Chapter Text
Part I
The Girl in the Mirror
Nothing was perfect. Nothing could be. Rumi had finally realized that it was actually okay to just exist, to not be perfect. She was actually okay. It was a little dizzying, like a release after too much pressure built up.
Getting to really spend time with her friends, being seen. Knowing that when they looked at her they saw all of her, all her faults and her fears and they loved her anyway. And she loved them, probably more than she should. (Much more than she was willing to admit)
Rumi loved this feeling and never wanted to let it go. The warmth of their arms when they embraced her, the soft hum of the Honmoon in her bones. Being able to look at herself in the mirror, really look at herself—to see her patterns and not flinch.
For the first time, she could look at herself and not feel shame and self-loathing. She just saw herself. Rumi. Patterns and scars and all. There was no real single thing or person she could thank for, she knew it had been sort of a group effort. Jinu. Mira and Zoey, even Rumi herself had played a part. She'd thought she'd needed to be fixed, when what she'd needed had been to heal.
Rumi lifted her arm, watching her patterns shine iridescently in the bathroom light. Honestly, she was starting to love them, something that for her entire adult life and at least half her childhood she would have found inconceivable. But maybe she had always loved them deep down, before Celine's voice had crushed that love.
And she could have lost everything. She'd come so close to losing everything. Losing herself, losing her girls, Bobby, the whole world. A different choice, a hesitation or too rash a decision and maybe…Maybe that girl in the mirror would be someone else. Someone alone and angry or scared. Or dead.
But she wasn't alone, or angry or scared. She was alive and she wanted to be. She'd chosen to live —had chosen it the moment she'd gone to Celine— and she wasn't going to turn her back on that decision.
Rumi smiled at her reflection, then turned away and stepped through her door, needing, suddenly, to find them and bask in the presence of the people she cared about.
But nausea overcame her and she stumbled, crashing into the hallway wall, her lunch rising up and spilling all over the floor. The vertigo made her vision swim and she thought she heard someone shout her name before an eerie silence filled her ears.
And that was what she noticed. The thing that told her something was terribly wrong. Absence. Zoey and Mira, gone. Not even the soft thrum of their heartbeats through the Honmoon. Those two brilliant parts of her were far away somewhere, the thread that tied them together fraying and fragile and she'd never known a feeling as cold or terrible.
The second thing that Rumi noticed was that the Honmoon was gone. No threads of rainbow, no comforting hum. It was just before sunrise, the penthouse dark and abandoned. Most windows and glass shattered. The couch was torn to shreds and the entire place was a wreck but all she could really focus on was that absence.
"Mira?" She called out, stepping carefully. Her hand clutched at her chest, clawed at it, their absence like a physical thing, a rift in her very soul.
Her voice shook, "Zoey?"
And then a thread, tenuous and thin touched her wounded heart. Rumi stumbled towards the balcony and looked out over a dark city. No lights, just the moon bleeding red high above and in the distance the fiery glow of Gwi-Ma, gigantic and menacing.
Rumi had woken from a pleasant dream and into a nightmare. She heaved, gripping the railing on the balcony, a keen sense of wrongness overwhelming her. Like the world itself was wrong. Closing her eyes, she tried to center herself, hyperventilating. Ice clawed it's way through her veins as her mind reached the only possible conclusion that made any sense; her happiness had been a lie and they'd lost. She really had woken from a dream.
But in that thread she felt it, felt Zoey alive. Felt Mira. Find them. She had to find them and make sure they were okay. Then they could repair this somehow. As long as they were together they could make it right. Oh god what if they—
The sound of air displacing behind her was the only warning she had. Rumi jerked to her right as a blade slashed vertically down where she'd been standing. Bouncing up onto the railing she reached within herself to draw her weapon and froze.
"Mira!" But her relief, while palpable, was short lived.
Mira was a mess, blood coating her arm and most of her shirt, hair roughly cut short, her eyes wild with anger, grief and fear. Leaping forward, Mira struck again, Rumi flipping sideways but remaining on the railing, "Mira, it's me, stop!"
"I know it's you!" Her voice was filled with a sort of tired rage that crushed Rumi's heart and slowed her movements. Another attack, this time managing to cut a thin line along Rumi's left cheek.
She touched her face, pulling her fingers away and staring at the blood. Still red, like it always was. The patterns on her arm weren't purple, unchanged from the iridescence of what they'd become after the Idol Awards. Rumi's heart was breaking and she was so confused. Was this the dream? If it was a nightmare, her patterns would be purple. Wouldn't they?
Her eyes searched Mira's face, "I don't understand! What happened? We defeated Gwi-Ma! Made a new Honmoon together!"
Mira stumbled, dropping to one knee and catching herself with her Gok-Do, her voice raw like it had been raked over shattered glass, "You betrayed us!"
