Chapter Text
They had regretted it the second Rumi turned to flee. They had lowered their weapons, lowered their heads, overwhelmed with shame.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” Zoey had whispered into the dark — the same dark Rumi vanished into.
They hadn’t known, couldn’t have known, that it would be the last time they saw her upright. The last time they’d hear her voice ring clear through the night. The last time she was intact. Whole.
But Mira couldn’t help but think they should have. They should have known. They should have seen it coming.
Now, memory devours itself. They replay it again and again, endlessly, obsessively: the breathless sound of her retreating footsteps, the ragged hunch of her shoulders, the silence collapsing in her wake. Had she looked back? Had her head twitched, almost, as if she wanted them to follow? They cannot remember, it had blurred in the grief left of their minds.
They argue over it sometimes, cry and shatter over it, but they can’t agree. They never will.
There is no agreement to be had. Only this night, carved into them like a horrific brand. One that would not fade, no matter how many mornings came after. The night their lives split open and refused to close again.
It hadn’t taken long to find Rumi after Gwi-ma fell. They had known, with a sick certainty, exactly where she would go.
The tree. The cradle of her childhood. The grave of her mother. The place where she had been forged into something deadly, broken and hardened and taught to endure. But they hadn’t had any idea the war she fought most faithfully had been against herself – that the enemy had always been in her very blood.
If only they had known.
Celine was the one they collided with first, staggering away from the direction of the tree, face drained of colour. She had gasped that it was false — just another trick of Gwi-ma, meant to rip them apart. That Rumi was waiting for them, now that he was defeated, waiting with the truth. Mira had bolted before Celine even finished, Zoey’s boots pounding after her.
And what they do remember, with hideous, haunting clarity, is how they found her.
Sprawled in the dirt.
Gagging on herself.
Sain-geom red and weeping beside her.
Her throat was not a throat anymore. It was an open mouth in her flesh, an unending wound vomiting blood. Rumi choked on its shreds, drowning in the violent torments – how it came up in great black gushes, bubbling, splattering, carving out of her neck in hot, obscene fountains. How her chest rattled like a jar of loose bone, rasping, every inhale a grotesque theft of air that refused to stay. How her mouth frothed, lips cracked and wet with gore that hadn’t decided which way to spill out of her.
Her eyes – Christ, Rumi’s beautiful eyes – huge and shining and burning with pain, with fear, and, horrifically, with relief – so wide and sharp it was nearly ecstasy.
And still, when she saw them, when her gaze locked and held, she looked at them as if they were a miracle. A beloved dream. As if the last thing she had ever hoped for had arrived at last.
Mira had dropped beside her so hard her knees split open. She barely noticed. Her hands flew immediately to the gaping gash of Rumi’s neck, sinking into the slick mess of it, scrambling to keep her inside herself. She shoved, clawed, prayed, as if she could cram Rumi’s soul back into the leaking vessel of her body.
Zoey had screamed, or retched, or both, so horribly it split the night, and folded forward to press her entire body against Rumi’s, as she so often did when the world felt too much. Their skin had smeared together in blood until Mira could not tell where Rumi ended, where Zoey began, where she herself was meant to be.
They clung to her — as if to defy fate. As though their arms could be a tourniquet, something to stop her from sliding off the edge. As though their human hands could convince the universe to leave her soul alone, to let her stay with them.
Because Rumi had been the axis of their world. And they, unknowingly, had been hers. But they had left her. Mira and Zoey had turned on her, abandoned her. And now Rumi was leaving in return.
What the fuck had they done.
“Please – please, not yet,” Mira had heard herself plead, voice shredding to ribbons. “We’ll fix it, we’ll fix everything, I swear it, Rumi. Just – don’t go – stay!”
“Rumi, look at me, stay, stay – please, stay – ” Zoey’s cries were muffled by Rumi’s hair, slick with tears. “We need you, unnie! I can’t – I can’t bear it if you – please don’t leave me!”
The words had poured out wild and senseless, the kind of promises that snap the moment they are made, but they said them anyway, because not to try was unthinkable. And even now, the sound of it still stalked them — their own voices, each other’s, stripped and pleading and trapped forever in that night.
But they had known, even then. They had known Rumi could no longer hear it.
Her gaze had fluttered, once, twice, then fixed onto theirs. Glazed, already half gone, but trying, always trying, to comfort them. Her mouth worked around syllables that wouldn’t form, tongue drowned in the blood that rose instead, throat slivered beyond speech.
