rumi, branded guilty by association, and their faults and fears must never be seen. And Mira, who does love Zoey and Rumi, can't really argue against that.

(I think it would be different if one of Huntr/x explicitly said to her "I'm gay/bisexual" because... Kissing a woman is one moment of weakness, a shameful inability to control yourself, but being gay is a permanent state. Like you could just be gay all the time, you could make breakfast while being gay, you could do your weapons practice while being gay, you could raise your not daughter while being gay and that's so... divorced from Celine's understanding of whatever is going on with her that she doesn't mentally connect the two until a little while later.)

(You probably shouldn't kiss women while being gay, though, that seems like it would be Confusing and Bad.)

But half of Celine's problem is the tendency to intellectualise and plan her way through all her problems, even the messy emotional ones where 'I Must Fix This' stops her from actually sitting with the discomfort and feeling whatever emotional tangle.

And I think Rumi going to Celine was like that "adultier adult" meme. Rumi was desperate and overwhelmed and scared and so she tried to come up with a plan to fix things and went to Celine. And of course Rumi would have noticed if Celine wasn't thinking - but more than that, she knows that Celine wasn't falling apart, because Celine was thinking clearly enough to come up with a plan about what to say to the others. So everything Celine did was a conscious decision, and apparently they both just have to live in a world in which Celine is fine condemning hundreds of thousands of people to die just so she doesn't have to break a promise to Ryu frickin' Miyeong.

(Like you, I don't think Celine consciously said "fuck the world, I'm picking Rumi". I don't even think she went "I trust Rumi enough to know that she will fix this without her needing to die". I think Rumi turning around and breaking the Honmoon in front of her was something Celine had never imagined, but Rumi thought Celine must have known. Celine knows everything! Celine's always in control!

Of course - like mother, like daughter - both of them have the same coping technique of going like "well, thinking about this would make me feel bad, so I'm gonna put those feelings in a box and ignore them forever. Surely this will cause no problems whatsoever for me, a person who is trying to protect everyone from demons using the ability to connect with other people". (Because they genuinely think that the things they feel - the weird, gross, frightening, painful or gay parts - would make people pull away. ) So Rumi is feeling Too Many Things and therefore chooses to feel none of them at all, so none of that is getting unpacked any time soon.

Even if she were up for chatting, it wouldn't be with this weird fake Celine who's freakishly open about her emotions and clearly disappointed in main!Rumi's life and who won't shut the fuck up about Miyeong. And all of this is before alt!Celine drops the biggest bombshell of all: "Have you girls considered finding a good therapist you can talk to? Honestly, therapy was probably the best decision of my life."

(Rumi... may never recover psychologically from that blow.)

[the-fallen-blue]

lol that's what I thought you were going for in that part where Zoey was talking about the first time she'd ever seen an adult bow to a child

oh Mira was absolutely sneaking out with Gay Intent. But I didn't really make a solid call in my mind whether she got far enough in her execution that Celine would know what she was attempting, beyond "Mira is a dumb teenager (affectionate) who wants to do dumb teenager stuff after curfew."

(Rumi… may never recover psychologically from that blow.)

Mira having nightmares about Celine bowing on the floor, Rumi spiraling about the idea of Celine in therapy, Zoey just hanging out like "what? Yeah it was weird, but honestly still more in character than some of the Polylight I used to read."

[kenkuheart]

Even if someone without deepseated internalised homophobia might have realised what Mira was up to, I see this version of Celine as just. Refusing. to even acknowledge any potential Gay Intent until someone forces her to stop deliberately boxing that off someplace into her mind she will not think about.

Occasionally Alt!Sunmi will do one of those interviews/variety shows where someone will ask her about her former life in SLS (not as often as they used to, now she's got a lot more projects in which she's credited as a solo artist than as part of SLS, but people still touch on it) and she'll have a little spiel about how they've kept in touch and they're best friends for life and so on. Main!Sunmi''s publicist has been told to shut down any questions about Miyeong, Celine or Rumi and Huntr/x.

(If one manages to sneak past her publicist, though, alt!Sunmi and main!Sunmi probably talk about SLS in a very similar way.)

Alt!Sunmi isn't above dropping a particularly embarrassing polylight edit into the group chat with a line like "Think I should tell them they're half right?" just to see Celine's 'Typing...' message show up for several minutes. (Miyeong always comments first to tell Sunmi to stop teasing her; Celine will never stop taking the bait and as her self-appointed bratty little sister, Sunmi will never stop needling her.)

Also the twins are in this weird spot where their parents want them to be part of the outside world - have friends at school, go off to university and get good jobs and so on - but they live in this very out of the way hanok where it's not easy to bring people, and where most people don't know that they have two mothers (on their official paperwork, Rumi is Miyeong's, the twins are Celine's, and most of their neighbours probably assume that they're two friends/sisters who are helping one another raise their children after divorce/being widowed.)

So I figure when they were younger, they worked out some elaborate backstory about how they had a dad who died back in Canada (and, because they were in elementary school at the time, probably embellished with a lot of details about how he was a spy and died saving the world from a giant bomb or something). And then they have never actually needed to tell it, because their mothers moved them into the hanok that everyone knows as That Place Where The Strange Women Live. And it's not been empty long enough for the village to forget all the centuries of lore about the strange women, and the children they raise, and so everyone knows better than to bother the women, or interfere, or ask uncomfortable questions. If one of the women asks you to do something, you better do it straight away, because the life that depends on it might be your own.

