Chapter Text
“Hey Zo?”
“Mm?” Zoey blinks, attention pulled from the sentence she was in the middle of, before shifting her arm out to glance down at Rumi. She brings her other hand up to dog-ear the page she was on before setting the book aside, reaching to stroke Rumi’s head in her lap. “What’s on your mind, babygirl?”
“You’ve been in relationships before, right?”
“Ostensibly yes, but they don’t hold a candle to you and Mira,” Zoey replies with a playful waggle of her eyebrows. She sobers when Rumi doesn’t smile. “What’s got you asking?”
“Did they…were you in the open about them? Like with your family or your friends?” Zoey winces.
“Not really,” she admits, trying to ignore the old, crawling shame in favor of the much more pleasant here and now. “I…wasn’t exactly a catch. I had some hookups and stuff, but not much more than that.” She pulls her hand back in uncertainty as Rumi’s expression grows darker with every word. “Are you mad at m—”
She squeaks out the end of the word in surprise when Rumi sits up and leans over to kiss her firmly on the mouth.
“I think we should go public about our relationship,” Rumi says with the resolution of someone ready to back that statement with her entire self. Zoey stares at her for a full ten seconds before calling over her shoulder, “Mir? Need you in here for a Big Relationship Conversation.”
“At 9:30 on a Tuesday night?” Mira replies as she comes down the stairs. “Weird timing, but sure. What’s up?”
Rumi sits up very straight next to Zoey, watching Mira perch on the arm of the couch with an expectant expression. She reaches over to wrap a hand around Mira’s, turning to look at Zoey as she reaches for hers as well.
“You are the most important people in the world to me,” she says. “And I hate that there’s anywhere in the world where I have to pretend that isn’t true.”
“Is this about that talk show host asking Zoey about her taste in men in front of us last week?” Mira asks with the corner of her mouth twitching up in a teasing smile. Zoey snorts at the memory.
“No!” Rumi asserts before hesitating. “I…maybe.” She shakes her head as if to clear it before pressing on. “The point is that I’ve had enough secrets in my life. I don’t want to keep the best thing that’s ever happened to me as one.”
“Oh, Rumi.” Zoey brings her other hand over to cover Rumi’s. It hadn’t even occurred to her that the privacy they’d kept around this might feel so similar to something she never wanted Rumi to go through again. “You know I don’t feel like you’re keeping us a secret, right? This is so much better than anything I’ve ever had before, we’re just–”
“Incredibly public figures whose influence also maintains the only thing keeping the world from drowning in demons,” Mira finishes dryly, watching Rumi with a look of dawning approval all the same. “But you’ve gamed it out, haven’t you?”
“As best I can,” Rumi confirms. “I’m sure there are things I’m not thinking about, but that’s why we have Bobby.” She squeezes Zoey’s hand and tugs on Mira’s until she shifts closer to them. “There are costs, I’m not saying there won’t be. But you’re it for me. Both of you. And I’m tired of having to act for anyone like you’re not.”
For a moment Zoey is speechless, a state she has experienced maybe three times in her life before now. She has never doubted her girls’ love for her once, but has also never expected anything beyond the near-perfect private life they share. At first she has the instinct to protest, to insist that this can’t be what Rumi really wants. Zoey understands the risks she poses as a person to be publicly attached to, she would be stupid not to. They already put up with so much professionally because of her; she’s sure neither of them have forgotten how embarrassingly long it took Zoey to take to press training. She opens her mouth to say something and pauses mid-thought, eyebrows furrowing. Rumi isn’t stupid either, she’s actually super smart. And she’s a grown woman who knows what she wants. Unfortunately, the two sets of logic appear to be irreconcilable.
She jumps when she feels a pinch on her arm. “Ow!” she says with an accusatory glare at Mira. Mira, for her part, fixes Zoey with a pointedly stern look as she pulls her hand back. “I can hear you thinking and I don’t like it,” she says. “Say it out loud so we can point out how mean you’re being to yourself.”