She could not answer them. She could not give them anything more.
But still, they begged her to stay. Still, they offered futures that would never arrive. Still, they made promises that already lay broken at her feet.
Rumi’s chest had hitched, again and again, rising in misfiring spasms that cruelly imitated their dying hope. And then — stillness. A brutal stillness. Her body slackened, head dropping against Zoey’s sternum with a sickening weight, as though she had grown heavier in death than she ever was in life.
The Honmoon had dulled and greyed around them, a fading star.
And Zoey had looked up at Mira then, eyes wide and red and convulsing with frenzied disbelief, with guilt so consuming it bordered on madness.
She looked at Mira like she had done something irreparably wrong and did not know how to fix it. As though she had murdered Rumi with her own hands. As though if Mira just told her the right words, she could undo it all, stitch her back together, breathe her alive again. If only, please, please, Mira would help her try.
Mira would never forget that look.
Nor the way Rumi’s pupils, once so sharp and consoling, had dilated past return, the light leaching out of them in time with the sky.
They stayed like that until morning.
Zoey would not unclench her grip. Her arms had become iron bands, welded around the slack body in her lap. She refused to stop keening into Rumi’s hair, refused to stop smoothing blood-clotted strands from her face. She kissed the stiffening cheek again and again, lips dragging through the tack of dried blood as though tenderness alone could rewind time, as though devotion could bully death into retreat and beat the blooming decay from Rumi’s skin. Her joints had locked around Rumi’s cooling body like a vice, an anchor against the inevitable drift – Rumi’s weight dragging heavier with every hour, inert, slipping into the objecthood of it, rather than her.
Still, Zoey would not let go.
Mira had folded her long arms around them, chest pressed to Zoey’s shaking spine, forehead sunk into the mess of Zoey’s tangled hair. She told herself it was to steady the younger girl, to keep her from splintering apart as well.
But the truth was uglier: she could not look into Rumi’s eyes, still open. Couldn’t face the vacant hollows where her burning soul had once lived. She hid inside Zoey’s darkness instead, clung to the convulsions of her sobs, buried her own gaze where she could pretend the abyss wasn’t waiting.
But dawn came regardless.
And it forced them to see what the night had stolen.
Light bled across the ruined clearing, indifferent, as though the world had not ended in the hours it was gone. It gilded the gore, the stained earth, Rumi’s body white and sprawled in Zoey’s lap — and still the sun climbed higher, relentless, blind to what it revealed.
By the second dusk, there was nothing left but dirt, the congealed crust of blood, and the sour tang of rot beginning to rise. Their own bodies had failed them first: tongues swelling with thirst, stomachs clawing, voices shredded from calling Rumi’s name into the dead, un-answering air. Mira’s sobs had degraded into hoarse gasps, her vocal cords rasped bare. Zoey kept flinging herself onto Rumi’s chest, shaking her shoulders, pressing her lips to cold blue skin, begging her awake, trying to warm her with the fever of her own body.
They had screamed their throats raw and ragged, screamed until they matched Rumi’s fate — until their throats were as empty as hers. And if that meant they’d never sing again… what did that matter? The only thing they could find it in themselves to say anymore was her name, her name, her name, flung into the silence like it might take pity on them.
It was Celine that had to tear them off. She looked just as wrecked, but her hands were steady; though Zoey trembled like fever and Mira clawed like an animal, nails catching skin, refusing, refusing, shrieking that she needed to see her, needed to see Rumi’s eyes one last time, no matter how dim, no matter how emptied of her.
In the end, they both collapsed under their own futility, bodies crumpling against Celine’s strength. And still she had to drag them, slick with gore, from the ruin of her – from what had once been their leader, their role-model, their beautiful, beloved best friend.
From what had once been Rumi.
They stared hollowly at the patch of earth long after the body was gone, watching the blood sink down and darken to black, like the soil itself had swallowed her whole.
The weeks that followed blurred into one. They couldn’t count days; they weren’t sure time existed anymore. They did not leave their room. The sheets became a tomb they curled inside together, clinging, skin clammy with sweat, limbs entwined like children lost in some endless cavern. Their stomachs were emptied, throats raw, eyes swollen. They did not speak of her — because to name her would make her absence in the bed irrevocable.
