Chapter Text
“Guys, look at this!” Zoey squealed, throwing herself over the couch. “I totally want to try this the next time we go out to a convention!”
Rumi looked up from her knitting and Mira lifted her eyes from her book. Mira’s eyebrows pitched and Rumi’s nose scrunched.
Gods, they were so cute.
“I’d never live it down if the PR team had to deal with word of us doing that getting out,” Rumi sighed and returned to her scarf.
It had been two years since HUNTR/X had disbanded and Rumi had gone solo. Celine and the executives of Sunlight Media hadn’t been too pleased, but with the Honmoon showing no signs of weakening, the girls saw no use in running themselves ragged. Mira and Zoey both had ambitions outside of being icons. Mira had a lucrative career as a model. Zoey was the luckiest girl in the world and had managed to found a position as an influencer/rapper/educator for sea turtle conservation.
Mira nudged Rumi in the ribs. “And that’s why we go to conventions that confiscate all cameras, princess.”
Even with the spotlight focused less intensely on the girls, they were still very careful with what aspects of their personal lives they allowed to be seen.
Their relationship had been left open to interpretation. They didn’t want to lie to their fans, but living under the spotlight made each of the girls value their privacy, Rumi and Mira much more so than Zoey. It wasn’t that Zoey was an attention whore, it was just that any publicity as an influencer was good.
That included publicity from Zoey got from being what the internet referred to as a “menace”.
Fans had many terms for the former members of HUNTR/X. Zoey was the only one who could keep up with the labels, mostly due to her being the only one who had something resembling online literacy. Stoking rumors of what their fanbase called “polytrix” was Zoey’s favorite way to get them trending.
Unluckily for her, there was a thin line between trending and stirring up controversy.
It wasn’t like she attracted the ire of Sunlight Media on purpose. She just happened to be the only one that had caused them social media controversies. Zoey liked to express her love through bites. Sometimes, her girls were just too cute for her to not feel justified in sinking her teeth into shoulders.
Bite someone in semi-public one time and suddenly, you’ve lost all privileges for deciding what’s appropriate in public and what isn’t.
Despite being in their thirties and having sound careers, the three of them had – in recent months – been subject to Celine harping on the importance of discretion and moderation.
None of them enjoyed being around Celine for more than twenty minutes, but extended periods of time in a room with her were exceptionally difficult when she was mad at them about something.
Celine wasn’t one to not be mad about something.
Mira was normally able to be the bigger person and keep quiet, but sometimes, her inner teenager was still so hurt at being a stain upon a legacy that her nasty brat showed her teeth.
Rumi, the poor thing, always looked ready to disappear into the floor when Celine lectured them, tugging at the edges of her short-sleeved shirts as if the fabric could swallow her. The two hadn’t spoken for years after the night of the Idol Awards, and anything resembling tension between them always sent Rumi back to that desperation she had felt that night.
Zoey, still feeling gut-twisting distress at any sign of tension between people that were supposed to love each other, would always bend over backwards to get the four to make up (especially if it was one of her classic impulse decisions that landed them in Celine’s compound).
Being around Celine was difficult for all of them – Celine included – to say the least.
Zoey looked down at the photo of the hook suspension. She could hear Celine’s chiding in the back of her mind, a short, clipped tone delivered with a tense jaw and grinding teeth.
She sighed. “Rumi has a point. One hidden camera and we’re in for it. Maybe we could try one at the dungeon?”
Dungeon life was Zoey’s favorite thing.
For one, the dungeon they went to was as exclusive and private as they came. Almost everyone on the member list was just as famous as they were, and just as concerned for their own privacy. Security had never been a concern of theirs.
Zoey’s freak was really hard to match, even with her girls. She was into nearly everything – and she liked it all heavy. Being amongst like-minded people healed Zoey’s inner loneliness in a way that years of therapy never had.
Of course, Zoey still went to therapy, but kink was more fun.
The dungeon felt like home to her. Even if she didn’t like everyone there, they all came there for the same reasons – pleasure, control, and release.
Release through kink was rarely sexual to the girls. Zoey liked her sex kinky and her kink sexy, but when the girls played, it was most often done to – in Rumi’s words – “correct traumatic experiences”, or to reach a place in their mind that was otherwise untouchable.
She couldn’t understand why the outside world just saw kink as getting choked or spanked during sex. Zoey discovered new feelings that she didn’t know she had until she was neck-deep in subspace, no sexy stuff required.
Of course, scenes that heavy were left for the comfort of their condo. As much as Zoey loved making creepy old men jealous they’d never get to touch her or her girls, Zoey didn’t want to experience such vulnerability anywhere but their home.
“No, wait,” Zoey cut in before Rumi or Mira could answer. “I don’t think I’d actually want something that crazy anywhere but here. We’re just so much more secure here. If you guys were interested, of course! I know this is kinda a lot and I’m a lot heavier of a masochist than you two, so not being interested is totally okay!”
Mira’s shoulders hunched. “I’m not saying no, but I am saying I can’t top.”
Needles had never been Mira’s favorite thing. As tough and aloof a persona as she tried to project, Mira had the weakest stomach of them. She once nearly passed out after trying to thread a single twenty-five gauge needle into Zoey’s arm.
“I get it.” Zoey kissed Mira’s temple. “I’m happy to practice my sharps if it means we get to do this. These hooks are crazy thick, though – those have to be at least a ten gauge.”
“Think you can give yourself needles that big?” Rumi finished up the line of her scarf and placed it onto the table. “If not, I can practice with you.”
Zoey ran her tongue over her teeth, pressing into the peaks of her molars. “Hmmmm, dunno! I guess there’s only one way to find out!”
Ten gauges weren’t going to happen.
Zoey couldn’t get an eighteen gauge to sit right.
Self-piercing was something that Zoey was comfortable enough with. She had given herself her first cartilage piercing at fourteen.
