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Mira never got to have a family. Her home was cold, not made for her. They assumed she would be a drain on her family because she was angry, and blunt, and herself. Her mothers and fathers looked down on her without even trying. Standing away. Letting her be distant.
They were wrong, of course.
She can’t say it was her plan. She just thought it would be a job that gave her the chance to be liked for all the things that made her out of place in a picture perfect family. Or a job, at all. A way to stand on her own two feet.
Then she met them.
To have a sister like Rumi is a bond she can’t begin to describe. They knew, from the moment they met. Rumi had grinned at her and Mira had felt a hope she didn’t know she was ever allowed.
“Your dancing is amazing!” Rumi had said, a smile on her face, curious and kind. “You move like… it’s so pretty, and like a—”
“Fighter?” Mira had asked. “You too. Who taught you?”
“Oh,” Rumi had said. “Celine taught me everything. She wanted me to be perfect, and to build a group with people who were even more so.”
A flash of sadness had crossed Rumi’s face, but Mira didn’t know to catch it yet. She would learn, how to read people, how to balance all her wrongness with understanding, skill… care.
She had a sense though.
“It must have been hard,” Mira had said. “Growing up as the daughter of two famous idols.”
“…Yeah,” Rumi had replied. A hand went to the back of her neck. “Something like that. But now I’m not alone, maybe?”
Not alone.
A sister or brother is just as precious as a wife or a husband. Mira has long wondered if she wants a husband at all - men are attractive but hard to imagine for a future. Her future has always been a sister-wife and a wife and…
It’s not that she’s a single, only women.
She just can’t imagine a man because man was her fathers and their empty relationships with her brothers who stood perfect and her mothers who were frozen like statues and none of them ever looked at her like anything but a mistake.
So she can’t imagine a man who understands.
The Sunlight Sisters were named as such because the leader was a moon who shone like stars and the others were the brightest suns in the world. There were whispers. A secret romance. All three. A secret husband. He left them, clearly, after the death of Ryu Miyeong.
No one said it loudly. No one knew of any of it.
But does a friend take in her potential lover’s orphaned daughter?
(Rumi called Celine mother once and Celine cried that night, clutching a flickering weapon, too weak to use.
She didn’t ask again, just trained harder.)
Zoe was light. Not a gentle thing. Light is fire, energy. Lightning in a bottle. The sun. She was warmth and light to them and danger, danger in auditions and training and—
She’s panting, head in Mira’s lap after they’ve trained all day. Rumi is still going. Drills, over and over, a poise and a surety from their whole life.
“We need a trip to the bathhouse,” she says suddenly. “They’re so cool, and we can just rest for a bit.”
“I’m busy,” Rumi says, still moving, sword singing through the air in a literal sense.
Zoe frowns.
“Alright then,” she says. “Can we go, or will Celine be mad?”
Rumi stops, turns to them and smiles.
“You two go ahead,” she says. “At worst, I’ll cover for you.”
“Ohhhhkay,” Zoey says. “Come to my room tonight though, I really wanna get to know you two— if you like? If you’re interested— I—”
“Alright, Zoey,” Rumi says. “I’ll bring snacks. You two have fun.”
“We will,” Mira says.
She learns so many thing about her girls that day. She learns where Zoey had moles. She learns Rumi has trained all her life because she loves to train and fight and sing, and Zoey ran away here to escape useless parents and cruel peers. She’s just turned 18. Mira accidentally gets her candy bar stuck in her ceiling from her grip on it after hearing that.
She learns they all love food and seeing other people happy and that Rumi makes a good pillow.
She learns they all maybe want a family.
Jinu doesn’t have a family. He used to dream of it. A husband, a wife, a sister like his own. He often wondered if it would be his sister, or like her. Bright. Energetic. Clingy. A sharp intelligence.
The day he sold them away, she asked what he did.
After, when he was older, he saw her singing. Her voice rang clear, and it burned him. He had only ever left the heaven that was made hell by his selfishness once, and that is when it destroyed him. When he gave in.
He lay on the ground of under and stared and ignored whispers because they did not allow him any strength until they ceased.
He was sent to the human world and he ate.
He stopped dreaming of a sister moon. Of anything but his own failures. He deserved the curse.
What of his victims?
He never considered. All he heard were whispers. Screams. Guilt.
Monster.
Gwi-Ma.
His own voice.
Zoey grew up with just a mom and a dad. The other two died - her biological mother in childbirth. It was her mother’s best friend and her mother’s wife that raised her after her father also died soon after in an accident.
Then they separated.
She wasn’t even theirs.
It’s almost no wonder they didn’t treat her well. She is all the more in awe of Celine for, for all that she is hard on them all and hardest on Rumi, still shows a kindness to Rumi. She’s never gotten that grace.
She has wanted to ask. If the sunlight sisters rumors were true. It almost falls out of her lips over and over.
She keeps it in. More grief.
She does plop herself in Rumi’s lap and feel her jerk.
“Zoey!!!”
“Sorry!” Zoey says. “Should I move?”
“No!” Rumi says. “No, I… I’m just not used to being touched.”
“Oh,” Zoey says, and hugs her. Rumi’s constant tension melts, just a fraction. Zoey’s hand moved too high, and she flinches.