Celine had explained everything to them. The whole truth. Tried to, at least, when they could bear to hear it. She kept them alive by mechanics alone. Food left at the door. Water pressed into unsteady hands. She hovered at thresholds but rarely crossed them. Her care was skeletal, perfunctory, the barest structure to keep them breathing. A performance of motherhood, never its marrow. She touched them, a fleeting hand on a shoulder, but never held them. She lingered but never stayed. She watched, distantly, as if waiting — not to save them, but to see if they survived themselves.
Today, Celine had called them to the living area. They heavily obliged.
She was sitting, but they did not.
The room felt cavernous without Rumi, every shadow strangely swollen in her absence. And still, even far, far away from that other place, there was a sickening echo – the stench of dried blood, though it had long since been scrubbed from their skin, from their clothes. Still, Mira swore she could smell it clinging; copper, rot, the sweetness of Rumi’s decay buried deep in her fingernails.
Zoey stood with her arms locked tight around herself, cheeks scraped red from a night of sobbing. Beside her, Mira’s body was present but distant, almost posthumous, her face scooped hollow by exhaustion and hunger. Her hands flexed unconsciously at nothing, grasping at air — always searching for something to hold that was no longer there.
Celine’s voice cut through the stillness, quiet, eyes lowered to the floor.
“You’ll need another.”
The words dropped like soot, coating everything they touched, deadening the air.
Neither of them moved. Neither breathed. They would not let those words crawl inside them, stain their lungs and settle in the raw wound of their loss. They did not want it anywhere near their bodies.
“We’ll need a replacement,” Celine went on, flat, unnatural, stripped bare of feeling until it sounded like some awful mechanism grinding out its function. “The balance cannot hold otherwise.”
“No.” Zoey’s head snapped side to side, violent, curls sticking damp against her clammy cheeks. “We’re not—don’t say that. Don’t—” The words snagged, strangled, strained. They were the first words she had spoken in a week that weren’t sobs. “We’re not – replacing her. Don’t you dare – ”
“Don’t you see?” Celine hissed, still not looking at them. “The show doesn’t stop. It never stops.”
But Mira’s voice followed, brittle and shaking close to a break. “How could you even say that? How could you possibly think we would accept it? She wasn’t just —” Her jaw locked, her fists balled. The phantom slickness of Rumi’s blood flooded back between her fingers, her pulseless throat pressed under her palms. She pushed the image aside. “She was like your daughter.”
Celine closed her eyes. “And that is why I know what has to be done.”
“You don’t get to talk about what has to be done,” Mira spat.
Celine stood abruptly, but Mira did not stop. Her words were tumbling out, catching fire as they went, “There are a million things we should have done. A million things we didn’t do. But we killed her. She’s dead. Rumi – ” Her voice cracked, popped like kindling, “Rumi is dead. Because of me. Because of us. Because of – ” She stopped herself, bit it off, pressed her teeth into her lip until it almost bled.
Zoey’s arms had folded tighter around her chest, nails digging into her own ribs, silent tears running unchecked down her face. They came with no sobs this time, no sound at all, only the quiet, vulgar shudder of her shoulders – the noiseless convulsion of a body drowning itself with sorrow.
For a beath the silence threatened to engulf them whole.
Then Celine’s composure cracked. Her hands curled, knuckles blanched, and when she finally raised her face, her eyes were wet, her mouth a hard white line.
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Her voice had turned harsh, guttural, full of feeling, “Do you think I haven’t replayed it all? Every second? If I hadn’t – if I had only – ” The words crumbled into a rasp, unfinished.
Mira flinched at the admission.
Zoey shook harder, closing her eyes, pressing her chin to her chest, trying to disappear into herself.
But then, suddenly, it broke from Celine’s chest – one sob, sputtering and sharp, as though it had torn itself free after weeks of being dammed. The sound startled even her, and she looked almost humiliated in its nakedness.
The words tumbled in its wake, panicked, unbidden: “She died in the very dirt where I raised her! In the same earth I laid her mother down. God, God I told myself – swore – I would keep her safe. I promised Mi-yeong. I promised. But I left her there! I left her by that tree, like I did before, and I – Rumi, I failed her, I failed her, I should have – should have – if I had just – if I had stayed – if I had – ”
Her words were choking her, clinging thick in her throat with the iron taste of blood-memory: Rumi’s neck bubbling dark, her ribs hitching, her body jolting with each failed attempt at breath. None of them needed to close their eyes to see it. None of them ever would.
Celine staggered on, tumbling downwards: “She – she came to me – Rumi – if I had only helped her—if I wasn’t such a failure—”
“Stop!”