It was the night before she was set to fly out to spend the summer in Seoul with her mom. Her dad, observant as ever, didn’t notice when he dropped her off at the airport. Her mom, emotionally unavailable as ever, just rolled her eyes when she saw it while picking her up.
Needle pain didn’t bother Zoey, but it wasn’t a pain she actively sought out. The rush from the puncture was sharp and intense, but short-lived. She could completely forget needles were in her skin, her body only recalling the intrusion when she rolled muscles.
It wasn’t the pain that made the eighteen gauges so hard to thread – a sharp poke on one side, a dull ache on the other, with a small hum underneath the skin – it was the adrenaline.
Even if the pain barely fuzzed the edges of reality and dissipated quicker than fog in the sun, it was enough to make Zoey’s mind wander.
Pain normally didn’t rile Zoey up. On the contrary, pain was centering – it made the rest of the world quiet, including the raging hormonal beast inside of Zoey’s head.
Eighteen gauges, for whatever reason, were Zoey’s greatest weakness. Impaling her skin with surgical-grade steel made her mind wander to thoughts of getting impaled by other things.
She didn’t feel this rush when she was topping needles for her girls. Topping for needles was even a little understimulating. Nothing she did with her girls bored her, but needles were the closest thing to boring.
There wasn’t any connection to their pain. She didn’t have the sting from a palm striking a thigh, didn’t feel the reverberations of a cane humming between the bones in her forearm.
Rumi didn’t seem to have been progressing much with her needles much, either.
Ryu Rumi didn’t half-ass anything. She threw herself into whatever her current fixation was with the same intensity that she threw into sealing the Honmoon. Everything was either life or death to her.
Complete perfection or utter failure.
Both Mira and Zoey hated seeing Rumi rip herself to pieces over every small mistake she made, and while all three of them knew that Rumi would never completely recover from a childhood and adolescence that demanded absolute perfection, she had made shockingly little progress in the six-ish years that had elapsed since the Idol Awards.
The anniversary was just around the corner.
Summer was always the hardest season to get through. The heat from the sun that clung to the humidity of the nights always brought back memories of how uncomfortably warm that night had been. Zoey’s nightmares got worse, Mira grew more irritable, and Rumi…
...didn’t handle summer well.
Isolation continued to serve as Rumi’s primary defense mechanism. She’d hole up in her room over an imperfect thread of a needle in the same way she had pulled back over the patterns creeping over her skin.
It didn’t escape Zoey that Rumi was the likeliest to wear long sleeves in the summer. It also didn’t escape her that those long sleeves were making more appearances as the weeks slogged on.
When Zoey was seeing those beautiful patterns on display, she’d see tiny pinpricks of red skirting around them.
All of the girls had always healed fast thanks to their connection to the Honmoon, with Rumi’s skin almost visibly knitting itself together thanks to boost her heritage granted her.
If Zoey had been able to see needle marks on Rumi, they must have been done hours, if not minutes, prior.
Seeing Rumi push herself so much with something as sacred as kink left Zoey with a knot in her stomach.
Play had always meant more than an orgasm or a floaty feeling to the girls. Mira felt at her most loved when she was screaming at her girls to go fuck themselves as they beat her; Zoey was a self-identified depraved slut who felt her most alive when she had as many sensations coursing through her body as possible; but to Rumi, kink was almost a religion.
Rumi seemed like she only felt like a complete person when she was in headspace.
Zoey wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
“Miraaaaaa,” Zoey whined, dragging her hands down her face. “She’s been in her room for three days straight. Can’t we just barge in and drag her out?”
Mira didn’t lift her eyes from the cutting board. In fact, it looked like she went from looking at it to looking through it. “We both know what good that would do, Zo.”
“Guys, I’m fine. Promise,” Zoey mimed, pulling out her best Rumi impersonation with the awkward wide smile and shoulders held straight (mimicking posture always helped Zoey with impressions).
The cutting board looked like it was less likely to combust as Mira’s gaze softened. “I’m worried too.”
Zoey popped a nail into her mouth and ran her tongue over the point, pressing into it. Chewing her nails had always been a nasty habit of hers, and she found treating herself with manicures made her far less likely to resort to the nervous coping mechanism. “D’you think… I don’t know. This is might sound bad. Or weird. But do you think she’s practicing so much as a way of hurting herself? Like, in a not-good way?”
Mira forcefully set her knife down and clenched her jaw.
God, she was so much like Celine.
Zoey had always known that a big reason why Rumi and Mira butted heads so much when they were younger – and why they still brought out both the worst and the best in each other – was that similarity that Mira shared with their mentor.
Mira wasn’t the only one who resembled one of their parental figures, even if the similarity she held with Celine was the most uncanny. Rumi’s professionalism-at-all-costs attitude brought out some very old wounds in Mira, and the two older girls being quick to turn terse with each other was scarily familiar to Zoey.
They were all so messed up.
“We’re going to have to ask her that, Zoey,” Mira sighed. “I want to say that you’re wrong. But she’s still so hard to me to read sometimes. And this isn’t something we’re going to risk being wrong on.”
Zoey nodded. “I can go and get her.”
“Thanks,” Mira mumbled, going back to slicing.
Zoey padded down the hall. When she raised her hand to knock at Rumi’s door, she felt a familiar thrumming in the floorboards.
When Derpy purred, the sound was easier to feel than hear.
He didn’t visit too much anymore, seemingly having found some other magical girl group to pass his time with. It seemed like he only showed up when one of them was having a hard day, like he could feel their pain yanking the chords of the Honmoon.
His bond with Rumi was either the strongest or Rumi had the most bad days between them, as he was normally with her when he was at the condo.
Zoey knocked.
“Just a second,” Rumi responded. “Come in.”
Rumi was sitting on her bed with her back to the door, curled in on herself. When she saw Zoey, her shoulders softened.
