Chapter Text
Rumi tries, she tries so hard, but she can’t make herself stop. She goes back to the gym, to the bastardized ghost of Jinu again and again, feeling dread and joy in equal measure each time she unsheathes Jinu’s sword. And each day, the whispers grow stronger, Jinu’s voice more and more clear even though she knows that this knowledge should slip from her with each recollection.
She talks with Joey about taking a hiatus but ends up working on their next album instead, sits with Zoe as she applies to a dozen medical schools, drinks tea and gossips with Mira about the employee drama at the coffee shop they frequent on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, does everything she can to fill up her life so she has no time to think. But she can’t make herself give up that one hour of indulgence every morning.
It all comes to a head on a random Tuesday. There’s been an increase in missing persons reports over the last week, and something in Rumi makes her check the threads of the Honmoon. It could be nothing, but - she doesn’t want to be wrong. She can’t deal with the consequences of being wrong. She sits in the center of her bed, spine as straight as she can make it, and lays her hands palms up on top of her knees.
Rumi breathes deeply, imagining herself rising a foot with each breath. She rises through the roof, further and further into the sky, until she’s surrounded by glittering lines of connection, a kaleidoscope of colors. She strums each string like a harp, eyes closed and focused entirely on the echoes. The strings of fate vibrate on her fingertips like old friends - there hasn’t been a reason to immerse herself in the Honmoon.
As she works through the threads, and there’s nothing coming back, Rumi starts to feel a little paranoid. They had given nearly everything to close the Honmoon, to complete the tapestry, and if it didn’t even last a year it made Jinu’s sacrifice pointless. Three threads left, two threads left, and then she found herself with the last thread. She hesitated for two, three seconds, and then flicked her fingers over it.
“There you are,” Rumi says out loud, back in her bed, the tapestry far beyond her once again and a sinking pit in her stomach.
There’s a single tear in the fabric, small enough that it’s escaped notice until now. But … She doesn’t know how she missed it. Rumi was always the most in tune with the golden weave, the softly glittering waves that filled the sky and pulsed warmly as she ran over the golden rooftops. In the end, she had even felt her markings glow in sync with the spread of the Honmoon, a physical reminder to herself that she belonged in this world. It was one of the four constants in her life before and after: Mira, Zoey, Bobby and the Honmoon. How did she miss this?
Rumi slings Jinu’s sword onto her back, slides into a pair of sneakers without putting on socks, texts Zoey and Mira that she’s going to take care of something. It’s only one demon, so she’s not as cautious as she usually would have been. She’s been itching for a fight, one with higher stakes than a spar at the gym or running through training exercises. Having the Honmoon be fully repaired has been a blessing, but sometimes she misses having an excuse to swing her sword and forget about being Rumi the pop idol for a second.
The sword feels like it’s burning through into her shoulders once she closes the apartment balcony door and hops down to the nearest fire escape, the city stretched far in front of her. She doesn’t look back.
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It’s a small pathetic demon, half her height and all long limbs and jutting teeth. It’s flitting through the shadows in a narrow alley way, it’s gait halting and awkward as if it’s not used to its own body. Rumi relaxes, she was worried about what kind of demon would be able to slip its way through. It looks as though a weak one had gotten especially lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it) and had found an opening to come through to the human world.
She drops down two flights of a fire escape with one leap, perching on the rail for a brief moment before dropping into the alleyway. She stalks behind the demon as quietly as she can, far enough away that it shouldn’t be able to smell her, but close enough that it won’t have any time to react once she strikes.
It halts at the end of the alley, gripping onto the side of the building six feet up, and staring at something that Rumi can’t see. She speeds up, cursing silently. The demons usually only do that when they’ve found a target. As she gets closer, she sees that the demon is looking at a young woman standing on a street corner, face downturned as she stares at her phone with a frown.
The demon tenses, limbs flexing unnaturally as its lip curls, ready to pounce, and Rumi takes the chance and unsheathes the sword completely. It hums in her hand, and she feels a vague sense of joy, anticipation and worry (worry?) from the blade. It’s never been so loud before, and the worry is a new emotion. Rumi doesn’t understand why Jin- the blade would have a reason to be worried at all. It was a piece of inanimate metal. This was a small fry demon, and the only reason it had survived above ground this long is because the partial shattering of the Honmoon left Rumi unable to sense it.
She swings downwards, the gleaming silver arc whistling through the air. The blade slices into the demon's skin smoothly, an instant knock-out and Rumi waits for the demon to return to where it came from. But it doesn’t burst into smoke, there’s no inchor running from its wounds, and it doesn’t even cry out. It simply collapses to the ground, teeth shrinking and its limbs shortening until Rumi is staring at nothing.