And now they have to travel further away to go to high school, they keep most of their other friendships safely away from their house - either through structured activities like sports or online gaming or going to hangout at a PCbang. But there's occasionally this weird charged element to their disagreements in which they might push each other a little harder when they're roughhousing, because what's their brother going to do, stop hanging out with them? They're the only people each other's age. (Solvable through actually giving each other some space and time to cool down, but also they're 16 so thinking that through and acting accordingly is not always the decision they make in the heat of the moment.)

[the-fallen-blue]

Thinking about the other two SLS a little more...

Sunmi's the archetypal maknae, so at least as far as the public is concerned, she's shy, cheerful, and innocent. This is not at all how she acts with her family even in flashbacks, so her trick for faults and fears is playing a role. You don't know how Celine feels because she's always calm and self-possessed. You don't know how Sunmi feels because she's always pretending to feel something else. This fits with Celine calling her a cagey fighter, and the way she acts upbeat and teasing in the face of Celine's distress both here and in the three-way swap, in comparison to Miyeong's open concern. (Though as you say, she is 100% genuinely a brat, too. Incredible dedication to gremlin behavior.) She's book-smart, good at math and remembering things she's read, but Celine was the leader, so she's probably worse at either tactics or interpersonal dynamics or both. She's a nerd who takes her nephews to their nerd movies, but main!Celine doesn't read comics despite alt!Celine liking them, so either Sunmi didn't either during their SLS days, or it was something she didn't share with the other two. Possibly she also had a shitty childhood and didn't have the chance to learn she was into them until the kids were a thing, but Celine framed the abusive nature of the idol industry as new to Sunmiyeong, something they shouldn't have had to face (unlike her, who was used to it). So perhaps, loving parents, but dirt poor and unable to take her to the manhwa shop.

If we go by the concept art (and/or Mirrorverse), Miyeong is an archer. That's a discipline that requires focus, precision, physical strength, and a great deal of patience. It doesn't take much space to flick off a throwing knife, so Zoey, despite her ranged weapon, is someone who can very much be in the thick of things, and has a very fast, mobile, close-in combat style (Celine, with two very short swords, would as well). But Miyeong would have been the opposite, finding a high spot with a good view and waiting for her shot. Other than evil!Miyeong, all variations of her in the celineverse have tended to be overtly kind, unwilling to judge until they've fully assessed a situation, and generally patient in the face of provocation, and I think that tracks with both "archer" and "kept a demon's baby"; I think it also makes sense if once you do corner her, she tolerates it much worse than Celine and goes for the headshot immediately (Rumi comes by it honestly). As the flawed extreme end of the generally virtuous trait of patience, her answer to the faults and fears mantra is probably "wait it out until it either goes away by itself or explodes," which goes with a) pining silently for Celine until she had to sleep with a demon about it, b) mostly behaving as though main!Celine is just alt!Celine having a normal bad day, c) not telling the other two about Jeongho until way, waaaaay too late. Celine pretends she doesn't have emotions about problems, Miyeong just pretends the problems don't exist.

Which, hm, okay. Celine bluescreens at the shinmok because she can't choose love over duty or duty over love, so she just Does Not See It instead. What if, deadbeat!au style, Miyeong had that same moment when Rumi was first born/whenever the patterns first showed up? She didn't choose Rumi, exactly. Celine probably mostly thought she did, the same way Rumi thought that Celine chose Rumi at the tree, because not choosing looks like choosing love in this circumstance. But it's actually not until Celine makes her promise to protect Rumi, to find a way to cure her, that Miyeong is able to resolve that tension and decide to love and keep this kid. Maybe you had that in mind to some degree already with her being so mad at main!Celine; it's not just that she failed main!Rumi, it's that Miyeong's own sense of self, her belief that she didn't betray herself and her soulmates and her duty, didn't doom a helpless child to Gwi-Ma's clutches, is actually very much contingent on Celine making that choice for her. And if Celine's choice was wrong, that foundation crumbles.

So we have another echo, another person making a choice because their loved one couldn't, but at least Celine is Miyeong's soulmate and peer and leader. That's her actual job! Rumi is Celine's kid it is very much not her job to solve things for Celine. One of the most important things this dimension hop can probably do for Celine is knock Miyeong off her pedestal a bit, and learning she wasn't actually any more able to face the fact of Demon Rumi than Celine was would certainly be a huge step toward that, but neither of them are going to think that handing the decision to Rumi was okay.

[kenkuheart]

Sunmi, I think, is very much also using her bratty little sister powers for good.

Celine does not always find it easy to talk about her feelings, and poking and prodding at her is also a way of getting a reaction out of her before Celine has chance to Bury, Bury, Bury. Even post-therapy Celine who has her coping techniques and has worked through a lot of her own self-hatred still sometimes uses that therapy knowledge to just rationalise her feelings away instead of letting herself feel them. Baiting Celine - who knows that Sunmi is deliberately getting on her nerves, and lets herself be baited anyway - is part of how they can check in on one another.

And Sunmi's playing a part in her conversations has a similar function - if Celine needs an excuse to actually voice how she feels (instead of rationalising things as 'Oh, I was reacting negatively because this reminded me of something that happened when I was a kid' and not giving herself the time to feel frustrated first) then Sunmi shit-stirring lets Miyeong and Celine reassure her when she gets into her head without people needing to make it weird and sad.