“Zo,” she breathed out. She twisted back around and unfurled, revealing that her right leg looked like it had been tail-whipped by a porcupine. “Sorry. Not trying to hide. I just know how Mira can be.”
“With needles?” Zoey added, not sure if that was what Rumi was implying.
She didn’t get a response.
“’Cuz I think that’s just when she’s the one putting them in.”
Rumi shrugged.
Derpy sat up in the corner of the room, eyes going different directions – one staring blankly at a potted plant that was too whiny to live outside in the summer heat, the other fixated emptily on Rumi’s laundry basket.
“He’s so cute,” Zoey giggled, padding over to Rumi’s bed and sitting beside her. Her eyes traveled up the patterns of Rumi’s thighs. They were bracketed with the foam green of twenty-one gauge needles, occasionally pockmarked with the pink of an eighteen gauge.
“I want him to leave, but he won’t,” Rumi mumbled, glaring at him like he had just left a hairball on her carpet. “He’s great. The best, even. But I don’t like him being around when we play. It’s weird.”
Zoey remembered the last time he had insisted on being an absolute mood-killer and allowed herself to grin. “We’re not playing, though. I mean it’s still weird when you’re self-scening! Having an interdimensional cat is very privacy-invading! But there’s no we here, right now.”
Rumi sucked one of her cheeks between her molars and started gnawing at the flesh. She raised her hand to her thigh, eyes tracing the peaks and valleys of raised skin. “You’ve got a point.”
“Come out to dinner. I think Mira misses you. And I know I miss you,” Zoey whispered, afraid to touch Rumi.
Blue ripples began to emanate from the floor beneath Derpy as he shrunk into the plane below. Sussie warbled sarcastically as he swooped down from a rafter he had apparently been hiding in, cocking his head in curiosity as the two disappeared.
Rumi sighed. “Okay.”
The two walked back out into the dining room and sat at the counter in silence.
Mira turned her head from the stove and acknowledged them with a heady glance, her eyes passing slowly, methodically, over Rumi’s leg. She returned to her work. “Those are looking good.”
Zoey smiled.
“They’re not as straight as I want them to be,” Rumi corrected. She must have felt Mira about to open her mouth, quickly adding, “—but I’m doing a really good job of just barely hitting the fat layer.”
Power exchange was the newest facet to be added to their relationship.
They had started playing nearly as soon as they started dating, but integrating power exchange took some time. All of them were smart enough to know that they just didn’t have the stability or life experience for something so intense in their early twenties.
Relationship check-ins were routine for them. They’d done them every three months since they had gotten together like clockwork, with more if there was a communication breakdown. At each scheduled check-in during their first three years together, they’d ask if it was time for the power exchange, but there was always some reason that it felt right to wait.
Right on the third anniversary of the Idol Awards, they had all agreed that it was time to start.
The first rule to go into place for Rumi was that if she said something mean about herself, she immediately had to follow it up with something nice.
“You’ve been practicing a lot.”
Neutral observations had always been how Mira liked to start heavier conversations. She wanted to make sure that her recollections were accurate, like checking for curves on a volley of arrows before firing them off.
Mira hated it when her shots didn’t strike true.
“Yea,” Rumi agreed. It sounded like she wanted to continue, but she didn’t. Of course she didn’t.
Rumi had made fantastic progress in opening up to the girls. Memories that bubbled up around the anniversary just had a sinister way of taking that progress and yanking it backwards.
Summer wasn’t easy on any of them. Zoey would slip back into her people-pleasing habits like a snake trying to wedge itself back into an old skin, cracking at the seams and losing brilliance. Mira always hated how much shorter her temper became, that old anger of hers starting to boil at a lower temperature.
Any amount of progress that Rumi made in the months prior would disappear overnight the first time Rumi felt a humid summer breeze during the first few years after the Idol Awards. As the years passed, the change she had made would come back on her better days, but it was still terrifying to see their fearless leader start to build walls as the anniversary rolled back around.
“Since you’re getting so good,” Zoey started, her voice wobbling a little. “Why don’t we start with you practicing on me now?”
Mira pushed the daikon to the side of the cutting board and grabbed the napa, trying to ignore the ringing in her ears, focusing on making sure she wasn’t slicing so hard that she’d embed the knife into the cutting board.
She knew that Rumi was going to argue, to try to get herself out of it, to say she just wasn’t good enough for that. And Mira knew that she was going to blow up when she did.
Mira was fucking good at reading people, which made it all the more insulting when she could predict an interaction down to the words used and still lose control over her temper.
“...Sure, Zo. I want to see how much easier it is on skin that isn’t mine,” Rumi breathed. Mira did too. “The pain is a little distracting. It makes me shaky. It can get me really nauseous, too.”
Mira let her shoulders fall. “Then why does it look like you sleep on a nail bed every night?”
She clenched her teeth together, as if clamping her jaws down could stuff those words back where they belonged.
Rumi was being good. She didn’t deflect an invitation for connection with her perfectionism.
Why was Mira letting herself be such a cunt?
“I just,” Rumi let out a clipped sigh. “I had this idea. That if I’m good enough, we could do something special for the anniversary this year.”
“Isn’t us making it another year special enough on its own?” Zoey sounded like she was about to cry.
Mira refused to look up from her work to check if she was.
“Zo, that isn’t what I meant.” Panic was edging Rumi’s voice. “I’m just tired of spending the entire day numb. I thought that maybe, this year, we could do something that isn’t just surviving.”
“What’s your idea?” Mira hoped that the molten anger in her stomach wasn’t burning her tone. She hated raising her voice or snapping at them – especially Rumi.
She had done enough of that to last several lifetimes.
Rumi adjusted herself in her chair, hissing as if she had forgotten about the needles until she moved. “I’d like to try a hook pull.”
Neither Zoey or Mira pressed for Rumi to continue.
Mira could feel that there were more words coming, and trying to coax them out before they were ready made Rumi start to fumble. Rumi hated fumbling, hated being seen as anything less than a completely cool-headed leader.