The word was so soft it almost dissolved.
But it was Zoey’s.
Mira’s head snapped down to her.
Zoey’s lips trembled, her whole face slick with tears, but her eyes were open now, steady in their devastation. Her voice came ragged from disuse, but unwavering all the same:
“Don’t… don’t do that to her. Don’t turn her into a punishment for yourself.”
“What–?”
“You think it makes it better? That if you hold your grief hostage, or if you tear yourself open deep enough, she’ll come back?” Zoey held her arms more loosely now, as though she was still making room for Rumi’s phantom weight. “She’s already in the ground. She’s already gone. And if we keep carving her up between us like this, she’ll never rest! Don’t you see that? Doesn’t she deserve to rest? She gave it everything she had, she always did. And it still wasn’t enough. Not for you. Not for me. Not for Mira. We all failed her.”
Mira felt Zoey’s words reach right through her, strike her weary heart directly.
“Because it should have been enough – her word should have been enough. Rumi was everything, and, in the end, not one of us was worthy of her. We didn’t stop her. And now she’s – now she’s dead.” Her voice broke. “That’s the only truth. That’s all we get.”
Celine froze. The room buckled with the weight of it.
They all carried it. The blame. The shame. The unbearable knowledge that Rumi’s blood was on every one of their hands. Celine’s desertion, Mira’s impulse, Zoey’s obedience – threads knotted in the same noose. They would never forgive each other. They would never forgive themselves.
The silence stretched again, as empty as the room.
At last, Celine exhaled. When she spoke, the iron in her voice bent, letting through a slither of gentleness. “Okay… okay. You are right.”
A beat.
“She left you something.”
Both Zoey and Mira’s heads jerked up, disbelief bright in their eyes.
Celine moved slowly, unsteady, and disappeared down the hall. Into her room. Rumi’s room. The door scraped open, a sound that had always meant music or humming or Rumi’s low laugh — and now it rang hollow, a desecration, the door to a shrine. She was gone, and even the air missed her.
When Celine returned, her hands cradled a shoebox. Nothing special, cardboard rubbed soft at the corners, the lid sagging. But she held it as if it might collapse to ash if she let her grip slip. She set it down on the table between them, and for a moment no one moved.
Mira and Zoey just stared.
It wasn’t decorated, not even labelled. Just a box. The kind you might mistake for storage, something left to gather dust, forgotten.
But then Celine lifted the lid.
Inside — a scattering of fragments.
Ordinary things, until they weren’t.
Zoey reached first, for a scrap balancing on the top of the pile, and her hand shook so badly the paper quivered when she pulled it free. A page torn messily from a notebook, corners bent. Writing filled the margins in a dozen crooked shapes, scrawled, scratched, blotted. Ink pressed so hard the paper nearly tore. Rumi’s handwriting. Not a message, not even words. Just Zoey’s name. Again and again, in a hundred different ways, as though Rumi had been practicing the feel of it in silence. And every so often, between the Zs and Ys, little doodled turtles were strewn all over the page.
Rumi had kept it here, in this box, as if she couldn’t bear to throw her devotion away.
Zoey pressed the page to her chest, and it shuddered with her.
Mira’s hand hovered longer, almost afraid to touch the box at all, as though each object was some fragment of Rumi’s body they’d be guilty of disturbing. At last, she plucked something thin and fragile from the pile — a pressed flower from between two crumpled receipts. It was brittle, browned at the edges.
She knew it instantly: She had given it to Rumi offhand once, not even thinking, a throwaway gift passed off with a laugh. Yet here it was, flattened and preserved like treasure, as though Rumi had wanted to keep proof that once, Mira’s careless hands had placed something in hers and made it sacred.
Rumi had saved it.
Beneath lay more pieces – old show posters, folded small and worn from being thumbed. Polaroids swiped from backstage, their signatures smudged by Rumi’s fingerprints. A setlist. Pages of lyrics, hearts hidden in the margins, each one marking where Zoey’s or Mira’s voice rose. A map, edges torn, the route to a beach they had once sworn to visit together but never had.
Mira found a recipe card in Rumi’s handwriting, smudged with chocolate, the corner labelled, Try again: Zoey’s favourite. A small gasp fractured audibly beside her.
Then a crumpled gig ticket — Mira’s first solo show. She remembered it all too well, had to swallow a startled laugh; her voice was still a little shaky back then, but Rumi had still cheered the loudest in the back row.