I kind of go back and forth in my head whether I think Sunmi is not interested in dating anyone, interested in dating but chooses not to get into a serious relationship because she prefers her independence and being able to travel and pick up jobs all over the world and make plans without checking in with anyone, or if she has occasional flings. But I do think it's important that the number one relationship in her life is still to Miyeong and Celine (and that she knows they don't feel the same about her). And for main!Sunmi, although main!Celine doesn't care about her at all, she's still enough of a celebrity that any serious relationship would have been written about in Dispatch. Or failing that, picked up by the Google Alert that Celine has set up for Sunmi's name, uncaringly.

Anyway, this is to say that main!Celine would look at alt!Sunmi's life as being closest to the one that she should have lived, basically. Rich aunt flying in every so often to shower her friend's kids with toys and days out, then return Rumi (and the siblings Rumi never got to have) to Miyeong, catch up with her friend and then leave. But main!Celine would also have seen that as being quite intensely lonely - the part where she would go back to her empty house, to just wait until it would become appropriate to go back to the warmth of a family that was not her own. Sunmi, I think, doesn't see her life as being as tragic as main!Celine would, not least because Sunmi isn't madly in love with Miyeong and does things she enjoys with the rest of her life apart from them, whereas even in Celine's imagination she assumes that she would just be hopelessly pining after Miyeong.

(Re: the abusive trainers & corporal punishment - I think that to teenage Celine, at that time, the anger at seeing Sunmiyeong being treated poorly doesn't come from 'I know how to deal with this, and they don't'. It's more like 'They don't deserve this, because they're good, and I do because I'm bad'. Not that she would say that to the other two - probably not even to herself, really, because this requires at least some basic introspection that young Celine would have struggled with - but that's an underlying assumption informing a lot of her anger.)

(The injustice of her having been treated that way comes. Uh. Later than she really wants to admit.)

Yes! Celine works best when she can get up-close and into the thick of things, and Miyeong operates best at a distance, so between the two of them they would balance each other out. (Main!Celine trying to train Huntr/x by herself, and having little experience of ranged weapons to draw on, feeling Miyeong's absence as acutely as if she'd just lost her all over again.) (A new fresh grief at seeing Rumi draw a sword - because Celine could teach her how this works, could use all her expertise in melee to keep Rumi as safe as she possibly can, but she'd always assumed Rumi would take after her mother.)

(I've been kicking around the idea of Miyeong's family having been affected by the division of the country into North and South Korea - not in Miyeong's lifetime, obviously, and even her parents would have been young children. But something about the motif of borders/barriers/separation. This probably won't come up at all, but all of SLS as having something that sets them slightly at a distance - Celine having been raised in France, Sunmi being from some place fairly rural and feeling like Seoul is a million miles from wherever she was growing up, Miyeong having heard all about her halmeoni's sister on the other side of the border who her halmeoni might never get to see again. Something about Miyeong knowing that if you get the right vantage point, you can see over the lines other people can't see past, and spot something not all that different on the other side.)

For Miyeong's reaction - there were a few different parts that I was thinking about at the time, and firstly, in alt!Miyeong's defence, she was operating off the story Celine had told Sunmi in a pretty combative mood, starting off with the punchy "Miyeong should be dead and my Rumi asked me to murder her" and then had Sunmi add something like "also this Celine seems like kind of a bitch". So she's shaken at the Holy fuck my wife is missing in some place with this incredible danger she has not had to face in years, then at the guilt of I didn't notice that was not my wife, dealing with Celine's shitty way of just announcing to Sunmi that Rumi was suffering so badly she was pleading for her own death (and is Miyeong's Celine with Rumi now? Will Miyeong's Celine have to see their daughter plead for her to kill her?) as well. She's not thinking particularly clearly, but in fairness Celine decided on the absolute worst way of communicating the differences in their two timelines.

I was thinking about the idea of the promise as a mirror - I'll take care of Rumi/Rumi will be okay, and both Celine and Miyeong having remembered their interpretation of what was promised more than the literal words. So main!Celine took that as an instruction to keep Rumi safe and make sure she did well at school and learned how to be an adult and had the training necessary to do well as a Hunter after it became clear the Honmoon chose Rumi. And I was thinking about how Miyeong had looked at her ostensibly platonic friend, plopped a baby in her arms and went "so you're her maman now" and how that could have been off the back of the same conversation, the same promise.

(Objectively, I think, an absolutely wild decision on Miyeong's part, to announce that Celine was now taking on parental responsibility for her kid without talking that through. So that's why I think Celine's promise kind of made sense to Miyeong as the foundation for their little family - Celine would look after Rumi, would make sure that Rumi would be okay, would fix things, and Miyeong trusts that.)

I think main!Celine does need to stop that reflexive habit of going "Miyeong would have known what to say", "Miyeong would have done this better", "Miyeong would have wanted..." It's ingrained now, but it just makes this entirely unnecessary distance between Celine and Rumi, because Celine's so busy holding herself up to this imagined perfect version of Rumi's mother that she doesn't let herself be Rumi's imperfect but real mother.

But. Crucially. Her image of Miyeong is someone who died tragically young and never had to tell a toddler to stop biting her for the seventh time that day. Who never had a little kid throw a screaming mega tantrum while they're on a train so there's no opportunity to escape and about one thousand eyes trained on her in judgement. Who never had to listen to weeks of whining about how so unfair Miyeong was to say that her 12 year old was not allowed to fly unaccompanied to the mainland and attend a concert without any adult supervision. The Miyeong Celine has been missing could always Be Perfect, Be Rumi's Mother, but not actually Do Parenting Things.

