imagining a world where rumi gets to grow up in the world's strangest household and only ever explains her family dynamic in a way that raises more questions
"my papa (riwoo) and dad (celine) don't get along very much, dad always glares at papa. but it's okay because my mama (miyeong) and eomma (kimmy) make them get along :)"
rightfully, the assumption is that her parents are divorced and have remarried. if only it was that easy
parent-teacher conferences are just 5 minutes of the teacher staring at Three Women and One Man and going "um. so., uh,m. which one of you is. Dad?" and watches in disbelief as celine raises her hand
as rumi gets older, she slowly stops calling celine "dad" and kimmy "eomma", but when she brings home mira and zoey for the first time, she is MORE than thrilled to point at celine and go "that's my dad over there! eomma's probably out in the garden, i can introduce you to my mama and papa right now! hi dad!"
mira and zoey eventually corner celine and go "Soooooooo. Dad, Huh?" and celine has to go "Miyeong Requested It. I Do Not Say No To Miyeong. As A Rule."
if it wasn't so painfully obvious that rumi was biologically riwoo and miyeong's, mira and zoey would never find out which one of them she was Actually related to, because they're all insistent on claiming rumi for themselves. kimmy in particular will go "yes it was a long painful labour. 15 days. all worth it in the end." and miyeong will nod and go "it must have been SO hard for you"
mira is bewildered by rumi having FOUR parents that love her and zoey is busy trying to figure out what awful grandparent names she can come up with for the four of them because she's already planned their future, so celine is going to have to deal with being peepaw at some point
(or: putting celine into this blender i've heard so much about) (part 1)
The Honmoon, doing its whole spiritual-magic-mystical thing, sends dreams to its hunters, often prophetic in nature. This is very useful if you are living in a pre-phone society where getting to tears in the Honmoon before they happen is a matter of a week of preparation, and very much less useful if you are the only hunter available for the Honmoon to send dreams to. And also you're trying to raise the Honmoon antichrist.
Needless to say, Celine does her best, but nobody could handle all of that psychological/psychic pressure.
She's at a public event – Rumi comes with her, because she's still not willing to let Rumi out of her sight – someone makes a comment that should be outside of her hearing, but y'know, hunter abilities and all, and, well–
Celine snaps.
Not fully, more like a still-green branch, not pulled far enough to come loose from the tree, but far enough that there's no chance of ever healing seamlessly. It's ugly (though nobody dies – barely), and extremely public, and she's absolutely involuntarily hospitalized. She has money and fame, but the government is making a push for this sort of thing, and there were extremely detailed photographs in the news the next day (the ones that could be published, at least). Her near-psychotic distress at being separated from Rumi – she knows what's happening here, she knows that they're going to take her girl away from her – doesn't help matters.
The next fourteen years are spent maintaining her physical condition as best she can in a cell with supervised yard time, trying to play 'nice' with her captors (emphasis on trying – Kang Celine does not do 'nice'), and bearing the brunt of the Honmoon's visions. Without a hunter to train the next generation, the Honmoon will do its best to guide future hunters, but Celine is still a psychic lightning rod for as long as she lives without a proper hunter to replace her.
The dreams aren't exactly precision tools – they might be visions, either of the present or the future. They might be allegorical to the point of complete metaphorical abstraction. They might be a loose manifestation of the Honmoon's mood, whether that be calm or anxious. Celine, completely cut off from accessing the outside world by normal means, at least has the entire backlog of Honmoon trash to slog through. Some of the things she sees are even true, or will be.
And at least in the dreams she can watch Rumi grow up
Rumi, on the outside, is fostered away. She's put with a nice enough couple, but she was old enough at the time to remember Celine's slow descent into disturbed sleep, the way she would insist on Rumi learning to fight even as young as she had been at the time. Her insistence that Rumi was not just special, was critical to the future of the Honmoon. Dangerously critical.
Rumi spends the first two months with her foster parents adjusting to falling asleep without Celine curled protectively around her. The two months after that are spent arguing with her foster parents over her attempts to continue Celine's training regimen – something they think is too much for someone as young as her and also far too violent for a girl. The two months after that are spent rebelling against her attempts to ground her. The media is still interested enough in the story at this point that Rumi's rebellions get public attention. She's refostered. The process repeats itself.
Rumi grows up following Celine's tenets religiously. Foster parents come and go, friends are made and abandoned and broken up with, she takes on schoolyard fights and singing competitions, but always her memories of Celine follow her. What Celine taught her about fighting, about singing, about the Honmoon, what Celine told her about the future and destiny and patterns, what happened when Celine couldn't handle the stress on her own. Rumi knows she has to be better.