And at the very bottom — a photograph. It had been sliced jagged at the edge, as if in a haze. Rumi had cut herself out completely, leaving only Zoey and Mira wholly intact, untouched, laughing side by side into a summered sky. It was as if Rumi could not imagine herself belonging there.
Tucked behind it was some sort of grocery list. Nothing strange to a quick glance, just hurried strokes in Rumi’s sharp hand: apples, rice, milk, ginger, tea, chocolate.
But sideways in the margin, crammed between the lines, her ink curled where the pen had wondered off-task. Random half-lines. Lines that rhymed. Not proper lyrics, not yet — just words scratched randomly where they could be, a rhythm she hadn’t been able to keep in.
apples. apples. too red, too sweet –
no sweeter than Zoey laughing at my feet
ginger burns the tongue, makes me cry
but no match for Mira – she torches the sky.
tea for morning, tea for night.
how the hell do I tell them, how do I write – ?
apples AGAIN… why? twice??
(Oh shit, RICE. don’t forget the rice.)
Zoey’s fingers clenched hard around the paper. Her chest stuttered, wavering with the effort of keeping her upright.
Mira leaned closer. Read once. Read again. As though repetition could dull it. But the more she read, the more her throat closed. The words were just so… stupid. So sweet, so crooked, so utterly Rumi. And that was why it hurt worse than anything else – because even now, in death, Rumi’s voice sounded so alive.
Then the lyrics became more stammered, less coherent. Slipping out of sense as her jokes dissolved into pleas, into fragments.
Chocolate – stolen, they begged for mine in bed
but I’d give them everything, if they only said.
oh god. oh please. don’t take them away
tell me not to go – and I’d stay. I’d stay. I’d –
milk goes sour – leave it too long
(like me. like silence. like this song)
apples again. THREE?? why three??
don’t need apples. don’t need rice. don’t need tea.
what I need – what I need –
but they’ll never need me.
tea morning. tea night.
tea for courage. tea for the fight.
tea for my vow, tea for my oath –
(why can’t I just write: I love you / I love you b– )
The last line collapsed there, scratched half into a doodle of a heart she’d tried to turn into a lemon; as though she’d caught herself, embarrassed, and shoved the page into her pocket before anyone could see.
Their breath had stilled in unison.
The shoebox, the scraps, the paper trembling in Zoey’s fist - it wasn’t like it was a will, left to them on purpose. It was not anything she had planned for them to find.
It was just… Rumi.
Her life, her heart, left scattered in fragments. Proof of her secret devotion – her most intimate, agonisingly tender thoughts. Carried so quietly, tucked into corners, buried in notebooks, crammed between grocery lists. A love so timid, so scared of its own force, it poured out of its own confines. Helpless. Messy. Unstoppable. Like heat moving unseen under the skin.
What if this was the only part of herself she had never whittled down, never sanded smooth for the world’s inspection, never forced into something brighter, prettier, easier to swallow?
This love. This love for them. She had hidden it, yes, but never polished it, never disguised it. She had left it crooked, honest, tucked into a shoebox – because it was hers, because it was the only thing she did not want to fix, just for everyone else. It was just hers. The only thing that had always only been true.
And that was the knife’s twist: she had died with it still inside her.
They would never hear her say it aloud. They could never give it back, not in the way she deserved.
And yet – now – it was in their hands. It was unbearable, like holding her organs after she’d already been gutted, still warm, still beating, but with no vessel left to put them to use in.
And tucked along the edges with careful precision — almost too careful — were the things she had stolen and never returned. Not valuables, not trophies. Small, stupid things.
Mira’s scuffed lighter, dulled by restless hands. Zoey’s hair tie, stretched thin, knotted with strands of her curls. A turtle keyring, its paint chipped on the shell, clearly meant to be a gift she hadn’t yet found the right moment to give.
Zoey touched it, and her throat made a sound like breaking glass.
All these trinkets, all these scraps — none of them were random. They had been chosen. Kept. Arranged as though she had known, somehow, she might never hand them back. As though she had always known, but she had pinned them like stars to the dark of her private sky anyway. Like she had already decided they were enough.
Maybe Rumi had been embarrassed. Maybe she hid them away in a sagging shoebox no one was ever meant to open because she was ashamed of how much they meant to her.
But here they were. And together, the scraps screamed louder than any confession. They wailed with what she hadn’t said, what she hadn’t dared.