And that's the way I've kind of been thinking about things - this being/doing split. In the movie, Rumi and Celine start off thinking entirely about Being - you can be a hunter or you can be a demon, and Rumi isn't a demon so that makes her a hunter and nobody has to question anything about their most closely held beliefs. Jinu teaches Rumi that demons are just people who are doing terrible things, and Rumi teaches him how to choose to do good things instead. At the end of the film, Rumi is human because she chose to Do the human things, hope and connection and love and honesty and trust. And Jinu chose those things too, and dies as a human. The doing allows you to become, basically.

Celine, though, has never had her This Is What It Sounds Like moment and doesn't know that there was this path. Miyeong is Rumi's mother so - for all that Celine has done the night feeds and the teething and comforting after nightmares and the driving lessons and the museum trips - that was that, Celine had no avenue to become Rumi's mother too. And yeah - echoes of that too in the way that Celine could, without a shred of irony, say something like "Yes, girls, some people are gay or bisexual, and that is fine but the media and the fans would not be kind to any idol who was openly gay so any person in that position would be better off being discrete" seconds before learning far more than she ever wanted to know about Zoey's gay awakening. And at the same time think of herself as having some disgusted impulse she needs to stop herself from acting upon, because she isn't going to Be Gay, she would be Doing A Perversion To Someone.

And that Being/Doing split ties into how I see a lot of Rumi and Celine's issues with communication stemming from. They're both people who want to jump into action, Do Something, Fix Things when things go wrong and actually letting themselves Be Sad or Angry or Scared barely registers. There's a bad feeling so they need to Plan or Solve This and they don't actually want to give themselves time to feel it. Rumi's learning, post-movie. Still very creepy to have a version of Celine not just feel things but want to talk about the things she feels and listen to Rumi talk about the things Rumi feels, and not jump into Fix This mode.

But that's the mother-daughter ness of it all, right? There is nobody in the world capable of driving the other person up the wall in quite the same way as Rumi and Celine can do to one another. Celine is the first person Rumi ever hated and Rumi is a constant reminder of Celine's guilt and yet! Celine will cut up fruit for Rumi and Rumi will nag Celine to hire someone to help out around the gardens at least, please, the last thing I want is to hear you broke a hip halfway up a mountain without anyone checking on you for days (Celine, who is not yet even 50, has to stop and ask exactly how old Rumi thinks she is) and they love one another.

[secondtolastrow]

Dead Evil Mi-Yeong gets revived somehow and at first Rumi is overjoyed to see her mom. However as time passes she sees how she treats Celine and talks about third and has doubts about what Celine told her. It finally clicks when Mi-Yeong starts sabotaging Huntrix’s dynamic to make it all or it her.

Them trying to convince themselves the edges are just trauma, that any inconsistencies in the narratives must be accidental, that she’s just trying to get used to the here and now. It’s Rumi’s mom, she can’t be…

And Miyeong feels so fucking lost, she’s just trying to get her feet under her, she is, and for her that means—control. It means attention. It means certainty, that everyone listens to her. She’s not hurting them just to hurt them, she swears, but she doesn’t know what the hell else to do other than make herself feel sick on it and make them hurt again

Rumi who doesn’t like that she doesn’t like her mother but—Celine doesn’t seem happier, really, now that she’s back. She just doesn’t

[fakelawyerbug]

Boy just imagining how Miyeong, who's working off memories of people who are 25 years out of date, trying to grasp control back and it just... not really landing the way she expects.

(Even Celine, reliable, affection-starved, desperate to please, Celine was different now and Miyeong feels like her grasp is slipping every time Celine pauses, frowns, looks at Miyeong like...

Like she thought Miyeong wouldn't...)

(Like she'd forgotten how much loving Miyeong had hurt.)

And Rumi (who just wants to be able to talk about this with her mom) (and by that, she means Celine because... god she'd always called Miyeong her mom but she really didn't know a goddamn thing about the woman did she) who doesn't know how to bring up it up with Celine.

Becuase it's Celine who kept telling Rumi how great Miyeong was and doesn't it feel like a betrayal that Rumi... does not agree with that?

Doesn't it feel like she's just going to hurt Celine if she brings up that she doesn't think Miyeong is... good for Celine?

[secondtolastrow]

And, really, Mira had wanted the fuck out of her parents’ house from the moment she realized there was a world outside of it, she just hadn’t thought it was accessible until—really, until she’d been living with Rumi and Celine for nearly a month already

Mira’s attempt at this would be straightforward and angry and end with Celine defending her soulmate and walking out, sick to her stomach, and Miyeong gently holding her and asking if the girls often make her this upset?

Zoey remembers how she hadn’t spoken to her brother for almost a month after he’d called the girls she only later admitted had not liked her stuck up little prisses, and it sits, sick in her stomach, as she feels it like an excuse to just not say anything, to do nothing, to not be there for Celine

She doesn’t have the words for it, only confusing guilt over the fact that she winces at the idea of sitting Celine down without bring another solution to the table

And Rumi… Rumi just keeps thinking about the way Miyeong had looked at Celine’s plate at lunch the other week and raised an eyebrow and Celine hadn’t eaten half of it and—she wants to ask. She needs to ask. Does Miyeong often make her feel that way?