"Never," Rumi whispered, stepping off of the railing and back onto the balcony. She slowly approached Mira.
Mira's eyes were sunken in, tired and dull as they tracked Rumi's movements, " I know I don't deserve it but is it too much to ask you to make it quick?"
Gently, Rumi's hand closed around the shaft of Mira's Gok-Do. Mira's hand dropped from it and landed in her lap as she lowered her head as if awaiting execution. Rumi's heart felt like it hadn't just shattered but been ground down to diamond dust.
She tossed the weapon to the side, Rumi's mind flashing back to her and Celine before the tree as it clattered away. This is what that must have felt like for her.
The realization weighed heavy in her gut. They hadn't talked, not really. Rumi vowed to change that once she fixed all this. If she could fix all this.
Mira didn't move. Her head remained bowed. Exhausted. Broken.
Swallowing bile, Rumi knelt. Mira flinched when she touched her face and tilted her chin up. This close, she could see the slow simmering anger in Mira's eyes. But also conflict, confusion.
"Who are you?" Mira rasped, her eyes widening, darting across Rumi's face. To her marks, her ears, back to her eyes.
"I'm ... I'm the harmony. I'm Rumi, without the secrets and the lies."
"God," Mira whispered, head falling forward. "I'm hallucinating. Even now, I'm fucking … everything we ever wanted from you. Just you. It's so cruel that I've got to be dying. One final joke from a God that hates me."
Her head lifted again, voice weak and strained, "So many sweet lies. Whispered in our ears, between our thighs. You said you loved us, you said we mattered. We belonged. You called me family."
Rumi's throat bobbed, "I do…You do. You are."
"And even if you did mean it, you tore us apart!" Mira shoved weakly at her, wracked by a single, exhausted sob, "It was so fucking easy..."
It would be easy. Too easy. Tear Mira down, rip out Zoey's heart. Rumi realized she knew exactly how do to it. But she also knew how that felt. Jinu had used her exact words against her. Used Zoey's voice, Mira's face, taken the two people she loved more than anything and used them to violate her.
Seemingly lost in the past, Mira snarled, "Zoey loved you. I loved you! And you kept lying to our faces…"
The words reverberated on the tattered threads of the Honmoon that tied her to Mira. It hit Rumi like a bullet to the chest and her body leaned back until she'd fallen onto her rear, shaking.
But Rumi had felt something else and realized a truth about herself.
She tried to slow her breathing, stem the rising panic in her stomach, and whispered, "You are Mira, but you're not my Mira. I don't know what's happening, what… what me you're talking about. But if she was ever anything like me then she meant it all at one point. But I know how easy it is to stand on a razor's edge between making the right choice and the wrong one. To hide a part of myself, to hide how I was born."
"Born…" Mira's breath caught and she managed to pull herself together enough to straighten and stare at her again, a devastated look on her face. She ran her tongue over a cut on her lip, "If you're not a dream while I'm dying what the fuck are you then?"
"The girl in the mirror," Rumi whispered, tears spilling down her face at the sudden clarity. She felt it in what was left of the Honmoon, in the subtle differences on Mira's face, "The one who went left instead of right, the one who kept her humanity and embraced her demon half. The one who made a new Honmoon with you and Zoey. My Mira and Zoey."
"Don't stop." Mira grabbed her arm, eyes pleading, "Tell me more of these sweet little lies."
There was a soft sound behind Mira and Rumi lifted her eyes to see Zoey leaning heavily on the wall. She looked even worse than Mira, blood-soaked bandages wrapped around her middle, the right sleeve of her sweater hanging empty, bloody around the bicep.
Rumi felt like she was going to be sick again. Sick at the sight of Zoey's injuries, at the broken shell that was supposed to be Mira. Sick at the knowledge that she'd done this to them. That she was even capable of hurting them. Even more than making them hate her, she'd been afraid of hurting them.
And then she was sick, scrambling to the side as her stomach twisted.
It was a long moment after she recovered before Zoey spoke, "What does it look like? Your Honmoon."
"Iridescent." Rumi wiped her mouth, then lifted her arm, pulling her sword into the air, "Like my patterns, like this." Her blade shimmered in the same rainbow as the Honmoon she'd still been growing used to and Zoey's eyes widened.
Mira bit back a choked sob, "It's not fucking fair. You come here like an angel showing us what could have been—" Her head turned, "Zoey, you shouldn't be up."
Shaking her head, Zoey started to cry silently, "I knew there was good in you, Rumi."
A few tears slid down Mira's cheek, but she said nothing.
Rumi opened her mouth to speak, but she felt a familiar presence and at the last possible second spun around, deflecting a strike.
Jinu landed on the railing, "Huh. I knew you were still soft on them."