Mira pressed a hand to her mouth, eyes stinging, because she understood now – and she knew Zoey did too. She could feel their grief crashing together in the silence.
Rumi had left them the proof, the knowledge that her heart, pieced out in fragments, had only ever been theirs.
And only now — too late, unbearably late — were they finally allowed to hold it.
It made sense, then, if anything about this could be called sense, How she must have felt, standing there, watching them turn against her. Believing their fear was hatred, their hesitation was disgust. Believing herself unwanted, unloved, abandoned. How could she not? Their weapons had spoken louder than their voices, and Rumi had always been so quick to bleed for whatever truth she thought she saw.
Mira would carry that forever. She had raised her blade first, after all – and her punishment would be lifelong: to live inside the hollow wound her dreadful instinct had opened.
For a long moment, none of them spoke. The silence wasn’t empty; it was thick, aching, as though Rumi herself had pressed into the room, just out of reach.
“She kept everything.” Zoey whispered. “Even the stupid things. She had to collect it all, because we never – She thought we never – ” Her breath hitched, cutting her off.
Mira’s chest heaved once, a soundless sob. “Don’t say that, Zo. She knew, she must have known.” The words sat strangely on her tongue, dragged up her throat like pebbles, too small for what they meant. “Rumi thought of everything.”
“No,” Celine smiled, small, shaking her head imperceptibly. It was the most mournful the girls had seen her. “She thought of you.”
Zoey’s body gave in, the grief dragging her down to the floor at last, knees folding like paper. The box rattled as her hand slipped from it, scraps spilling everywhere — spilling like they had come from her own body, her own chest ripped open.
“Zoey – !” Mira dropped after her, clutching her arm, as if to tether her to something solid, anything real. But Mira was trembling too, her own bones felt like they could fracture under the weight of what she could not undo, of what neither of them could carry.
Zoey was gone to the misery, sobbing into Mira’s shoulder, strangled and childlike, her breath tumbling in frantic, broken gasps that sounded like she was choking on her own ribs. Her hands clawed at Mira’s shirt, bunching the fabric until her nails scored skin beneath, as if she could dig herself inside, crawl into the cavity of someone else just to escape her own.
“Why didn’t she tell us? Why didn’t she just – ” Her voice broke apart, dissolving into gasps. She shook her head violently, as if she could fling off the truth, fling off the pain, but it clung like tar. She kicked the scraps of paper away from her, furious, rasping, “She had us, Mira. She saved every piece of us! Like we mattered half as much as her. And she had the words – she always had the words. She could have told us! She could have just – ”
Mira crushed Zoey against her chest, arms wrapped too tight, holding her so hard it hurt – like she could possibly shield Zoey from the grief that already lived inside them both. “No, no… she – she was afraid.” The words came out shredded, a realization more than a comfort, each syllable tasting like iron. “God, Zo… she was so afraid.”
“But why!” Zoey only thrashed harder in her arms, wrecked and wild, her voice climbing to something near a wail. “She loved us! And we never – ” The words stuck, seized, her eyes wide as if the horrifying realisation was burning through her skin. “We never told her back! I – She died thinking she was alone and I – ”
Her cry was ripped from her, raw, the kind of words that left a throat bloodied:
“I loved her too, Mira! Don’t you see? I loved her!”
Mira’s face crumpled, her eyes burning rivers. She had no words, no breath. Her voice had deserted her completely. She wanted to be strong, wanted to fold Zoey against her chest and keep her untouched – but the lie of that strength broke in her hands. She shook with the effort of holding Zoey tighter, binding them together, as though the press of her body could fill the yawning hollow Rumi had left behind.
Around them, the scraps lay strewn across the floor like limbs — Zoey’s hair tie, Mira’s lighter, the stupid turtle keyring, the anatomy of Rumi’s love, torn out and hidden like little witnesses, pressed into silence, of a devotion Rumi had carried until it killed her.
Each one a testament, each one deadly.
And something inside Mira turned. Her grief split jagged and furious – and still unbearably, unbearably, upset. At the girl who had sworn with her, once, that neither of them would ever let Zoey fall apart like this. Rumi had promised. They’d promised each other. They would rather die than let Zoey suffer. And now Rumi had managed both — gone silent, gone still, but left Zoey screaming herself bloody over her all the same.
“Why would she do this? How could she love you and still leave you like this?” Mira’s nails dug into Zoey’s back. The words were not an accusation but a plea, a desperate confusion. “How could she love me and still go? It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense.”
