another #blenderedrumi thought. also cw for mentions of suicide.
so, humans have nightmares every once in a while, some more often than others. demons are living a nightmare, aren't they, so the awful nature of it kind of bleeds out into the background (do demons even sleep?? for the sake of this headcanonâno).
and then you have a half-demon. someone human enough to be disconnected from gwi ma's touch, but demon enough to feel the remnants of the curse he inflicts upon his victims.
imagine this, then. celine, having read up on dozens of guidebooks about parenting, knows that babies cry a lot. like, a whole lot. no surprises in rumi's early childhood; the shrills in the middle of the night are expected and taken care of. celine never thinks much of it.
but rumi grows. rumi's patterns grow, and with them, her nightmares. nightmares that soon morph into night terrors, cycling between sleep paralysis and too-vivid dreams and aches, aches, aches.
it is not hard to conclude why she suffers from this. anyway, those are the technical parts of the headcanon, parts which i might ramble on about another time, but right now, i'm so stuck on the moments.
toddler rumi bawling into celine's shoulder, too young to even comprehend the abstract pain and torture of her dreams. celine whispering into her hair, completely lost and frightened, murmuring for miyeong to help (she's sure miyeong would know what to do, she always knew what to do).
preteen rumi clutching onto celine, fingers digging into her back as she tries to breathe, breathe, breathe since the ceiling is always too low when she wakes up, the walls too narrow, her lungs too weak. sleep is her enemy for as long as she remembers, and she never learns how to fight back.
teen rumi who barely gets 2 hours of sleep each night, so sure that it would be easier to die than to live like this.
rumi on stage, eyebags covered by countless layers of makeup. she is the main reason why their concerts never last too long. otherwise, she'd collapse from exhaustion. it is a miracle how she's standing as is, how she's sweating and moving and dancing and being so perfect on the outside and yet so flawed on the inside.
and until mira and zoey come to the compound, rumi sleeps alongside celine. then, there is an awfully long stretch of her sleeping alone, having no one to turn to during the night, no one to whisper in her hair, comfort her when the horrors invade her mind.
(maybe either zoey or mira ask her what's up with her sleep schedule, or they hear her yell and cry at night, and she deflects and says that she has stress-induced nightmares, and that she's finefinefine, she's nothing but fine!).
post-movie, they always sleep together. even if rumi is sick (which adds onto the severity of the night terrors), they are holding her close, ready to help in any way they can. there is not much they can do (there never is), but rumi finds it easier to wake up from a bloody, painful, migraine-ish nightmare and realise that she's with her girls, and the pain fades with their touch, with them lining kisses along her scalp, on her temples.
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
amandla
blakekathryn
pixelskylines