Zoey rubs her arm with a grumble. She should have anticipated the downsides of being intimately understood by objectively wonderful people. And now Rumi is looking at her with such sadness, not even a disappointment Zoey can recoil from, just abject sadness. Zoey wilts into herself.
“Are you sure?” she says quietly. “I just…” She trails off, looking at the floor. She swallows but doesn’t risk looking up when she feels a gentle hand smoothing over the spot where she was so recently accosted.
“Hey,” Mira says, squeezing until Zoey looks at her. “Say it about me. How many PR nightmares have we had to deal with because of my stupid family? You really want to hitch yourself to that?”
“That’s different,” Zoey insists. “That’s them being fucking idiots you won’t let me stab. You’re amazing. I’m…I’m–”
She cuts herself off when they both move in sync, Rumi scooping her up into her lap, Mira sliding off the couch to kneel in front and wrap her long arms around both of them.
“You’re ours,” Rumi says. “Good and bad, even if you won’t believe us that there’s way more good.” She rests her chin on Zoey’s shoulder. “If you’re really uncomfortable with it, we won’t do it. Nothing has to change. But I want you to know that if I got to choose, I would tell every single person on the planet that you were mine.”
There’s that speechlessness again, twice in less than five minutes. Zoey can’t keep herself from sniffling a little, especially when Mira makes a low noise of agreement and presses her lips to Zoey’s cheek.
After a minute she collects herself enough to ask, “What do you think?” as she turns her head towards Mira. Mira shrugs with a smile.
“It’s not like I can get more disowned for being in a gay polyamorous relationship. Also I genuinely don’t care about what anyone but the two of you thinks about anything, so I’m cool with whatever.”
Zoey lets out a wet laugh, starting to relax into the feeling of their arms around her. She feels so safe like this. Like nothing outside the three of them could ever touch her.
“Well, if we wanna go shock and awe about it I’ve already written about five albums worth of songs about how stupidly in love with you I am, and probably another three about how much I want to fuck you.” Mira snorts as Rumi buries her face against Zoey’s shoulder with what sounds like a weak, “Zoey, oh my god.”
“I don’t hate it,” Mira says thoughtfully, grinning and jostling Rumi when she groans. “We could probably crank out the masters and a few music videos in a month if we buckled down.”
“Absolutely not,” Rumi says firmly. She leans back far enough to meet Zoey’s eyes. “Does this mean you’re okay with going public?”
Zoey swallows again and nods. “If I weren’t afraid of what it’d do to you two I would basically never stop telling anyone who would listen about how unbelievably lucky I am to be with you.”
Rumi smiles and brings a hand up against the side of Zoey’s face. She still looks a little saddened by Zoey’s choice of words, but chooses to press a kiss to Zoey’s temple over saying anything.
“Alright,” Mira says, squeezing her arms tight around both of them. “Where do we start?” Zoey turns her head just in time to see Rumi’s expression settle into that unshakable determination Zoey knows so well.
“Step one is Bobby.”
“So. You’re all dating. Each other. At the same time.”
Mira keeps her expression carefully neutral, for once grateful that her height allows her visual control and overwatch of this situation. She keeps her eyes trained on Bobby, arms crossed over her chest, but remains just as aware of Rumi and Zoey in front of her. Rumi is standing tall, spine straight, proud and ready to fight about it in a way Mira has to admit is unspeakably endearing. Zoey is trying her best to carry the same energy, but is still less than her usual, irrepressible self in the face of disappointing an authority figure. Mira will need to keep working with her to get into her head that Bobby is their employee, even if he is their most trusted one.
Bobby, for his part, appears to be processing as quickly as he can. Mira watches for one breath, then two, then three, ready to end a professional relationship she has depended on for years if a single toe is put out of line.
“Oh, girls!” He throws himself forward, trying to wrap his arms around all three of them. “I’m so happy for you! You know, I’ve been worried about you not seeing anyone for a really long time now; you all work so hard but there’s so much more to life than work.” He pulls back a little, looking a little teary eyed. “All I want is for you to be happy. You’re happy, right?”