Celine crouched nearby then, the grief carved so deep in her face it had gone almost still, as if she too could barely survive it. She reached toward the box, stopped, her hand hovering in the air as though touching it might shatter the fragile ghost of Rumi that seemed to fill the room.
“She saved all of herself for you.” Her lips trembled. “Every last piece. And I think… I think she believed she had given you everything she had left to give. This is all that remains. You two are all that remain. You must keep going. She trusted you to.”
“But she broke us!” Mira felt feral in her disbelief. “She abandoned us!”
“Please.” Celine stood. “You cannot be so hard on her, Mira. She only believed she had already lost everything that might have made her stay.”
Then she turned, slow as though her body carried centuries of weight, and walked back toward Rumi’s room. At the door, she turned, looking at them one last time—two girls shattered, shaking, clinging to what could never be whole again.
“She left you her love,” Celine said softly. “Do not waste it again.”
And then she was gone.
Zoey collapsed fully, abandoned by gravity, her body buckling into Mira’s lap, sobs racking her frame in pitiless waves until she shook. Mira bent over her, pressing her lips to the crown of her head, a few stray tears spilling hot across Zoey’s hair. She clutched Zoey with a desperation that bordered on violence, as if the sheer strength of her arms could keep both of them from following Rumi into the dark.
“She kept everything,” Zoey choked, her voice thick with snot and salt. “Every little thing – because she couldn’t – because she couldn’t say it – ”
“She said it,” Mira forced out, her voice breaking for the first time. Her fingers tangled in Zoey’s curls, wet with both their tears. “She said it everywhere but out loud. She was screaming it, Zoey. Screaming.”
Zoey’s grip only tightened, her whole body a fist of grief buried against Mira’s neck. “But we didn’t – we didn’t say it back. We never – ” Her chest heaved, shuddering. “She died thinking – thinking we didn’t – ”
“I know, I know – shh.” Mira’s hand slid from Zoey’s hair to cradle her damp face, her thumb stroking the hot swell of her cheek as though she could erase the tears even as they came. She pressed her forehead to Zoey’s temple, whispering with a ferocity that sparked, “She knew. Even if we failed her, even if we never spoke it right – she knew. We have to believe that. I’ll make you believe it, Zo. I’ll tell you every day, if I have to. But she knew.”
Mira wasn’t even sure if that was true. The words trembled on her tongue as she spoke them. but she needed them to be real – needed to believe them as fiercely as she needed to keep Zoey from spilling apart in her arms. She would carve belief out of her own bones if that’s what it took to protect her.
The world outside refused to pause. Somewhere, the sun was still climbing, the traffic still running, life still rolling forward in its merciless chain. But here, in this room, time had collapsed. Here, they could only feel her.
Rumi, who would spend herself, again and again, if it meant sparing them any cost.
Rumi, who must have thought, in the end, that they had wanted her to go.
Rumi, who had given up on her own heart, but had left to them all that remained of it.
Mira’s chest shook as the thought took her under: they had always put Rumi above themselves. Rumi, who had seemed made of something brighter, harder, more enduring than any of them. They’d thought her untouchable – radiant in her devotion, fierce in her loyalty, almost holy in the way she moved. How could someone like that break? And yet she had, slowly, quietly, while they weren’t watching. And then, all at one – she broke completely, right before their eyes. And they had not rushed to hold her together.
How were they ever supposed to reckon with that?
Mira buried her face into Zoey’s hair, her whisper hushing her sobs, a raw and final confession:
“I loved her too.”
Zoey stilled against her, breath hitching sharp like she’d been struck, then shattered into a cry so violent it sounded like it ripped her in two.
And Mira was crying too, then, her restraint giving way at last; great, persistent streams of silent tears slipping down her cheeks like they’d been waiting and waiting for permission.
For a long, unbearable moment, there was nothing but their ruin, their grief colliding like frothing wave-heads in a storm, a wreckage no one else could touch.
Rumi was gone. That could not change.
They had loved her. That could not be undone.
And now they knew: she had loved them, recklessly, relentlessly, until there was nothing left of her but the scraps of her lingering heart, the small things she had hidden throughout their days. She had buried it everywhere, all around them, and they had walked blind through it all.
It was too late to say it back. Too late for her to hear it. And the utter waste in that truth sickened them – a rising bitter tide, like poison in their throats. Because the words were here now; alive between them. They had always been here.