[kenkuheart]

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? “Soulmate”. This isn’t a family member you could stop seeing, or a partner you could move on from. Miyeong is a match to her soul.

There are theories passed down by the Hunters who came before, that three are needed to complete one another, to achieve balance.

So what does it say about Celine, that part of her soul was tied to Miyeong’s so that she could help Celine learn all these lessons Miyeong is still having to teach her? What does it say about her, that she was supposed to help Miyeong in turn but Miyeong has never, not once in all their years together, felt satisfied?

(When Rumi had been chosen, she let herself hope that Rumi’s partners would be kind. That is as far as she let the thought go.)

[secondtolastrow]

Not that, had things gone so wrong a second time, Celine wouldn’t have shifted her stance in the direction of ‘fuck fate’ and found as much of a way to maintain Rumi’s wellbeing as possible, though of course she wouldn’t let herself even consider such a thing, much less what her answer would’ve been

Not that, when Third walked away, Celine even considered chaining her back with such an argument, however much it tore her open to lose a second soulmate so soon after the first, though of course she wouldn’t let herself remember such a thing, much less that they both had very much been able to move on to some degree in the intervening years

(Not that one would ever imply Celine was hypocritical, of course)

But it is not as though Celine has been unsatisfied, for all that she has been unsatisfactory. It isn’t, she promises

Herself, more than anyone.

[kenkuheart]

Well, it would have been wrong for someone to be unkind to Rumi. That wouldn’t make any sense.

Miyeong, though, just wanted to help Celine. If Celine could just figure out how to talk without embarrassing herself, how to present herself so she looks half-decent, how to behave in front of other people then Miyeong wouldn’t need to keep explaining those things to her.

(And if, sometimes, Miyeong’s help was phrased a little more forcefully - if Miyeong showed how frustrated she was - then that was just because Celine should have already known. If sometimes there are times when Miyeong’s hand is tight around her wrist, tighter in her hair, then there are also times when Miyeong’s smile lights up and it feels like sunshine fills Celine to see it.)

Miyeong died, had her daughter’s childhood ripped away from her, and Celine was the one who benefited from all those stolen moments - only to waste them letting Rumi down. Of course Miyeong is struggling to accept that; how could Celine hold that against her? How could Celine think about turning her back on Miyeong now, when she needs Celine most?

Celine just needs to do better. That’s all.

[secondtolastrow]

Thinking about Celine offering the worst of her failures to Miyeong, in this world. Of what she did to Rumi, as she frames it and Miyeong most certainly agrees, though she somehow finds some kind of forgiveness for her, after her rage is over

(Though she holds it over her head, brings it up when she needs to remind Celine, as she always does, of course she forgave Celine for her failures)

Thinking about Miyeong having something she knows about Rumi, about her daughter, about this stranger woman that seems to be so central to her soulmate’s life.

About all of the ways that could go, for better or worse

[kenkuheart]

It just occurred to me that for Huntr/x - or definitely Zoey, who grew up idolising the Sunlight Sisters and finding comfort in their friendship when she was being bullied, and Rumi, who was raised with the saintly Ryu Miyeong haunting her and Celine's continued insistence on talking about how much Rumi's mother would be so proud of her - there's a super logical explanation for the weirdness, right?

Because it is weird. That's the closest word they have to describe any of it, the way Miyeong speaks about Celine like she's testing them, the way Miyeong talks a little more sharply, the small raised eyebrow at Celine's plate, the bruise that Rumi only saw a tiny glimpse of (Celine, tugging at her long sleeves for weeks).

It's weird and it has to be weird because all the other words that they could use are. Not sayable words, even in the privacy of their own heads.

But weird has an explanation in their world, usually, and what makes more sense - the idea that Miyeong was secretly not. A good person. (The closest they can get, at first.)

Or maybe that the thing that came back wearing her face is just a demon trying to trick them?

[secondtolastrow]

Fuuuuuuck

And, like, yeah. A demon can be encouraged into more pro-social behavior until they break the cycle of shame and get out from under Gwi-Ma. And this demon has certainly shown some capacity for kindness, even if she(?) is convincing herself these behaviors are just trickery

But she’s also wearing Rumi’s mother’s fucking face and using that to hurt her mom

(Mira, biting her lip just a little, looking at this theory as her girls get themselves worked up and carefully pointing out that they haven’t seen any patterns yet. They haven’t seen her do any magic, or slip on her social cues. They could be right, but…)

(Rumi, unable to listen.)

And thinking about the girls trying to talk to Celine about this possibility and her just being like “…what. No. Miyeong isn’t acting weird.” And then getting angry. Defensive. Protective. How could they possibly think that about Rumi’s mother?

Which is. Unhelpful

[kenkuheart]

And Mira was not an SLS super fan like Zoey or Miyeong’s actual daughter but she was raised in a household with a very normal, human kind of evil.

But she was a kid. She didn’t have a choice, and as soon as she could, she left and was better off for it. She found her family with Rumi and Zoey. She never went back.

Celine is an adult who has been away from this for more than twenty years, and she still isn’t doing anything to stand up for herself? That’s… Mira doesn’t get it. She doesn’t like what it says about her that part of her feels angry at Celine for being pathetic enough to let it happen.

Rumi is. Okay, obviously my girl has incredible compassion and belief in people’s ability to choose to do better. But that’s her mother’s face which was stolen, and it’s being used to hurt her… Celine, and her belief in redemption is being sorely tested by the only possible explanation for what’s happening, no, Mira, you must not have heard me, I said Celine had finger marks on her wrist like someone had grabbed her. So! Demons!

