Chapter Text
Don't Go — Arc One: Divided
Chapter 1 — First, Rumi
“You were hiding this from us, the whole time?”
Above them, people still scream, their noises muffled. And somewhere inside Mira’s words lies a truth that makes another sense. If she could read her well enough. But Rumi is far too panicked to read her well, and understand what Mira is saying; all she hears is the shock, the withdrawal, the disgust coiling around the revelation of her true nature. Without meaning to, her patterns flare up, lilac and purple. Disgusting. Who could blame them? Because yes, she’d been hiding this from them, that she’s a demon, the whole time. Demon, half-demon, not a human. She hid, because she feared exactly this all those years. For ten years. Their looks. Their disappointment. The fear in their eyes.
“No, I have a plan, to erase them. Jinu was supposed to—I—he was—” In her panic, the words tumble out, a desperate jumble of excuses going nowhere or, rather, worsening everything. She sees it in Zoey’s eyes and how she closes off in shock, in how Mira’s face goes rigid, distrusting her more by every passing second. It all crumbles so fast.
“Jinu? You’re working with him?” Zoey still sounds as if she doesn’t believe what she sees, even when the demon is right in front of her.
“No. No! No!” Rumi cries, desperately trying to pull them back. “I was using him to fix all this! To fix me! So we could all do our duty! We could all be strong, be together.” Rumi pleads, raw and ragged, tears streaming down her cheeks now. How could all that go so terribly wrong in, what, just a few minutes?
“How could we be together, if we can't tell your lies from your truths, Rumi?”
Despite her voice being on the edge of breaking, Zoey’s words strike hard and deep, her usual bright and trusting energy extinguished, replaced by a hollow and wary tone. It is like this: the people who are most trusting are also hurt the most when betrayed. Rumi feels how hurt Zoey is, and what’s worse is that she did this to her. To sweet, trusting Zoey, who always tried to be the soft glue, sticking Huntrix together, who was always first to reach out after they argued. Because Zoey needed all of them to be together the most.
“I knew it. I knew it was too good to be true,” Mira says, her words a self-inflicted wound, and they sent Rumi’s dying flickers of remaining hope curdling into despair. She's losing Mira right now.
“Mira, no! Didn’t you see? See the gold. We’re so close!” Rumi gestures frantically upwards, where just moments ago the for everyone but them, imperceptible shimmer in the Honmoon had been, the sign of their ritual’s ultimate success. She knows she’s begging pathetically; she has nothing else left.
The girls, her girls, retreat another step.
And now, anger. There’s anger below all her despair. Anger about the unfairness, about that evil trick Jinu played on her, about his betrayal, but also, Rumi realizes, about how stupid and naive she’d been to trust him. To trust a demon. Oh, the bitter irony. She shouldn't have trusted him. And Mira and Zoey should trust her. While she hadn’t. She probably deserves this.
Looking at them - Mira rigid and Zoey horrified - she sees Celine’s lifelong lesson and caution proven right. Your faults and fears must never be seen. It had been right to not trust her girls either. Because of how they look at her, with all that fright and disgust. They look at her like she’s a monster.
They hate her, and rightfully so.
Yet she can’t help herself from crying, begging, trying. “No, don’t leave, don’t leave.” The anger swells into something more, raw and wanting to be unleashed. The beast in her, it's angry, and it's clawing its way out.
“I can still fix it!”
Rumi knows it before she hears it. Her voice, once pleading, slipped and dropped into a lower register, a resonant growl vibrating through the world, through the Honmoon, threatening it with her other side, her demonic one. She feels it trembling, sees the change in Mira’s pose, in Zoey’s eyes. The Honmoon is hurting, and it’s hurting because of Rumi. Who’s a demon.
They react, just like they’ve been trained to for a decade, taking a frantic step back before readying for attack. Immediately, Rumi tries to shrink herself, to give them space, to make herself less of a threat. She’d never hurt her sisters, because they’re so much more.
But Mira raises her woldo, the curved blade catching a stray beam of light like it wants to mock her. It was always a terrifying sight for anyone on the other end of her blade, but her words, oh, her words are so infinitely worse: “You're a demon. You’re not our Rumi. She would never do this to us. Rumi doesn’t have patterns. She’s a huntress, like us. And huntresses kill every demon.”
Oh god, how Zoey’s eyes lock onto her, how her face suddenly hardens, closing off in newfound certainty and in a way none of them has ever seen on her before.
Rumi’s breath hitches as her mind catches up. Oh no. Oh no. Taking another step back and raising her hands, she tries to look not threatening. “Mira—” Her throat is tight.
“Tell us where Rumi is, and maybe we'll let you go,” Zoey offers, voice strained, and Rumi is not sure if she’s honest or deceitful, when clinging to a hope that all of this isn’t true. That Rumi hasn’t betrayed them like she has, isn't the liar that she is, a mistake that needs to be purged for the sake of the Honmoon or just because she has backstabbed them for a decade. Backstabbed the only people in the world who really mattered, and whom she should’ve trusted with everything.
Mira points her woldo at Rumi’s throat, shaking her head. “No, Zoey. We don’t negotiate with demons. We kill them. And then we search for our Rumi.”
Our Rumi. As if she belonged to her, were another person, somewhere else. Someone with her face, but without her. Someone Mira could not hate.