“So happy, Bobby,” Zoey says, relaxing a little into Mira’s hand as she brings it up to her shoulder. Bobby watches the movement with nothing less than delight.
“That’s all that matters, then,” he says firmly, whipping out his phone. “The rest is just logistics.” Mira watches with some amusement as he paces around the kitchen.
“Now, I would never tell you what to do with your money, but it’s going to look better to start shifting some of your charitable donations to HaengSeongIn and/or GongGam sooner rather than later if you’re planning to go public; I don’t want anyone accusing you of only caring about something like this now that you’re…wait.” He looks up from his phone. “Are we going public with this?”
“We are,” Rumi says resolutely. “And they’ve also both been on my donation list for about three years now.”
“Oh hey, mine too!” says Zoey.
“Get Dding Dong on there too if they’re not already,” Mira adds, smiling when Zoey pulls out her phone and immediately makes a note. “They’re good people.”
Bobby looks proud in a way Mira wishes didn’t make her feel as warm as it actually does. “Alright,” he says simply, returning his attention to what is surely a growing list on his phone. “So the press situation is going to be a nightmare for a while no matter what we do. Strongly recommend you let me be a first line on any questions; I don’t want anyone getting inappropriate with you. They’re going to anyways, but I’m not going to take it lying down. You’ve seen how tough it’s been for Cherry and Holland; you three are the strongest girls I know but it’s not easy being the first anything.”
“We know.” Mira’s watched the industry chew up too many good people to not. She reaches to touch Rumi, too, with a low churn in her stomach at the thought that she would risk her professional reputation, a generational one at that, over this. Rumi leans back into the pressure of her hand, bringing her own up to squeeze it without looking away from Bobby. Her mind’s made up, Mira thinks with a faint smile, and she’d walk into hell for Mira and Zoey regardless.
“I don’t want to downplay the private-side downstream of this either,” Bobby says, circling back around the counter with a more concerned expression. “Mira, there’ll probably be a fresh round of bullshit from your terrible family, pardon my English.” Mira snorts but can’t disagree. They’ve been suspiciously quiet for the last year, which she’s managed to parley into another handful of coping skills and another measure of distance. She’s ready for whatever they try to throw at her.
“Zoey, I don’t have a good enough read on your American relatives to know how this will go down, but I can’t see your mother and her side being thrilled.”
“They’ll get over it,” Zoey says with more confidence than Mira thinks she actually has. Mira squeezes her shoulder once in reproach, watching her swallow and retry with, “They’ll stay away from the press. They hate all that stuff even on the good days.” Bobby’s look of concern deepens. He glances up to Mira, who gives a small shake of her head. They’ll talk it out together tonight.
Bobby nods to himself and shifts his attention to Rumi. “Rumi, I know things have been…tense…with Celine the last year or so.” It’s an understatement, and a very polite one at that. “I want to make it extra clear that while the label pays my salary, you girls are my number one priority. I will handle her however you tell me to.”
Mira feels Rumi’s shoulder stiffen under her hand even as she says, “Thanks, Bobby.” There’s been movement in the last few months that feels positive to Mira, more around their growing understanding of the intricacies of the Honmoon after the Idol Awards than addressing the elephant-sized hole Rumi and Celine tore in their relationship that night. It’s been simple for Mira; what Celine did to Rumi, what Rumi thought she would do to her when she asked, is unforgivable. But she respects Rumi enough to let her make her own decision, and will act as she needs to in support of it.
“Okay,” Bobby says mostly to himself, starting another lap of the kitchen as he taps furiously on his phonescreen. “We’re gonna need to beef up the security on socials, might even be worth taking a little break on the…and then there’s the–” He looks over at Zoey and points. “Please don’t stream for at least two weeks; I need to vet a professional mod before letting that crowd at you. Possibly a team of them.”