Civilians don't know what her patterns are when they see them, but demons hear rumors. Rumi covers up. Rumi's less of a headline these days, but every time she gets slapped in the back of a gossip rag for getting into public fights she has to spend the next week avoiding the odd demon scout. Rumi keeps her head down. Celine said Rumi won't hunt until she draws her weapon from the Honmoon, but she'll need to be ready when that day comes. Rumi trains, and trains, and trains.
And then she meets Mira at a dive bar (Rumi's performing, Mira's working), and the two of them are frustrated and a little scared by how much unexplainable attraction there is between them until they're fighting their differences out in a back alley after the bar closes for the night and Zoey crashes into them as she's trying to get out of her own trouble, and – oh. Oh.
And on the other side of the country, Celine's eyes flick wide open.
This story is entirely inspired by this post. Note I am not being paid enough to accurately reflect the characters as they appear in canon.
Rumi has two phones, and has had since she was old enough for Celine to trust her to manage herself (read: very young). Both are always jailbroken in-house by Sunlight Entertainment to turn them from the best phones on the market into a hacker’s worst nightmare, are never kept for more than a year, and all of them are completely wiped and destroyed at the end of their lifetime.
Internal policy dictates she keep both phones on her at all times, which Mira and Zoey argue aggravates her workaholic tendencies and Human Resources Heung-min has assured them is only to ensure that she, as leader, can be contacted in the direst of circumstances. Two phones, he says, a quarter of the risk. Zoey thinks Human Resources might be creating policies for the outbreak of nuclear war.
One of them is always a ‘personal’ phone – decorated and eye-catching such that she can pull it out at events and interviews for fans to analyze later and supposedly intended for whatever people in her demographic use their phones for (games, personal pictures and videos, and looking up pictures of small animals, according to the SE public relations team).
The other is a ‘work’ phone – undecorated, filled with apps to streamline her work on the move, and the only phone that anyone ever called her on until she gave Zoey and Mira her personal number.
Rumi never hesitates to pick up a call from her personal phone. It’s good for the public to see, after all, that her phone wears custom-made cases in such a way to promote their newest album, single, photoshoot. And also nobody calls her on her personal except Mira and Zoey.
Her work phone, though, she has to check before she answers. By this point, most of the people with access to her number can be trusted not to bother her unless it’s important, but every so often a new manager hire or one of the several old men on the board will start panicking about nothing and decide to take their issue all the way to the top. But she’s been doing this for ten-odd years, so most have been taught not to try her or have weeded themselves out.
When her work phone flashes ‘Kim Celine’, her first instinct is to pick up. Not only is declining a call from Celine flat-out stupid, Rumi’s aunt never calls unless it’s necessary. Celine calling is a category-three event – only disasters and emergencies would warrant Rumi letting this call go to voicemail.
On the other hand, their personal relationship since the last Idol Awards has been… wounded. Raw, maybe. Zoey had used the word ‘shredded’, but Rumi prefers to give herself a little more credit than that and anyway it’s not like they can’t recover – sort of – from what Mira calls ‘their whole thing’, a phrase they’ve started using to shorthand for 'Rumi’s life between the ages of ten and twenty-three' in their discussions about how fucked Rumi is.
Celine has sent her messages since the Awards – email, text, hand-written note delivered by courier, fax (Rumi hadn’t known the Sunlight building even had a fax machine, had needed someone to explain to her what it was and how it worked) – telling Rumi that she was sorry, that she was going to see a therapist and that Rumi should too, that she was going to step back from Sunlight Entertainment indefinitely until Rumi wanted her more involved again, updating her on the state of her garden, a slightly blurry photo of a half-empty soda-bottle on a table once, but.
But.
For the past eighty-six-and-a-half days, she hasn’t called Rumi at all. Hasn't showed up in person, either.
It's given Rumi... time. Distance. To think about Celine. To think about how Celine relates to her (Rumi had ended up taking her advice and gone to see a therapist). But all of a sudden her time is up and that distance is falling fast, the ground rushing up to meet her.
The phone keeps ringing on the counter. Rumi thinks distantly that it should have gone to voicemail by now. Mira groans from the couch where she’s sleeping. Zoey shouts some question from the bathroom. Rumi’s hand hovers over the phone. The phone is shaking as much as her hand.
Rumi swipes a finger across the screen and collapses into the seat she’d been leaning on.
