Work Text:
Beat your breasts, young maidens.
And tear your garments
in grief.
O, weep for Adonis!
But come, dear companions,
For day is near.
- Sappho, Fragment 140(a)
I.
So they’ve survived: the three of them hunters, fighters, lovers. They can still slay, demons and otherwise, but they’re tired. Their voices are still strong, but they’re torn. Zoey thinks they deserve vocal rest. Outside the side window, the city skyline sparkles, a beacon in the night.
“When we get to the couch,” she says, “I don’t want to get up for a month.”
She listens for noises of assent, but in the back of Bobby’s car, the two other girls instead emit soft sounds of sleep. To her left, Mira snores: loudly, unselfconsciously, like she wants to take up space and is daring you to call her out on it. On her right, Rumi’s head lolls, bends back and forward, the weight of her heavy long braid pulling her all over the place.
Zoey sighs. She conforms herself to being unlistened to. It’s fine. It’s only what’s happened all her life, isn’t it? Being ignored? The weird kid?
Suddenly, something.
Rumi’s sleepy head falls on her shoulder. At the same time, Mira’s latest snore startles her, and she yelps huh! before curling up next to Zoey, grasping for her hand.
Zoey smiles. She should have known. As long as she’s between these two, she’ll always be accepted.
She holds Mira’s hand with her left hand the whole way home, grabbing and not letting go; she cradles Rumi’s head, tracing patterns on her soft purple hair, undoing all her hard braiding work, with her right hand. She has two hands, right? This is what they’re for.
Bobby parks on his spot in the lot at Huntrix Tower. “Wake up, sleepyheads,” he says as he turns off the car, and Zoey pretends she’s been asleep this whole time too, just like the others. Like she didn’t see the Seoul skyline, which always amazes her, even after all this time. To think there’s been a place for her here, with her closest friends, after all this time.
Mira and Rumi get out of their respective sides. Mira stretches; Rumi yawns. Zoey suppresses a contagious yawn of her own. She wonders why they are so contagious, if it’s science or an invisible string connecting the three of them, and swears to herself in the morning she’ll look it up.
The three of them are nearly silent as they walk in. The Honmoon is sealed, yes (or is it?), but that doesn’t mean the weight of the world isn’t still firmly placed on their shoulders. Plus, she’s discovered so much about the others tonight. Things she never thought possible are real, lush, live, happening all the time all around her.
Zoey brushes her teeth. Skips some steps on her skincare routine—though only some, the least important ones. She’s not a monster.
She lies down in her soft fluffy bed, stomach up, thinking. The stars and lights are just outside her window. There is happiness in the world and there is love and she is safe. Why doesn’t she feel it, then?
A creaking sound wakes her out of her near-stupor. It’s her door, unlocked. She’s almost asleep when someone walks in.
“Zoey,” she whispers. Zoey knows it’s Rumi by voice alone, if the tentative, tiptoed steps hadn’t given her away. “Can I sleep here tonight?”
“Mm-hmm,” Zoey mumbles. So Rumi gets in, gets comfortable. Drapes her arm over Zoey’s stomach. Zoey feels, finally, safe. At least for the night.
When she’s nearly asleep again, there’s another creak at the door.
Mira doesn’t ask. Mira just takes what she wants. Perhaps she’s too scared to ask, or perhaps the world belongs to her anyway. She curls up on Zoey’s left, nestles her nose into Zoey’s neck.
“Don’t say anything,” Mira says. So Zoey doesn’t. Instead, she lies awake, wondering what to do with the feelings swirling in her stomach, and, if she’s honest, in her heart.
II.
Mira wakes up the next morning leaning into Zoey’s side. Breathing in the scent of her neck. It’s nice, like flowers, like the lavender body wash she uses to bathe.
She doesn’t speak about it. None of them do. Rumi was the first to wake up, and she’s already cooking them breakfast in the kitchen. She smiles when she sees Mira come in, flipping a buttermilk pancake. Mira notices the pile of blueberries in a bowl next to the pan: Rumi remembered. Blueberries are her favorite. It’s silly. She’s the one who loves Western-style breakfasts. Not Zoey, who actually grew up in America, or Rumi, but her, who’s only gotten to travel after being a part of HUNTRIX, as an international popstar.
“So,” says Mira, as if she’s starting a conversation.
“So,” says Rumi, as if she’s willing to continue.