Her heart hammers in her chest, and she doesn’t understand - that was a demon, why did it disappear like that? Why hadn’t it dissolved? The blade is screaming at her, nearly vibrating out of her hands. She can almost hear Jinu shouting at her Rumi, run! But before what she's seeing can really sink in, she feels a hot breath on the back of her neck.
“Got you.”
Rumi spins around, but whatever it is is faster, and she feels claws tear through the muscle in her thigh. She screams and falls backwards, the pain immediate and blinding, but there’s no time to assess her injuries. She deflects the second swing with the edge of the blade, her arm wobbling under the sheer power of it. She pushes it off with a strength that she doesn’t feel like she possessed, and jumps back six feet. She scans frantically for the demon, but she can only see shifting shadows and the gleam of its needle sharp teeth before they close over her arm. She dodges, but the beast’s bite barely misses her.
She shouldn’t have come out here alone, she realizes, dread sinking in her stomach. Whatever this thing is, it’s clearly an ambush predator, and she had been thoughtless enough to fall right into its trap. Never mind that she’s never encountered anything like this before. She’s been trained by one of the best demon hunters in the last century, she has fought against more demons than she cares to admit, and aside from the entire Saja boy fiasco, she never fails. But whatever this thing is, it’s not something that she can take on one-on-one.
What she needs right now is distance, enough to make a plan that has a chance of succeeding. The only way to do that is to run. So she turns and bolts further into the alley, away from the women and hopefully any other civilians. Rumi hears the creature give chase, its heavy footsteps shaking the concrete under her. She turns a corner, then another, dodges a strike from a tail (she didn’t even realize that it had a tail, this was bad ). She thinks and thinks, discards one idea after another as her options dwindle. She can’t feel anything other than the searing pain from her thigh, the sensation too intense to push down, but she knows that she can’t keep this up.
When Rumi skids sideways and finds herself at a dead end, with no fire escapes or windows close enough to the floor to jump to, she knows that she’s out of time. She has no idea what to do, there’s nowhere to turn, nowhere to go. She steels herself, and raises her sword one last time.
The demon is taller than she realizes, she thinks distantly, as she stares up at the hulking figure. It stands on two deer-like legs that end with cloven hooves, its arms are long and slim with giant knuckles and long nails. It’s dark in coloration and furred, except for the light fur surrounding its face and its soulless black eyes. It laughs at her, a rasping noise that raises the hair at the back of her neck.
“Are you done running, little mouse?” it steps forward again, seemingly content to take its time now that it has her cornered. “From what the others told me, I thought that you would have put up more of a fight than this.”
“Fuck off” Rumi spits, eyes narrowing, but the demon only laughs again.
“I think that I’ll enjoy seeing your blood soak the concrete now.” Another step, and it licks its teeth, long tongue flicking out. “Our little chase has made me quite hungry, and mice make an excellent snack.”
It rushes at her, the conversation seemingly over. Rumi manages to slice a long cut into the demon’s torso before its teeth clamp into her shoulder, and all she knows is pain. She screams, and blood runs down her arm, lightning running her shoulder as she slams into the ground. The demon bites down harder, teeth scraping against bone and she bites into her tongue this time instead of giving it the satisfaction of her screaming again.
She tries to push it off of her, but her hand is too slick with blood to do anything. She scrambles for her sword, but she knows from the blackness at the edge of her vision that she won’t have that long. Her fingers touch the sharp edge of the blade, and she feels the tip of her finger being sliced open. But that pain is nothing compared to her shoulder.
I'm going to die here in this alley , Rumi realizes, staring blindly at the night sky as the demon’s teeth slide out of her shoulder and it rears back for a second bite. This time it aims for her neck. Rumi feels time slow down as her destiny approaches. A tear trickles down the side of her face. There’s so much that she wanted to do, so many things that she never had a chance to experience because she continuously pushed off her own happiness. She had a duty to the world, had a duty to her mother and to Celine and to Mira and Zoey and a duty to humanity as a whole. There was no room for personal happiness in her fated path. But now the only thing she could think is that she wished that she had more time.
Before the demon can rip out her neck, Rumi sees a flash of light in her fading vision, and she feels the weight of the demon lift suddenly. Over the ringing in her ears, she hears the whistling of a blade slicing through the air followed by a wet gurgle. She smells the tang of demon inchor, hears the demon disintegrate. Then there’s the thud of someone falling to the ground next to her, and she can feel large hands pressing something into her shoulder wound.
The pain subsides slowly, until she can process the cool temperature of her savior’s palms as he wraps her thigh with thick strips of fabric tight enough to cut off circulation. But as the pain leaves so does the adrenaline keeping her consciousness, and the last thing she processes before the darkness takes her is those strong arms lifting her up, and the familiar scent of irises filling her nose. Then she knows nothing.