“Aw, but–” Zoey cuts herself off when both Mira and Rumi give her a firm look at the same time. “Fine,” she grouses, accepting a conciliatory kiss on the head from Mira all the same. Mira glances up when she feels Bobby watching them. She tries not to roll her eyes at how over the moon he looks at the display.
“There are going to be more things to decide on down the line, but I think I have a good basic idea of what to do,” he says, hitting a few more buttons on his phone before decisively setting it down on the counter. He looks up at them, suddenly uncharacteristically serious. “Thank you for trusting me with this. I won’t let you down.”
“You’re the best, Bobby,” Rumi says, stepping outside the circle of them to touch Bobby’s arm with a smile. Mira wraps an arm around the front of Zoey’s shoulders as Zoey leans back into her, finding it hard to disagree. “No one else could handle this all so well.” Bobby touches Rumi’s hand with a watery smile.
He sniffs loudly and wipes at his eye before continuing. “Have you thought at all about how we want to go public? Or when? Socials would be the lowest impact for the highest spread, but with the album launch coming up that could be a toss up on how the press junket breaks.”
“We haven’t talked about a ton,” Mira says, watching Rumi as her posture changes at the question. “But it looks like someone’s got an idea.”
Rumi turns back towards them, expression shifting from her thinking face to her ‘oh, we’re doing this’ face. She meets Mira’s eyes with a dawning grin.
“Could you choreograph a brand new song in less than two weeks?” Mira scoffs.
“Is the sky blue?” She feels Zoey’s gasp as much as hears it. “Do you mean…?” Zoey asks with growing excitement.
“Yep,” Rumi says, turning back to Bobby just as her expression settles into iron clad determination. “Bobby, we’re going shock and awe.”
“Thank you, Busan!” Rumi calls out, raising an arm to wave with a grin just as the lights cut out. Even once she’s hustled backstage, the roar of the crowd is still deafening.
“Not bad,” Mira shouts over it as Rumi comes up to her side, shoving her gently by the shoulder as Rumi accepts a water bottle from a bustling support staff member with a grateful smile. Zoey tackle-hugs her sideways into Mira with such surprising force that she sloshes a good third of the bottle on the floor.
“Easy,” Mira chides through a wide, fond smile as she settles both of them back on their feet.
“Are you ready? I’m so ready I might explode,” Zoey says, bouncing on the balls of her feet without letting go of Rumi, who is beginning to give up on the idea of getting any amount of this water into her mouth. She manages to steal a small sip when Zoey’s attention is pulled to a hovering makeup artist who has clearly been around long enough to know that there will be no opportunity to do the touch ups they need that they don’t make themselves.
“Let’s do this,” Rumi says, grateful that someone takes the water bottle from her hand so she can reach out and touch Zoey and Mira at the same time. She wants to kiss them, a thought she has often had backstage made an order of magnitude more intense by the knowledge that this is likely the last time she will have to restrain herself. All three of them look up when they hear the lighting machinery start whirring. They’re familiar enough with this venue that they’re ready for their cues before the wrangler even starts their way.
The second before the spotlight hits is a liminal one for Rumi, a breath where she can fully take in the roiling mass of the crowd chanting for an encore. Her body knows what to do, how to move and brace and bear the concentrated weight of attention once it's focused, but in this strange, brief time she hovers in the inbetween; a performer standing just outside the performance. She doesn’t have the time to look back when she feels hands brushing against her, one by her shoulder, one by her waist, but she shifts into them without thinking before striding back to the center stage mark.
“Alright, alright, we get it!” She says into the mic, waving an arm up over her head. “You might be interested in another song. We know how excited you all must be for the album drop in…” She trails off and theatrically examines her wrist, as if there were a watch there. “...Ten minutes. How about we kill some time while we wait?”
The bass starts first, thrumming through the floor as steadily as it fills the air. Zoey built the beat, as she often does, as a framework in conversation with her lyrics. Rumi is glad they settled on one of the sweeter songs for this, but a part of her is very interested in hearing the beat Zoey might make for one of the more private ones.