(Mira, as gently as she possibly can but honestly they have been going in circles for a while: “… You know humans also have fingers?”)

[secondtolastrow]

And, at the end of the day, the point is that demons are just people making shitty choices. You don’t get to divide yourself from them, just like they don’t get to resign themselves to the idea that they could never be anything else. It’s all just people, all the way down

(Zoey spent a good while thinking about that, after everything. Thinking about how easily she let Gwi-Ma in, about how easily she’s killed so many demons, about how easily people had treated her with the kind of uncaring cruelty that comes with not quite seeing the victim as human

Thinking about what, exactly, she thought she was)

Rumi says, “And?”

And Mira just looks at her. Doesn’t bring up how perfectly respectable her family is, when they can sweep to the side the odd… tension… of their relationship to their daughter.

Zoey watches Rumi consider bringing it up, lashing out at the closest weak point. You’re projecting there, ready on the tip of her tongue, just for a millisecond

But she’s better than that. Fights off the impulse, doesn’t say it. Takes another breath.

“Yeah,” she says. “But…”

And Mira shrugs a little.

[kenkuheart]

And it's better, obviously, that they can see this about demons - people making shitty choices who can still have the capacity to make different choices.

But they used to be able to solve their problems by swinging a big magic sword, and the more Rumi thinks about the purple mark on Celine's wrist the more she kind of wishes that her problems could still be solved that way.

(And yes! She knows that's the whole antithesis to everything Huntr/x stands for - the whole This Is What It Sounds Like of it all. But. They're in the process of unlearning a few centuries' worth of teachings about the line between humans and demons, and most of Rumi's problems didn't involve her having to talk about feelings. Worse, talk about feelings with Celine and also the demon who might be masquerading as Rumi's dead mother. She used to just be able to swing her magic sword and everything would be fixed and it's fine. It's better now. She gets it. It's just, you know, it was nice when all her problems were simple.

Mira, again, unable to stop herself picking at this like a scab. Like a bruise. Saying: "... All your problems?")

But. Okay. People can make shitty choices, but Miyeong has never really been a person in their eyes. Zoey spent years wanting to be part of a circle of friends who loved each other as much as the Sunlight Sisters did - and finding out that one of her childhood heroes was quite literally a hero who saved the world on the regular did Nothing to stem her worship of Miyeong. And Rumi has known Miyeong more as a constant refrain of "Your mother would have ...". Not just from Celine, although she's definitely done most of it, but from everyone who knew Miyeong - or thought they did, in the way fans sometimes do. Miyeong has always been an absence in Rumi's life, an echo, a story that everyone else was telling her. She was never.

Human, she thinks. Fallible?

(Mean, maybe, except that feels like a little kid's complaint, "My mom's so mean", and this doesn't. Fit.)

(It's easier to ascribe evil to the world of demons and magic. Not. Whatever Mira's trying to imply.)

[secondtolastrow]

Eventually, finally, they decide not to bring up the demon theory. Not directly. Just like they decide not to bring up the way Miyeong treats Celine, because Celine has ridiculously low standards for how others treat her would hate the idea that her students are seeing her as weak. Reject it out of hand on pride alone

It makes more sense to try I had a weird conversation with her and Does that sound like normal behavior for her? and I guess we’re still getting to know each other, right? Is that some kind of pet peeve or something? and It freaked me out

(However vulnerable, however childish, Rumi does end up saying it anyway: She was just really mean.)

Celine dances around her answer. Justifies. She’s sure Miyeong was just having an off day, things have been so rough for her—she lost decades of her life, Rumi, and you know your mother loves you more than anything

She doesn’t seem surprised, though. Not really.

And Rumi can’t stop herself from poking at it

[kenkuheart]

And some of their questions make the excuse for Celine - "We're still getting to know one another", "She seemed like this really bothered her", "She's got to catch up on so many things that she missed out on".

So what can Celine say to that? They're right. Miyeong needs-- time, and patience, and understanding, and Huntr/x might not have always had the first two but their hearts had so much of the third that they remade the world around them. Celine wants to just agree with them when they speak like that.

It's the strangest thing, though. Her throat feels so tight she can hardly talk when she thinks about telling them that they're right. If they can just learn to navigate the waves of Miyeong's moods the same way Celine had learned, and is having to learn all over again, then things would be so much easier for them. She just. Can't quite seem to put that into words.

In some ways, even though Rumi feels so awkward and embarrassed and desperately uncomfortable about the whole process, talking about how it (always it, not 'she', because an 'it' is just talking about an objectively fucked-up situation and they've learned that blaming Miyeong directly is the quickest route to getting Celine to shut down the whole conversation) made her feel - I didn't like it, it makes me feel uncomfortable, I was scared - gets better results.

Better in that Celine nods like she understands. Like she remembers. So, you know. Worse!

[secondtolastrow]

Dead Evil Mi-Yeong gets revived somehow and at first Rumi is overjoyed to see her mom. However as time passes she sees how she treats Celine and talks about third and has doubts about what Celine told her. It finally clicks when Mi-Yeong starts sabotaging Huntrix’s dynamic to make it all or it her.