“I’ve read lots of posts about peoples’ experiences.” Out of the corner of her eye, Mira saw Rumi pick up her braid and begin to nervously work her fingers down the tresses. “It sounds like it’s alchemy. People make it sound like it just pulls the pain from their body.”
None of the questions Mira wanted to ask were gentle or smart. She wanted to ask Rumi if she really thought that physically hurting themselves was more responsible than letting themselves sit in the emotional discomfort. Then, she wanted to ask Rumi how she’d react if it was Mira who had been driving dozens of needles into her body every night, as if it were the only way that she could see God.
“So pushing ourselves to catharsis?” Zoey clarified. “On the night when we’re always at our most vulnerable?”
Rumi made a non-committal noise. “I mean, isn’t that the point of catharsis? Being the most vulnerable that we can be?”
Tension melted from Mira’s clenched jaw like butter in a hot pan, oiling out into a form much harder to quantify while not exactly leaving.
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea to try something so new – and so intense – when we will have such raw feelings.” The napa was as thinly sliced as Mira could tolerate for this dish, but she still felt the need to destroy something and pulled out more garlic. “Catharsis is about having control, Rumi. It’s letting go of things in a controlled environment when you’re stable enough to responsibly navigate the feelings that come after. And I think I speak for all of us when I say that control isn’t in abundance here on the anniversary.”
“Don’t speak for me,” Rumi hissed. “This is the most stable my mental health has ever been!”
Metal clattered against marble as Mira tossed the knife. “And that’s why you’ve been sitting alone in your room, punching holes in yourself, for hours at a time?”
“Nope!” Zoey shouted, slamming her palms down on the counter. “Couch! Both of you! Now!”
Couch time was how they would reset after anything they went through. It was for aftercare just as much as it was a neutral ground to hash out disagreements.
The majority of couch time was dedicated to a misunderstanding between Mira or Rumi. Not that Mira was keeping score, but it felt like they were tied between being scolded from her temper or from Rumi’s distance.
Being relegated to the couch to talk about her feelings was nothing short of infuriating the first several times that one of the others had insisted on it, but couch time had grown on Mira. The give of the plush beneath her body made her feel like she was sinking away from the baser parts of herself that she had worked for her entire adult life to tame.
She found herself feeling relieved at being given orders to stop being such a pain in the ass, because, for whatever reason that psychologists would have a field day discerning, Mira could listen to those orders when they came from her girls instead of from herself.
Zoey rolled over an exercise ball and popped it in front of the couch. Being a mediator was something that their poor maknae was all too accustomed to, but in recent years, Zoey had evolved from being someone who wanted peace at all costs into someone who didn’t let a single score go unsettled. She didn’t say anything unless she thought one of the others was somehow being unfair, but she didn’t let them leave until they were done, in Zoey’s words, “being silly”.
Even if Mira liked the emotional release that came with couch time, she still found herself fighting the sullen urge to cross her arms and look away from the other two. “Look, Rumi, I’m sorry. I just don’t like how much time you’ve been spending alone. I know you need your alone time, especially this time of year. But, recently, it’s felt like you’ve been using kink as an excuse to self-harm.”
Rumi sucked in a breath. “I–”
She blinked cowishly. “–can see where you’re coming from on that. And I won’t completely deny it. I didn’t think I had been consciously doing that, but… when you put it that way…
“I can be done with this.” Her eyes fell down to the spikes of metal protruding from her hard thigh muscle. A couple of the hubs had blood welling beneath them. She dipped a fingertip into a stream that was starting to spill down her leg before it dripped onto the couch, rubbing it between the pad of her finger and her thumb. “I’ve been pushing myself too hard. I want to be perfect at it. Yes, I know, perfect isn’t healthy. Me wanting to be perfect is what makes this unsustainable.”
Mira’s skin crawled when she looked closer at the needles. More than a quarter of the needles were bevel-down.
“Can I clean those up for you?” Mira asked, her voice breaking. “I know I don’t put them in well, but I want to try taking care of you.”
Rumi nodded.
This felt like a record for couch time. Zoey had once made them sit there for three hours.
Mira stood quicker than she had intended to and cupped Rumi’s face in her hands. Rumi didn’t meet her eyes, but Mira didn’t need to see them. She was being given enough vulnerability as it was. Mira leaned forward and kissed Rumi’s forehead. “Thank you, princess.”
“Thank you, both,” Zoey whispered behind them, reaching over from her perch to clumsily wrap an arm around Mira’s thigh. She placed a small palm on Rumi’s knee. “I’ll finish up dinner while you two work, okay?”
Mira nodded.
Once she was released, she padded into their play room.
It wasn’t nearly as opulent as the dungeon that they went to, but it had just enough for Mira to be indifferent about whether they stayed in for a scene or went out to the dungeon. Zoey and Rumi had a cage. Mira had tried it once, but bars were too familiar for Mira to want anything to do with the inside of it. A St. Andrew’s cross sat pushed into the far corner. Their favorite toys were hung up on the walls, organized from the soft sensory toys that Rumi adored to the vile things that were almost never touched – Zoey was the only bottom heavy enough to take demon tongues or whips, and seldom did the other two feel sadistic enough to want to use them.
Sharps containers, disinfectant and gloves all lived in the same drawer. Mira got to work sanitizing and putting on gloves. Staph infections were a lot less likely to happen with the assistance from the Honmoon, but Mira didn’t want to push their luck.
Rumi was still waiting on the couch for her by the time she got back. She was running the pads of her fingers over the speedbumps of skin.
Needle pain wasn’t something Mira cared for. Whereas Zoey and Rumi stopped feeling the needles the moment they punched through the second veil of skin, Mira’s pain only grew the longer they stayed in. Her hypermobility left the matrix of her skin more sensitive than her girls’, the springiness of her tissues constantly complaining against the metal skewers.