“Mira, please, it’s me! I’m not lying to you! I’m Rumi.” She pleads.
“Rumi isn’t a demon.” Mira’s so sure, her voice cuts through everything, and almost through Rumi’s own beliefs. “Rumi would never lie to us like that.” Oh god, she has been too convincing. Mira came to her with her concerns, even told her she felt Rumi was keeping something from her.
And Rumi lied.
Straight into Mira’s face, convincing. Convinced Mira that Mira's feeling that something was off with Rumi wasn't true. Convinced Mira that Rumi would never hide something like that, not from them.
Truly, she did this to herself. Her throat is tighter than it’s ever been as she realizes one more time that she shouldn't have lied, shouldn’t have dug her own grave.
She sees it in Mira’s eyes and the micro-tensing of her shoulder muscles and in how Zoey shifts her weight onto her back foot before she throws. For years, she has memorized their tells, the exact way they move when they are about to strike, to kill. And for a whole decade, she always, always feared that exact moment, when she would ultimately find herself on the other end of their weapons because they found out what she really is. A demon. A monster. A mistake.
“Mira, stop, it’s me. You were right when you asked me if I was hiding something from you! I was—” This has to convince Mira. She had been on the right trail, but Rumi threw her off with her puppy eyes, her soft lies, and her promises, and because Mira trusted Rumi more than she trusted herself, she had believed her. Oh god, no.
“Nice try. You even sound like her. But we’ll find her without you,” Mira bites, voice full of venom.
Mira hates lies and demons equally.
The fight erupts not with a word, but with a rush of air. Mira lunges, a blur of practiced motion, the woldo’s staff a horizontal blur aimed at Rumi’s ribs. But Rumi or the demon in Rumi is fast, too. She twists her body, the staff whistling past her side by a hair’s breadth, and slaps her palm against the concrete floor, to whirl away, coming to a stand a few meters away.
Rumi doesn’t press the advantage. She can never hurt them. “Stop! Please!” she cries, scrambling back, her hands held up in surrender. She doesn’t want to draw her weapon, not even to defend herself. Not from them. “Please, Mira! I’ll go, I’ll go! You won't have to see me—”
But the hunter in Mira sees only a monster using its powers to deceive them, and she moves.
“How dare you have her face.”
Rumi twitches from guilt, or despair, and the brief moment of hesitation makes her vulnerable. Two, three, four of Zoey’s Shin-Kals whiz right past her arms and waist, and they back Rumi against a massive stack of columns, holding the stage above them, and left and right is nowhere to run. Mira is advancing, her expression a mask of cold, righteous fury. She feints high, then drops low, sweeping the woldo at Rumi’s legs. Rumi jumps, but a Shin-Kal catches her ankle, a searing line of pain. She lands hard, her vision swimming, trying to stand straight and flee.
The moment of weakness is all Mira needs. She grips her woldo harder and charges, a raw, guttural cry tearing from her throat. Rumi sees the blade coming and knows she can't dodge it in time. She braces for the impact, a final, desperate apology on her lips. “Mira, I’m sorry I lied—”
The blade sinks deep into her stomach.
Not clean.
But with Mira’s brutal, angry force.
Rumi’s eyes blow wide. A gasp, not of pain, but of profound shock, escapes her lips. She tumbles forward, her hands scrabbling at the smooth, even surface of the staff for purchase, finding none as all strength flees her limbs. Her blood, a shocking, vibrant crimson, smudges her pants, dripping down the staff, and spatters onto the dusty ground.
Only now do the two huntresses realize something is deeply wrong.
Mira halts in her every movement, her hands still gripping the weapon. Her eyes, fixed on the spreading red stain, are suddenly starting to fill with a horror far greater than any she’d felt facing a true demon horde. This can’t be true. This can’t be real.
Because demons don’t bleed. They dissipate. They vanish into that weird pink mist. And the Demon-Rumi-thing before her eyes, slumping to the ground and taking her weapon down with it, isn't vanishing. It doesn't disappear in pink mist. It’s not gone!
It’s bleeding.
Mira is frozen, terror in her eyes, and Zoey claps her hands before her mouth when, for the first time in her life, she’s forced silent and can’t help with her words.
Rumi crumbles to the ground, her hands around the staff that is taking her life. Quietly, her voice a fragile whisper, Rumi forces her head up, looking at them, her vision already blurring.
The blade is still in her. Mira's knuckles are white on the staff. Rumi closes her hands around Mira's—gently, the way she used to—and Mira flinches like she's been burned.
“Tell Celine I’m sorry.” She hasn't fulfilled her duty. Lied to them. Betrayed them. She has failed them all. She lets Mira go.
Because this is what she deserves.
Her mind is hazy, everything hurts, her entire body flares up in heat. The patterns, the patterns on her hands, are glowing, so bright. A last flare before I go, Rumi thinks, as her head lolls down. Before Mira or Zoey can move, can speak, can process the catastrophic weight of their mistake,
Around Rumi’s form the air folds itself, and she is gone, a swirl of red mist there for a blink, and then the air rushes into the place she cowered at with a soft plop. The only other noise comes from Mira’s woldo as it crashes onto the ground.
But that isn’t the worst of it. Because whatever Rumi is — she can’t survive such a wound in her gut. She can’t survive. Mira screams in horror. Zoey laughs—before she understands that she's not laughing.
The woldo, on the ground between them, is still bleeding.