Them trying to convince themselves the edges are just trauma, that any inconsistencies in the narratives must be accidental, that she’s just trying to get used to the here and now. It’s Rumi’s mom, she can’t be…

And Miyeong feels so fucking lost, she’s just trying to get her feet under her, she is, and for her that means—control. It means attention. It means certainty, that everyone listens to her. She’s not hurting them just to hurt them, she swears, but she doesn’t know what the hell else to do other than make herself feel sick on it and make them hurt again

Rumi who doesn’t like that she doesn’t like her mother but—Celine doesn’t seem happier, really, now that she’s back. She just doesn’t

[fakelawyerbug]

Boy just imagining how Miyeong, who's working off memories of people who are 25 years out of date, trying to grasp control back and it just... not really landing the way she expects.

(Even Celine, reliable, affection-starved, desperate to please, Celine was different now and Miyeong feels like her grasp is slipping every time Celine pauses, frowns, looks at Miyeong like...

Like she thought Miyeong wouldn't...)

(Like she'd forgotten how much loving Miyeong had hurt.)

And Rumi (who just wants to be able to talk about this with her mom) (and by that, she means Celine because... god she'd always called Miyeong her mom but she really didn't know a goddamn thing about the woman did she) who doesn't know how to bring up it up with Celine.

Becuase it's Celine who kept telling Rumi how great Miyeong was and doesn't it feel like a betrayal that Rumi... does not agree with that?

Doesn't it feel like she's just going to hurt Celine if she brings up that she doesn't think Miyeong is... good for Celine?

[secondtolastrow]

And, really, Mira had wanted the fuck out of her parents’ house from the moment she realized there was a world outside of it, she just hadn’t thought it was accessible until—really, until she’d been living with Rumi and Celine for nearly a month already

Mira’s attempt at this would be straightforward and angry and end with Celine defending her soulmate and walking out, sick to her stomach, and Miyeong gently holding her and asking if the girls often make her this upset?

Zoey remembers how she hadn’t spoken to her brother for almost a month after he’d called the girls she only later admitted had not liked her stuck up little prisses, and it sits, sick in her stomach, as she feels it like an excuse to just not say anything, to do nothing, to not be there for Celine

She doesn’t have the words for it, only confusing guilt over the fact that she winces at the idea of sitting Celine down without bring another solution to the table

And Rumi… Rumi just keeps thinking about the way Miyeong had looked at Celine’s plate at lunch the other week and raised an eyebrow and Celine hadn’t eaten half of it and—she wants to ask. She needs to ask. Does Miyeong often make her feel that way?

[kenkuheart]

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? “Soulmate”. This isn’t a family member you could stop seeing, or a partner you could move on from. Miyeong is a match to her soul.

There are theories passed down by the Hunters who came before, that three are needed to complete one another, to achieve balance.

So what does it say about Celine, that part of her soul was tied to Miyeong’s so that she could help Celine learn all these lessons Miyeong is still having to teach her? What does it say about her, that she was supposed to help Miyeong in turn but Miyeong has never, not once in all their years together, felt satisfied?

(When Rumi had been chosen, she let herself hope that Rumi’s partners would be kind. That is as far as she let the thought go.)

[secondtolastrow]

Not that, had things gone so wrong a second time, Celine wouldn’t have shifted her stance in the direction of ‘fuck fate’ and found as much of a way to maintain Rumi’s wellbeing as possible, though of course she wouldn’t let herself even consider such a thing, much less what her answer would’ve been

Not that, when Third walked away, Celine even considered chaining her back with such an argument, however much it tore her open to lose a second soulmate so soon after the first, though of course she wouldn’t let herself remember such a thing, much less that they both had very much been able to move on to some degree in the intervening years

(Not that one would ever imply Celine was hypocritical, of course)

But it is not as though Celine has been unsatisfied, for all that she has been unsatisfactory. It isn’t, she promises

Herself, more than anyone.

[kenkuheart]

Well, it would have been wrong for someone to be unkind to Rumi. That wouldn’t make any sense.

Miyeong, though, just wanted to help Celine. If Celine could just figure out how to talk without embarrassing herself, how to present herself so she looks half-decent, how to behave in front of other people then Miyeong wouldn’t need to keep explaining those things to her.

(And if, sometimes, Miyeong’s help was phrased a little more forcefully - if Miyeong showed how frustrated she was - then that was just because Celine should have already known. If sometimes there are times when Miyeong’s hand is tight around her wrist, tighter in her hair, then there are also times when Miyeong’s smile lights up and it feels like sunshine fills Celine to see it.)

Miyeong died, had her daughter’s childhood ripped away from her, and Celine was the one who benefited from all those stolen moments - only to waste them letting Rumi down. Of course Miyeong is struggling to accept that; how could Celine hold that against her? How could Celine think about turning her back on Miyeong now, when she needs Celine most?

Celine just needs to do better. That’s all.

[secondtolastrow]

Thinking about Celine offering the worst of her failures to Miyeong, in this world. Of what she did to Rumi, as she frames it and Miyeong most certainly agrees, though she somehow finds some kind of forgiveness for her, after her rage is over

(Though she holds it over her head, brings it up when she needs to remind Celine, as she always does, of course she forgave Celine for her failures)

Thinking about Miyeong having something she knows about Rumi, about her daughter, about this stranger woman that seems to be so central to her soulmate’s life.