The truth was that they had always loved her – every radiant part of her, every stubborn, impossible corner too. And they would have kept loving her, even the pieces they hadn’t understood yet, even the shadows they hadn’t known how to hold.
But Rumi was dead. She had died in their arms. And there was no comfort, no undoing, no bargain left in the world that could soften that reality.
Mira pressed her mouth to Zoey forehead, damp from her own tears, whispering against the pulse of the smaller girl’s fevered anguish. “Rumi isn’t here to hold it. But we are, darling.”
Zoey sniffed, choking down her sobs with devastating effort.
“I’m here, we’re here.” Mira clutched her tighter, sealing her vow. “We’ll carry her, Zoey. We’ll carry her. She’ll stay right here with us.”
Zoey’s fingers clawed weakly at Mira’s back, clinging like she wanted Mira to breathe for her, for the both of them. Her face pressed hard into Mira’s shoulder, her nod small, broken.
Then – barely a voice, more air than words.
“I love you, Mira. Like… like I loved Rumi.”
The confession staggered out between hitches of breath, too fragile to survive in the small space between them unless someone caught it.
Mira froze.
After a heartbeat, Zoey seemed to realize what she’d said, what she’d done. Her tear-swollen eyes lifted, horrified, searching Mira’s face for rejection.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, voice cracking, terrified. “I’m so sorry, I had to say it – please, I had to – ”
The desperation struck something deep within Mira. She thought of Rumi – how she had begged to be saved, how she had carried a devotion that was never returned to her as it should have been, how she had died without knowing – and something inside her snapped clean through, past breaking, past repair.
(“Please, no. Don’t leave. Don’t leave!”)
Mira would never confess her love too late again. Never let it starve unspoken.
“I love you too, Zoey.” The words came fast, unshaped by thought, a truth dragged out from her depths. “God, I love you too. More than anything. More than I know how to say.”
It wasn’t release. It wasn’t comfort. The grief still clawed at their bellies, unrelenting, infinite. But the words found a home at last, found a body to live in. Not Rumi’s, but theirs – spoken into the empty space she had left between them.
They had to reach across it now. Reach to each other.
Together, they folded around the remnants still scattered on the floor, around each other, as if to shelter what little remained. The room was a ruin. They were ruin. But threaded through it was a new warmth Rumi had left behind, a new truth, a new love — ordinary, extraordinary, hidden in every corner, on every surface she had touched. Something they could still hold onto.
Rumi was gone. And still, impossibly, she was here.
Because Rumi would never have abandoned them – would never even have thought of it – if she hadn’t believed they could still have each other. She may have believed they would be lighter without her, that she had nothing left to give them but heavy weight, a baggage she couldn’t bear to unload. She may have surrendered her place in their arms, convinced absence was the last kindness left to her.
But her devotion had not ended, not entirely. It existed as a hand pressed into their backs, urging them forward, together. Even if they could no longer reach her, she had trusted them to carry on.
And it killed them – the thought that she had died believing her absence was her greatest gift, when her love was the very thing they could hardly breathe without.
So they wept, knotted around each other, clinging and stranded in the wreck Rumi had left of them, whispering truths too late into the air as if every breath without her didn’t feel like a betrayal.
She was gone. And they could not follow. Could not carry her anymore.
They would have carried her forever, all of her — in life, in death, in whatever came after — if only she had let them.
But she hadn’t. And so, the heartbreak remained: not a lesson, not a mercy, only the shape of her missing body carved into theirs.
And still — they would go on. Not lighter without her, but heavier. Weighted by her absence, weighted by her love. They would not polish it into holiness, nor curse it into burden. They would love her with forgiveness, and they would make it what it had always been: ordinary, relentless, alive. A habit.
Because love left unsaid does not vanish. It festers, it hardens, and it binds. It is the reason they would keep walking, even with the wound split wide.
Mira and Zoey would go on — because Rumi had wanted them to, and because they could not bear to betray her again.
They would keep one hand in the other’s for balance, hold each other together when the nights grew unbearable, and they would carry her in the fidelity of their continuing.
They would not forget – never – because grief itself had become their only proof of her. It was all they had left of her heart.
And in that grief, they learned the cruellest truth: we forgive most fiercely when it is too late, when we already know the end, and we love most honestly only when there is no one left to hear it.
But they would go on, because they loved Rumi still, and because love does not die where a body does. They only need look at each other for that evidence.
They would go on, heavy with her absence, but heavier still with her love.