Mira has a hard time saying she’s sorry. Her aggression towards the demons—it must have made Rumi feel so lonely, so isolated. But she’s always been so jagged and abrasive. No wonder she’s the least favorite member. (She’s checked her socials. She’s not stupid. She’s hard to connect to, people say. Too edgy. Too mean.) No wonder her family threw her out, sent her to that troubled teen camp.
But that was a long time ago.
She doesn’t really express her gratitude with words, but instead with her hands, her hands that curl around Rumi’s back, and, possessively, wrap themselves around her front. Rumi makes a surprised little sound, but lets her. Leans in to her touch as she watches the pancake mix simmer and harden and brown. The electric kettle whistles. Tea for Zoey, because she can only have caffeine later in the day; buttermilk blueberry pancakes just because they’re Mira’s favorite. Rumi’s so thoughtful, she thinks, so kind, and all that after the way they all treated her. Mira especially.
Rumi’s shorter than her. Her head of soft hair, tied in her signature, leans into Mira’s neck. She does not deserve this love, but she basks in it.
They stay like this until it’s time to distribute the pancakes and wake Zoey.
Zoey grumbles at being woken up. She yawns, sleepy, and Mira watches her, her making her way to the kitchen table with her familiar catlike steps and grumbles, her plopping down heavily on her chair. They all have their own chairs, their own spots, here. Of course they do, Mira thinks. It’s home.
There’s already a mug in front of each chair, thoughtfully placed there by Rumi. Hot coffee for Mira and Rumi: black for Mira, sweetened by sugar and moderated by milk for Rumi. Zoey’s tea is ready too. Mira sits on the couch. She watches Zoey take a sip of her tea, watches her groan.
“I have this tight muscle in my back,” Zoey complains.
“Oh, poor you,” says Rumi, absentminded, but moving closer. She brings the pancakes out, carrying mountains on a pile for all three of them to dig in.
Mira, ever-vigilant and stoic, instead says, “Come here.”
Zoey moves to sit beside her. She lifts her shirt ever so slightly, maybe even expectantly. Mira makes a sound like an admonishment. “Take the whole thing off. What, are you shy around me now?”
They’ve seen each other in bathhouses, completely naked. Mira is not oblivious to the sensual power Zoey’s body has on her. Zoey strips the shirt without complaint. She wears nothing underneath.
“Where is it? Your pain?”
“Right here,” says Zoey, gesturing at nowhere in particular, rotating her left shoulder to the best of her tightened ability.
Mira places her fingers on her back. Delicately at first. Then she presses hard. She listens for Zoey’s hitched breaths, rubs her shoulders slowly until she hears a sigh. By the table, Rumi watches. The pancakes lay there, forgotten. Cooling.
“Let me join you. Please.” Rumi removes her shirt. She, too, is wearing nothing underneath.
Mira is well aware of the sensual power Zoey’s body has on her. But that Rumi’s has the power to bring her joy the same way, that her patterns are hot rather than a turn-off, is a new discovery.
Rumi stands there shyly in front of the two of them. Watching. Being watched. Mira doesn’t stop her ministrations, her mapping of Zoey’s body, digging deep with her thumbs and releasing. Instead, she traces specific markers, she realizes: she’s drawing Rumi’s patterns on Zoey’s skin.
Rumi’s still standing there. She’s waiting. For an invitation, an opening. For something to join in, somewhere to belong to. For forgiveness. For something to believe in.
“Oh, come on, don’t be so self-conscious,” Mira says. “Join us.”
And Mira stops rubbing Zoey’s back for only a second. Just so she can take her shirt off too.
III.
Later that night, Rumi lies in the middle of the two. This time it’s her bed they have all chosen to pile onto like puppies or purring kittens. It’s soft, raised high on its pillars and with a dark sturdy wood frame.
They’re reminiscing, wondering: about the past and the present, about what has come and what there is to come.
“I think of that fight constantly,” says Zoey, breathless, voice far away. “How you destroyed them completely with your glaive. Not one of them survived. There was so much blood.”
She says it like it’s a good thing. So Mira takes it as one. “Funny,” she says. “Because I think of you constantly.”
“Remember how you crawled out of that cave, Zoey,” Rumi says, “like you were so determined to survive you would not accept defeat?”
“I remember,” Zoey says.
“And remember how you swam into that ocean, Mira,” she says, “like you’d never felt fear once in your life?”
“Yeah,” Mira. “But I was afraid the whole time.”
“We all were,” says Rumi. “Well, I was afraid of this. Being known. For every part of me.”
When the other two lean into her, say that she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore, well: this time, she believes it.