About all of the ways that could go, for better or worse

[kenkuheart]

It just occurred to me that for Huntr/x - or definitely Zoey, who grew up idolising the Sunlight Sisters and finding comfort in their friendship when she was being bullied, and Rumi, who was raised with the saintly Ryu Miyeong haunting her and Celine's continued insistence on talking about how much Rumi's mother would be so proud of her - there's a super logical explanation for the weirdness, right?

Because it is weird. That's the closest word they have to describe any of it, the way Miyeong speaks about Celine like she's testing them, the way Miyeong talks a little more sharply, the small raised eyebrow at Celine's plate, the bruise that Rumi only saw a tiny glimpse of (Celine, tugging at her long sleeves for weeks).

It's weird and it has to be weird because all the other words that they could use are. Not sayable words, even in the privacy of their own heads.

But weird has an explanation in their world, usually, and what makes more sense - the idea that Miyeong was secretly not. A good person. (The closest they can get, at first.)

Or maybe that the thing that came back wearing her face is just a demon trying to trick them?

[secondtolastrow]

Fuuuuuuck

And, like, yeah. A demon can be encouraged into more pro-social behavior until they break the cycle of shame and get out from under Gwi-Ma. And this demon has certainly shown some capacity for kindness, even if she(?) is convincing herself these behaviors are just trickery

But she’s also wearing Rumi’s mother’s fucking face and using that to hurt her mom

(Mira, biting her lip just a little, looking at this theory as her girls get themselves worked up and carefully pointing out that they haven’t seen any patterns yet. They haven’t seen her do any magic, or slip on her social cues. They could be right, but…)

(Rumi, unable to listen.)

And thinking about the girls trying to talk to Celine about this possibility and her just being like “…what. No. Miyeong isn’t acting weird.” And then getting angry. Defensive. Protective. How could they possibly think that about Rumi’s mother?

Which is. Unhelpful

[kenkuheart]

And Mira was not an SLS super fan like Zoey or Miyeong’s actual daughter but she was raised in a household with a very normal, human kind of evil.

But she was a kid. She didn’t have a choice, and as soon as she could, she left and was better off for it. She found her family with Rumi and Zoey. She never went back.

Celine is an adult who has been away from this for more than twenty years, and she still isn’t doing anything to stand up for herself? That’s… Mira doesn’t get it. She doesn’t like what it says about her that part of her feels angry at Celine for being pathetic enough to let it happen.

Rumi is. Okay, obviously my girl has incredible compassion and belief in people’s ability to choose to do better. But that’s her mother’s face which was stolen, and it’s being used to hurt her… Celine, and her belief in redemption is being sorely tested by the only possible explanation for what’s happening, no, Mira, you must not have heard me, I said Celine had finger marks on her wrist like someone had grabbed her. So! Demons!

(Mira, as gently as she possibly can but honestly they have been going in circles for a while: “… You know humans also have fingers?”)

[secondtolastrow]

And, at the end of the day, the point is that demons are just people making shitty choices. You don’t get to divide yourself from them, just like they don’t get to resign themselves to the idea that they could never be anything else. It’s all just people, all the way down

(Zoey spent a good while thinking about that, after everything. Thinking about how easily she let Gwi-Ma in, about how easily she’s killed so many demons, about how easily people had treated her with the kind of uncaring cruelty that comes with not quite seeing the victim as human

Thinking about what, exactly, she thought she was)

Rumi says, “And?”

And Mira just looks at her. Doesn’t bring up how perfectly respectable her family is, when they can sweep to the side the odd… tension… of their relationship to their daughter.

Zoey watches Rumi consider bringing it up, lashing out at the closest weak point. You’re projecting there, ready on the tip of her tongue, just for a millisecond

But she’s better than that. Fights off the impulse, doesn’t say it. Takes another breath.

“Yeah,” she says. “But…”

And Mira shrugs a little.

[kenkuheart]

And it's better, obviously, that they can see this about demons - people making shitty choices who can still have the capacity to make different choices.

But they used to be able to solve their problems by swinging a big magic sword, and the more Rumi thinks about the purple mark on Celine's wrist the more she kind of wishes that her problems could still be solved that way.

(And yes! She knows that's the whole antithesis to everything Huntr/x stands for - the whole This Is What It Sounds Like of it all. But. They're in the process of unlearning a few centuries' worth of teachings about the line between humans and demons, and most of Rumi's problems didn't involve her having to talk about feelings. Worse, talk about feelings with Celine and also the demon who might be masquerading as Rumi's dead mother. She used to just be able to swing her magic sword and everything would be fixed and it's fine. It's better now. She gets it. It's just, you know, it was nice when all her problems were simple.

Mira, again, unable to stop herself picking at this like a scab. Like a bruise. Saying: "... All your problems?")

But. Okay. People can make shitty choices, but Miyeong has never really been a person in their eyes. Zoey spent years wanting to be part of a circle of friends who loved each other as much as the Sunlight Sisters did - and finding out that one of her childhood heroes was quite literally a hero who saved the world on the regular did Nothing to stem her worship of Miyeong. And Rumi has known Miyeong more as a constant refrain of "Your mother would have ...". Not just from Celine, although she's definitely done most of it, but from everyone who knew Miyeong - or thought they did, in the way fans sometimes do. Miyeong has always been an absence in Rumi's life, an echo, a story that everyone else was telling her. She was never.

Human, she thinks. Fallible?

(Mean, maybe, except that feels like a little kid's complaint, "My mom's so mean", and this doesn't. Fit.)

(It's easier to ascribe evil to the world of demons and magic. Not. Whatever Mira's trying to imply.)