She couldn’t wrap her head around sitting and playing with the valleys of her own skin like that, but she found herself wanting to push against the bumps of Rumi’s legs like a xylophone.
“Lift up,” Mira commanded gently.
Rumi obeyed.
Mira slid a plush towel beneath her. “Color?”
“Green,” Rumi whispered, her half-lidded eyes nearly swallowed by her pupils. “So green.”
Vinyl consumed Mira’s senses. Her hands were humming with the desire to feel, to touch, to own. She found herself thankful for the protective barrier, knowing for a fact she’d be unable to concentrate if she could feel the warmth of Rumi beneath her.
“Okay.” The response was more to hype herself up than to warn Rumi. “I apologize in advance if this makes me pass out and fall face-first into these. Or throw up. Or both.”
Rumi snorted. “Good thing we’ve already fluid-bonded.”
“I don’t think I’m an emetophiliac,” Mira snarked. “No shame if you are, princess, I’d just never let myself live it down if I did that to you. Especially if I fell into it afterwards.”
Opal coursed beneath Rumi’s skin as she laughed again.
Mira didn’t let herself procrastinate any longer. She grabbed the light green hub of a bevel-up needle and pulled straight out.
The tiniest bit of resistance from Rumi’s skin made Mira’s own feel charged, like she was standing right beneath where lightning had just struck.
She dropped the needle into the sharps container and started to work her way down.
Pinpricks of blood bubbled to the surface, quickly congealing between the cool air of the apartment and Rumi’s preternatural ability to heal.
Mira caught a bit of resistance on a pink-hubbed eighteen gauge, Rumi hissing in response. “Stop?”
“No, ‘s fine,” Rumi whimpered. “I think I just put that one in wrong.”
Dutifully, Mira nodded and popped it out. The inside of Rumi’s skin matrix clung to it like oil, fluid but thick.
Something old and wicked curled in Mira’s gut. She suppressed the urge to gag. “Princess, I didn’t like the way that one felt.”
“Sorry,” she whispered so quietly that Mira almost didn’t hear her.
Mira stood, moving to box Rumi in with her arms before remembering that she was sterile, instead settling on closing her gloved hands into fists.
Undue apologies were banned under their power exchange.
Rumi pressed her mouth into a thin line, as if more apologies would pour out if she didn’t. “I felt obligated to say sorry because that one felt like my fault because of how I placed it. I realize that it was a silly thing to apologize over.”
“Good job,” Mira praised, kissing her forehead. She wanted to touch her face so badly, to stroke her soft cheeks and tuck the flyaway hairs back behind her ears. “Can you pull any others that feel like that one out for me?”
Rumi nodded and effortlessly plucked a steel skewer from her leg, dropping it into the sharps container. She selected a couple other needles that seemed to sit deeper in the skin, one sitting in a small puddle of blood, another already having a purple blossom growing beneath it. “There. That’s it.”
“Thank you, princess.”
Mira returned to her work, unsewing needle after needle. She fought the urge to poke them before pulling them out, not wanting to find out the hard way that she couldn’t stand the sensation of putting pressure down on steel beneath skin.
Once Rumi was unpinned, Mira wiped at the wounds with the first of several antiseptic towelettes. She carefully chose her next words as the rolled the towelette between her gloved fingers. “We can discuss a hook pull.”
“FUCK!” Zoey shouted.
Mira flew into the kitchen, Rumi somehow beating her there.
“I’m fine!” Zoey squeaked. “Really! The knife just slipped a tiny little bit!”
Rumi grabbed a dish rag and pressed it into Zoey’s left hand. “Mira, love, first aid kit?”
Mira nodded.
They had plenty of stock leftover from when they still fought weekly interdimensional threats. Mira yanked out the first one she could find from beneath the bathroom counter.
Rumi was still holding the dish rag against Zoey’s hand, the threads of the Honmoon lacing the two of them together by the wrist. “Mir, she isn’t listening to me. Can you tell her that we can go to the emergency room this time?”
“I am listening, I’m just saying you’re wrong!” Zoey argued, voice verging on airless. “I don’t care if this is a normal explainable human injury and that I’m not in America, there’s just no reason for me to go over this!”
Mira sighed. “Princess, let me look.”
Rumi stiffened, but pulled the hand with the dish rag back, leaving the bloody mass of fabric in place.
Warm, wet iron flooded Mira’s senses as she peeled the rag up, catching resistance as scabby tissue clung to it. She fought the urge to gag.
A scarlet river, banks clogged with the choppy red of clotting tissue and undertow pulsing with Zoey’s heart, cut its way through the inside of Zoey’s hand. Just a hair’s breadth further and she would have severed the muscles in her thumb. Pale threads of the Honmoon, thin as spider silk but just as strong, strung the walls of Zoey’s skin together.
Mira placed the rag off to the side. “Princess… I think she’s right. She’s barely bleeding anymore. The Honmoon rescues us from an awkward hospital visit, yet again.”
Zoey snorted. Her laugh died suddenly, her jaw still hanging open.
“Zo?” Mira’s heart skipped a beat. “Is something wrong?”
The smallest girl shook her head. “Nope. Definitely not. Now’s just not the right time.”
Ugh.
That was Zoey’s way of saying that she had the most spine-tingling idea pop up.
“Zoey,” Rumi started, her tone indicating that she knew Zoey was going to ask for something and that she was going to say absolutely not. Rumi might have been the most submissive of them, but she was also stubborn as a mule and could be as authoritative as a cult leader. “I’m not going to stab you with the Honmoon.”
“But why not?” Zoey whined, hissing as Rumi splashed antiseptic into her cut. “That was mean!”
Rumi rolled her eyes. “So letting you get an infection is nice? And, we’re not doing that because it’s the Honmoon, not a toy.”
Mira couldn’t fight her smirk. “I recall gagging you with my gok-do while Zoey dug her shin-kal into you, Rumi.”