Zoey thinks Rumi has had a better life than her, but she isn’t sure.
Zoey kisses Mira and the world feels right. She writes nothing but love songs for a month and Rumi looks at them and grins.
“I’m happy for you two,” she says. “You’ve waited for family for so long.”
“You’re our family, too,” Zoey says. “And Bobby.”
“I… am?” Rumi asks.
“Always,” Zoey says. “Can I kiss you, too?”
Rumi… shakes her head.
“Not yet,” she says. “Let’s wait until we make the Honmoon gold.”
“…Oh,” Zoey says. “Okay.”
Rumi keeps secrets.
Jinu is Gwi-Ma’s favorite toy. It hurts. It burns. It—
Gwi-Ma doesn’t kill him. Doesn’t hollow him pout physically. Whispers in his mind and a fire inside him and he stumbles away. Everyone knows of Jinu. A singer with a mouth and a power and a plan. Most of them work. He is Jinu, Gwi-Ma’s entertainment.
Gwi-Ma is always surrounded, so Jinu…
He stumbles away, even up. He needs a new plan.
Most demons don’t bother to know the human world. Jinu isn’t usually an exception. Today he finds a girl with a grin and a music and dance and humming, wrapped up in a big coat. She turns to him.
He knows she’s a hunter. She seems to not know he’s a demon.
“Who are you?” Jinu asks dumbly, and the girl smiles.
“You really don’t seem to know,” she says. She looks like his sister when she was happy. Or when she performed, that once.
“I don’t,” Jinu says. He steps, and he winces. Should he try to kill her right here? He’s too weak, it might not do him any favors.
The girl catches him.
“Are you okay?” She asks, a ferocity in her tone. “I’ll get them!”
“Ah… no,” Jinu says. Her goal is to defeat his tormentor, but it will trap him with Gwi-Ma, forever.
“Okay,” the girl says. “Sure you don’t need anything?”
“Keep singing?” Jinu asks, leaning against a wall. “It was beautiful.”
She nods. She plays.
Jinu tries not to think about his sister.
And so it passes.
The story you know.
Rumi doesn’t touch them after they win. She stumbles home to her room and curls in on herself. It’s not fair. She chose them, in the end. They chose her. They’re safe. Jinu isn’t—
A distant part of her thinks Mira would have never accepted Jinu as their partner. Another reminds her that her demonic side meant she could never have been Zoey’s girlfriend, Mira’s sister. A third reminds her neither is true - Jinu is dead, and they know.
Another huge part sees blade pointed at her, and she covers her mouth to keep from letting out a keening wail.
The truth is, they were called the Sunlight Sisters because they were supposed to be the ones who turned the Honmoon Gold. The truth is, most generations of hunters become wives and sisters and find a man they care for deeply once they retire.
The truth is, after the third disappeared, Celine already was never the same. Then her mother had a baby. Then there was a demon, and—
And now Rumi is here. Still not trusting her girls, not completely. Rumi is here, Jinu’s soul in her blade.
She wants to reach out.
She—
“I think I saw Jinu before,” Zoey whispers, curled up in Mira’s lap. Mira feels safer when she can have them close, protected. They both feel guilty about what they did.
“You did?” Mira asks.
“It didn’t make sense,” Zoey says. “With what we knew about demons. He was hurt, sad. He told me I looked like his sister. Said she was like me.”
“His sister was a hunter?”
“Maybe,” Zoey says. “Or maybe a singer. Who knows.” She tightens her grip in Mira’s sweatshirt. “Why did we almost attack Rumi? Why didn’t we listen? If demons have no feelings…”
“We did what we were taught,” Mira says, which is a big admission of guilt. “And she didn’t talk to us.”
Rumi says Celine told her to hide it, that they wouldn’t understand, and there are keening sobs, and they hold her, and she finally lets them, and Zoey kisses her over and over until she can’t breath. And then there is a laugh, and Jinu appears made of light.
And so it end and begins.
“I don’t trust you,” Mira says. “You hurt her.”
“So did you,” Jinu says. “My plan wouldn’t have worked if you didn’t see demons as monsters.”
“You are a monster!” Mira exclaims. Jinu hmms.
“I am,” he says.
It’s the admission that trips Mira up.
“You’re the most important people in Rumi’s life,” Jinu says. “I can be replaced. I know that. I’ve always been replaceable.”
“Don’t go asking for sympathy from me.”
“It’s just the truth,” Jinu says. “I saved her from you as often as I betrayed her. As often as you hurt her.”
“I thought I was doing the right thing!” Mira exclaims, but she knows it isn’t enough. All her desires to break free just put her under the Hunters’ system, and it almost destroyed her girls.
“And isn’t that the fun part?” Jinu asks. “But life isn’t fair.”
Mira growls, and pins him.
Neither are quite sure why she kisses him. Anger. To shut him up.
To make it work.
For Rumi.
“What’s with that dumb expression?” Mira asks.
“I’ve never been kissed by a girl before,” Jinu says. Mira gets off him, rolling her eyes.
“You’re ridiculous.”
Rumi is in bed surrounded by her girlfriend and her sister and wherever Jinu fits.
She never expected this much love.
She doesn’t doubt it, anymore.