“You’ve been such a great crowd tonight that we thought we might try a little something new out. Does that sound like fun?” A wall of noise answers her, and she can almost feel the camera focus tightening as people begin to recognize this song won’t be one of their standard closers. “We have something we’re excited to share, and you all will be the first to hear it. You ready?”
She slides into the first sequence of choreography as the music starts in earnest. After less than a week of practice, it already feels natural. Rumi has never worked with a choreographer like Mira, who understands movement and beauty and how Rumi fits into it at the same time. She wondered after they became intimate if things would change in how Mira understood their performance together, and she remains curiously delighted that it didn’t. Mira already knew how she moved, how they all moved together, perfectly.
The vocals start with Rumi, as they often do. She’s proud of all the music she’s written, but suspects this song will be one of her favorites. Zoey and Mira have an incredible ability to tell stories, Zoey with words, Mira with movement, and Rumi loves putting both to music. She started with an old hunter’s melody for this song, blending it into the West Coast hip-hop that raised Zoey while inflecting the Euro-pop hits Mira would never admit are her favorites.
As they hit the first chorus, Rumi is aware enough of the crowd to feel the energy start shifting to something like heightened, excited confusion. In the six years they’ve been performing together, they’ve never once released a love song. It’s been a notable quirk of their repertoire in the industry. But by the start of the bridge, no one listening can deny that a love song is unfolding before them.
It builds in intensity through the second verse as the choreography pulls them into a tighter orbit of each other. Rumi struggled with the section, struggles still but now with enough practice to mask it from everyone outside the three of them. Her body remembers the Idol Awards, being touched in front of thousands, being exposed, and the lights and sounds and feel of the stage beneath her feet are violently similar. She wants to forget, to burn that night away, but knows (with a lot of work) that she wouldn’t have what she does now without it. So instead she keeps her breathing controlled, lets herself see the glowing grin that could only be Zoey’s and feel the brush of the now-familiar pattern of calluses that could only be Mira’s, and works to write a new ending to this story.
They barrel down the last chorus together, a three-part harmony at its strongest. The song has been their story, pictures of the life they built with each other after Golden, but Rumi wants to leave no room for ignorant interpretation of their work. She rolls her shoulders as the second bridge they recorded just for this concert hits the speakers and walks confidently towards her future.
Rumi hits her mark and turns to Zoey, stepping closer as Zoey drapes her arms over her shoulders. As hard as her nerves are firing, she can’t help but smile.
“I love you,” she mouths. The first words the cameras, the world will see her say, and the truest of them at the same time.
“Me too,” Zoey mouths back, grinning briefly at Mira over Rumi’s shoulder before pushing up on her toes to kiss her. They’ve filled an arena tonight, and the gasp is still audible as it ripples through the crowd.
When she pulls back, Rumi lets herself be moved, spun smoothly under Mira’s arm and dipped into another kiss. She can feel Mira’s smile as she’s set back on her feet. Mira then turns to Zoey, who throws herself in just slightly ahead of the timing they planned, so undeniably Zoey about it that Rumi has to laugh. She turns out to face the crowd and is nearly caught staring open mouthed past it at the Honmoon.
Instead of the flickering, iridescent lines she has grown used to seeing wrap around every corner, the Honmoon is pulsing with the beat of the music, an explosion of color so vibrant she briefly wonders if the whole world can see it now.
She glances to the side when she feels hands on her back, sees Mira and Zoey both looking out with the same astonishment she feels. It is different from that moment over Namsan Tower, not the breathless understanding that they had saved the Honmoon, but a deeper, fuller breath of knowledge that the Honmoon has grown. That their music, that they themselves have gone beyond strengthening the barrier to altering its core.
Rumi reaches for them, wraps her hands around theirs, and holds them tight. As the music fades she bows at the waist. The coming days will be a trial, but in this moment there is only the warmth of their hands in hers and the ocean of noise in front of them.
They changed the world. Now it was time to live in it.