“That’s different,” Rumi hissed. “That was about correcting a traumatic experience–”
Zoey’s back shot up straight, her eyes half-lidded and upper lip stuff as she parroted the beginnings of Rumi’s lecture. She started giggling when Rumi glowered at her. “And how would this not be that?”
She punctuated her question with a strum of the ethereal cords sewn into the meat of her hand.
Rumi dumped another swig of antiseptic onto Zoey’s hand, the smallest girl hissing and then giggling.
“We can discuss it. When we’re a little less bloodied up, though.”
Suspension hooks were a marvel of engineering in the same way human skin was a marvel of evolution.
Hooks designed for suspension were able to securely hold a human being in the air while not being stronger than the skin it burrowed beneath. Hooks that were too flexible would give under the weight of a human and send them to the painful ground. Hooks that were too rigid would be unsafe to pull with – if they were more stubborn than human tissue, it would be possible to pull them through the tissue.
That goldilocks spot, that perfect middle, was where Rumi was wanting to make sure that Honmoon hooks would sit.
Assuming the Honmoon even let them do this, that was.
Zoey had had some… creative ideas about what the Honmoon could be used for, but no matter how the chords were strummed or who the one plucking them was, no one could make a strap appear.
Rumi hadn’t tried to manifest one, but she refused. The Honmoon was more than a pocket dimension their weapons slept in.
It was alive.
It had desires and ambitions. Arguably, it even had a personality.
Each hunter had their own unique relationship with the Honmoon. Just as those that came before them, HUNTR/X hadn’t been the ones to choose their weapons – the Honmoon was.
It saw Mira’s guarded nature, her inability to let people close, and bestowed upon her a gok-do, its sleek elegance mirroring its wielder. Zoey’s razor-sharp focus that could hop from one target to the next in the blink of an eye had no better companions than her shin-kals, a perfect mirror for her devastating but narrow focus.
Part of Rumi grew bitter that she got a sain-geom when she saw that her girls were given weapons that harmonized with their personalities so well.
In the first moment she was called forth her blade and held it in her hand, she felt like she had finally done something worthy, done something right. This was years before she had met Zoey and Mira, the blade coming to her hand on her tenth birthday.
Pride hadn’t ever been something Rumi allowed herself to suffer again after Mira – the last to summon her hunter weapon, despite being the second member – finally called forth her gok-do.
In the moment, Rumi felt unparalleled elation. Their weapons suited them both so well, as beautiful and succinct as an epitaph. They were finally all hunters, and they were finally going to turn the Honmoon gold.
After that revelation flitted through her mind and the pride for her girls began to leave her chest, she felt an acrid taste in the back of her mouth as a question began to claw at the bars of her mind:
Did the Honmoon know anything personal about her, or did it just wanted to drop the most generic sharp thing into her hands so it could go on, pretending she didn’t exist?
Rumi didn’t let herself dwell on what the Honmoon must think of her for years. She was its most ardent defender (until she wasn’t), driving herself to the brink of absolute exhaustion to turn it gold. If she sealed the Honmoon, it would love and protect her.
She never felt the love that Mira and Zoey talked about when they discussed their connection to the Honmoon.
Rumi never felt that warmth, that belonging.
Even if the old Honmoon didn’t love her, the Rumi that she used to be would sooner die than see it completely destroyed, because maybe in death, the Honmoon would love her. Maybe as she slipped from the world, she’d feel that warmth.
Rumi never quite figured out why her resolve had changed so quickly.
Celine refusing to strike her down – Celine saying that she loved her – made something in Rumi snap.
In a moment, she went from accepting that she needed to die to refusing to sacrifice herself for something that could never love her.
The new opal Honmoon felt different.
On some levels, the new shield felt like it was the same. Zoey and Mira’s weapons remained unchanged.
In fact, the only thing that was different was that its personality.
Rumi knew the old Honmoon would never have let her hold something so blasphemous, let alone knit it for her hands.
She turned the hook over in her hand.
This was her seventh time trying to manifest one. Each time, they came out looking and feeling the exact same.
The Honmoon wasn’t physical or ethereal, but sat somewhere in between. Blades made of threads would ignore human constructs, leaving them unmarred after sword swipes swung wide or a gok-do was embedded into them.
Blades spun of thread and song weren’t designed to penetrate human skin.
The first time Rumi found herself bleeding after a slash from a shin-kal that flew wide made her body feel like she had fallen into a frozen river, the floor beneath her disappearing and dropping her into bone-deep cold.
Panic had nearly swallowed her whole by the time Celine had found her, huddled into a dark corner of the vale where her mother lie six feet deep. Celine had taken one look at the scratch on her cheek before using her diminishing connection to the Honmoon to summon one of her twin blades. For a brief moment, Rumi thought that they were for her own throat.
“Since we can manipulate the Honmoon, it may manipulate our flesh in turn,” she explained, the closest thing she was ever able to hold to tenderness edging her voice.
Celine ran her palm over the edge of her blade, pulling it back to reveal a thin red ribbon slashing through it. “The fact that you bleed makes you a Hunter. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Rumi took her fingertip away from the barb on the hook, seeing a clear hole in her skin but feeling no blood rise to the surface. She popped it into her mouth, her heightened taste keyed in for the tang of iron.
There wasn’t any blood she could taste, either.
“You are so weird,” Mira introduced herself without knocking.
She still clung to the old habit of hovering in doorways and awaiting explicit invitation, not unlike a vampire.
Maybe that was why she was so pale.
Mira’s arms were crossed, trying to convey some sense of confidence and failing miserably. Confident Mira kept her chin raised and her eyes half-lidded, but this Mira was evading eye contact and shrinking in on herself.
“I had to know for sure,” Rumi defended. “I can’t tell if I’m not bleeding because it’s so sharp, or if it’s because the Honmoon doesn’t want me to. Also, get in here.”
