DreamYolk

zoey having exclusively fair-weather friends. when they're having fun, it's fun, and she recalls the memories for days . but when days are too long and school hallways are too narrow, she cannot confide in any of them.

zoey being part of trios, except she always feels like a placeholder, like a punchline to a sour joke. and so, since third wheeling is anything but nice, she ends up in bigger friend groups, hoping that would help her fit in better.

instead, the issues repeat, except they're even more obvious. she is ignored and talked-over, included solely because no one wants to be the one who directly tells her to leave them alone.

zoey's mom telling her to stop wearing earbuds so much—you'll damage your hearing—and she thinks to herself, there is nothing good to hear around me anyway. zoey's dad telling her to go out sometime, to stop draining nights by writing until the sunrise—your eyes will shrivel up from staring at the paper—and she thinks to herself, the outside world has nothing nice to offer.

and her parents think she's fine, you know? their girl is this bubbly and extroverted person, jumpy and jittery. when they visit uncles and aunts in other states, she plays with her cousins. during dinners, she still chatters and jokes. sure, her eyebags are more prominent, but she's a teen!

zoey dreams about an escape. there's a period—mid-divorce, when talks of custody cloud any other topic—when she believes living in korea would offer her a new, fresh start. but then she thinks how teens there are likely no different from teens here, and she will always stick out like a sore thumb.

she is destined to be alone. too boring/annoying/weird for her peers, and to her parents a bullet point in the lawyer's office more than a daughter.

The refer to being the slayer as something that comes with a "heritage". Being the Slayer is a "birthright", slayers have "heirs" in the slayer line. The Bringers speak of destroying "the legacy of the slayer" by killing Potentials in seven season.

But they don't know about that heritage. They don't know about Sineya and what she went through, they aren't taught about their predecessors or about the shadow demons who's "essence" they gain their powers from. They don't know that the Shadow Men preceded the Council. IDEK how I feel about the Guardians thing but regardless of its validity within the lore, Buffy finds these things out via Plot Stuff and the ramifications and IMPLICATIONS of ALL OF IT is equally unexplored.

right around the first time rumi’s patterns spread, when she was 7 or 8, she stopped asking celine to do it. despite how long of a task it had become, celine was genuinely disappointed the first night she wasnt asked.

decades later, rumi and her wives and their 3 year old daughters come to visit jeju for a few days. like their mama, the triplets have started to amass a collection of their own plushies. celine also cant help but notice that a few of rumi’s old teddy bears have made their way into her daughters’ possession, passed down to them. they have names for each and every one of their plushies, some of them more unique than others (hani has a stuffed frog named sir cornellius wobblytoe hoppington xiv, while jihae has a stuffed cat named meowmeow. aeri’s two favorite plushies are a stuffed turtle named shelldon jr, who is the son of zoey’s stuffed turtle, shelldon sr, and a stuffed alligator named bear), but they have kept the same names that rumi had for her teddy bears.

one night, celine walks to the bedroom her granddaughters are staying so she can wish them goodnight, and she sees rumi in there.

the sight of what she’s doing sends her mind back decades in time. tears form in her eyes.

rumi is kissing her daughters’ plushies, and wishing each and every one of them goodnight. the three of them watch her with expressions that celine distinctly remembers seeing on rumi herself while she watched celine kiss her teddy bears. they even hand the next one to be kissed off the same way she used to.

they seem to have a bit of order to it. each girl gets a turn handing off a plushie to rumi, who kisses the toy and wishes it goodnight, then hands it off to mira, who does the same and then hands it to zoey, who does the same, before she hands it back to whoever’s plushie it is. each girl waited patiently for their turn, so there was no fighting about who got to go next.