Mira took a seat next to Rumi. She sprawled out, her shoulderblades sprouting from her back. It was impossible to not picture her as a predatory cat, all lean muscle and inhuman flexibility. “Can I hold it?”
Rumi handed the hook over to Mira, who took it as if she was being handed an expensive bottle of wine. She spun it over in her fingers.
Honmoon alloy shimmered, even without a light source. The hook slowly melted into a pink as Mira held it, almost rose-red near her fingertips. “I am shocked that this worked.”
“Me too,” Rumi sighed. “I guess we both owe Zoey dinner.”
Mira rolled her eyes, smirking. “I think if we just go and show her, she’ll completely forget about the bet.”
Rumi bit down on her lip, holding back a wince when she felt the points of her fangs dig into the flesh. Her demon didn’t come out often anymore, and it was always surprising when it decide to rear its head again. “If we go and show her, she’ll want to take it for test run.”
The muscles in Mira’s throat bobbed. “Is that not what you were planning on doing in here? Going for a test run?”
“I was told,” Rumi exhaled. “Or, rather, it was heavily implied that all the practice I’ve been doing is worrying you. Both of you. And I told you that I can be done with the practice. At least, done practicing alone.”
Mira spun the hook between her fingers, gasping when the point grazed her knuckle. “You’re done practicing alone. But you don’t want to practice with Zoey.”
“I didn’t say that,” Rumi hissed, perhaps a little too quickly. “Sorry. I just don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to exclude her. What was supposed to come out was that the only thing I can responsibly do right now is make sure that I can put these together right.”
Mira tapped the edge of the hook with a fingertip, gasping and flinching. “Well, they seem plenty sharp to me. Stage one, done. Do we want to go and ask Zo–”
Rumi curled up and tucked her chin behind her knees, wrapping her arms around herself.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Mira snarked. “Do you want me to sit with you so you can try on yourself? We won’t count that as practicing alone.”
“Zoey,” Rumi mumbled, suddenly feeling like she was six and crumbling as she was scolded over something innocuous. “I want Zoey here, too.”
Mira nodded. She pulled out her phone.
Realistically, Zoey was no more than ten feet away and could have been beckoned with a yell, possibly by breathing the word turtle. In practice, Rumi appreciated that Mira knew her so well. Being alone, even if it was only for a brief few moments, sounded unbearable to Rumi.
The sound of feet thumping against the floor alerted Rumi to the smallest’s presence before the door flew open. “I have arrived! Ohmygosh I can’t believe I get to see this! Mira, are you sure you want to watch this? Rumi, do you have a sharps container and the right size needles?”
Mira passed the hook off to Rumi, who instantly lost it to the sea of threads. She sighed to herself. “That’s something I never considered checking. I’m sure the Honmoon has an intimate understanding of needle gauges.”
“Do you think it uses the metric system or freedom units?” Zoey bounced down onto the bed, inching closer to Rumi. “Touch?”
Rumi nodded.
The three of them were all physically affectionate, but Rumi needed her space sometimes. Her patterns were sensitive and she hated the visceral reactions her body sometimes received from touch. Even after having been together for nearly seven years, her girls still didn’t have ongoing consent for touch, but they knew her well enough that they knew when they needed to ask.
Zoey nuzzled into Rumi’s neck, dragging the bridge of her nose across the thin tissue of Rumi’s throat.
“If the Honmoon uses the imperial system, we’re making a new one.” Mira sat down on Rumi’s other side, wrapping an arm around the two of them.
Rumi smirked. “Only one way to find out, I guess.”
And just like that, another hook was sitting on her hand. This one gleamed like her patterns, the pastels slick and fluid like oil.
“That’s really big,” Zoey whispered. “Thick, too.”
“Quiet,” Rumi teased, tapping her on the nose with her free hand. “So, stupid question. This is probably sterile, right?”
Mira threaded her hands into the small hairs at the base of Rumi’s neck. “I would assume so. How many times have we stitched each other up with the Honmoon?”
“I wonder what microfauna in the demon world must look like. We can get a swab and check with my microscope!” Zoey started vibrating. “Ohhhhh, guys, what do you think demon parasites look like? They’re probably not as cool as our parasites, because I don’t think anything cooler than the barrel apmhipod will ever exist.”
Mira snorted. “Dr. Choi Zoey, industry expert of demon parasite science.”
“Parasitology,” Zoey corrected, “Is the proper term for the science and study of parasites. God, Mira, it’s like you don’t even listen to me when I talk about parasites for two and a half hours.”
“I listen, I just don’t absorb,” Mira deadpanned as she stood up. “I’ll be right back. You two hang out.”
Zoey drummed her fingers against the thin skin on Rumi’s wrist. “Can I touch it?”
Rumi passed the hook over to Zoey. As it was passed over, it went from a pale purple to a light, playful blue.
“Oh,” Zoey drew the word out, her eyes growing wider by the second. “That’s so cool. It’s like it knows us.”
“Of course it does,” Rumi stated. “The old one did, too.”
Zoey dragged the sharp point of the metal across her knuckles. A thin river of blood welled up to the surface, the current not strong enough to erupt from the valley of skin. “Rumi?”
Rumi made a noncommittal noise, her eyes stuck on the thin red ribbon on Zoey’s hand.
“If the old Honmoon knew us, then why does this one feel so different?”
Opalescence gleamed as Zoey spun the hook. She started to weave it between her nimble fingers, already adept with the weight and sharp lines of the weapon.
“Being known doesn’t necessarily mean being loved,” Rumi offered.
“I wonder,” Zoey started, squeaking and clicking her mouth shut. “Wait. Nope. This is a heavy observation I’m about to make, so how’s the emotional vibe check?”
Threads of the Honmoon began to wrap around Rumi’s fingers as she strummed at the air. She pulled them taught between her hands, feeling the thrum reverberating into her marrow. “Good. We can do heavy observations right now.”
“Each generation of hunters puts their own spin into the Honmoon. I wonder if this one feels so different because it’s ours.”
Rumi nodded. “I think you’re right. It feels nice, having it be ours.”
Mira strolled into the room, carrying the medical bag that held their needles and everything they’d need for sharps. She dropped the medical bag onto the bed and sat on the other side of Rumi. “Touch?”
She nodded.
Lithe and graceful as ever, Mira settled into the space that the other two had unintentionally left for her.
It was so funny how the three of them felt like parts on their own, only whole as a group. Rumi knew that the Honmoon was more than the threads that they could choose to see. It was an entire plane of the spiritual world that nestled over the human realm like a blanket, but the part they were able to manipulate was like the Earth’s crust, subject to the violent upheavals of the tectonic plates of the spiritual world. Their bond came from a deeper place than that surface they were able to see, which was the only explanation for how they were able to reunite after she had ripped the old surface of the Honmoon into oblivion.
For any other humans, Rumi wouldn’t consider their need for each other to be sustainable or healthy. But for them, it made sense.
For them, it was destiny.
Mira handed Rumi a wrapped ten gauge needle. Zoey placed the hook into Rumi’s hand, fingers brushing against her palm as she pulled away.
Rumi held the hook to the body of the needle. “Nope. Smaller gauge.”
“God damn it,” Mira grumbled to herself. “The Honmoon wants me dead.”
Zoey snorted.
The next size was an eight gauge, which was still too small.
“Six?” Rumi asked.
Mira made a noise reminiscent of a rabbit taking its last breath in the jaws of a greyhound. As if she was anticipating Rumi’s follow-up question, she blurted out, “Still green. I’m just a wuss.”
A sterile piercing needle was passed over from Mira’s shaking hand. Rumi compared the hook to the breadth of the needle, her breath hitching. “It looks like it will be perfect.”
“Only one way to know for sure.” Zoey pressed her cheek into Rumi’s shoulder, nuzzling so hard that Rumi could feel the valleys between her teeth.
Rumi popped the package open and slipped the sharp end of the hook into the dull end of the needle. It sat snug inside the steel.
“Well,” Rumi breathed, her lungs suddenly remembering they had a job to do. “That answers that.”
The day of the anniversary felt like a slog and a blur at the same time.
Bobby, still Rumi’s manager and eternally their biggest supporter, had sent them a gift basket brimming with their favorite snacks.
They couldn’t eat like they used to, and what would have once lasted six hours would now be unable to be eaten in a week.
Zoey shredded several bags of shrimp chips as she padded around the condo, making sure everything for aftercare was in order. Aftercare was all of their responsibility, but it was truly Zoey’s domain. Everything she did had so much tender consideration sunk into it that it gave Rumi cavities.
She was currently building a nest of blankets, stuffed animals, and pillows of all sizes on the couch. Snacks, a cooler, and the best weighted blanket on the market padded the outskirts of the fort.
It was so cozy and so Zoey.
Mira had a similar penchant for in-scene check-ins, knowing if one of her girls was dropping before they did.
Rumi didn’t mind that she was the best at preparations – she actually preferred being the one to set up – but she felt like the talents she brought paled in comparison to her girls’.
It wasn’t like she loved them any less than they loved her or that she wasn’t as good of a play partner, but it was hard to feel equal when her greatest contribution was checking boxes.
Regardless, she had a job to do.
She swiped a check mark into the box for First Aid Kit. She frowned as she looked down at how disproportionate it was to the others. A quick swipe of her pen fixed that, but there was a noticeable fault line between the old ink and the new.
Red ink flowed out from Rumi’s pen as she thickened the lines of the mark, retracing her old ones so it didn’t have to feel different.
“You’re correcting a check mark,” Mira deadpanned. Rumi startled, cursing to herself at Mira’s uncanny ability to be the only creature that could sneak up on her. “On a piece of paper that literally only you will see.”
Rumi’s shoulders dropped. “It’s just. You know.”
“No, I don’t know,” Mira crossed her arms as she walked over to Rumi, bumping her hip with her own. “I know that you’re spiraling, but I need you to use your words here, princess.”
Rumi’s head fell into Mira’s arm. The taller girl moved and swept Rumi up into an embrace, the pop princess sighing and closing her eyes as Mira’s scent enveloped her. “I’m nervous, is all.”
Mira drummed on Rumi’s exposed skin with the hand perched on her bicep. “Me too. And Zoey. Have you seen how many stuffies she keeps adding to that pile?”
“I don’t know where she keeps all of those, Mir. Did she convince the Honmoon to hold on to some of them for her?” Rumi buried her face deep into the cotton of Mira’s shirt. She tried talking, but the words were swallowed by the fabric.
Fingers closed around the back of her neck and squeezed. Rumi squeaked as Mira pulled her back. “Can you try that one again, princess?”
“Ugh, can’t you just read my mind by now like you do with Zoey?” Rumi whined. “I was saying, I just don’t want to mess today up.”
“Rumi,” Mira began, her tone suggesting that she was in that weird Mira mood where she was just as amused as she was pissed off. “Honestly. How great would it be if this could be so embarrassing that we’d completely forget that this is the anniversary of the Idol Awards? One trauma completely overwritten by another– Ow!”
Mira reeled back, the fabric of her shirt still caught in Rumi’s teeth. Her molars clacked together when Mira gave one last tug and freed herself. “You are such a brat!”
“Hypocrite,” Rumi sniped as she curled a hand over her heart. “I think you’ve got a point, though… Of course, part of me is worried about one of us getting hurt, but I don’t think the Honmoon would let that happen to us.”
“There’s no chance in Gwi-ma’s realm it would,” Mira agreed. “Are we ready?”
Rumi glanced back down to the clipboard she had forgotten she was holding on to. “Looks like it. Do we want to call our troublemaker?”
“Present,” Mira smirked. “But I’ll go and get Zoey.”