for the bio siblings au: celine meeting mutt and immediately noticing how much she looks like rumi's dad?
Ohhhh that would be. Not good! Seeing as this is an au where Rumi was conceived during rape.
Might be a little like this:
Rumi knocks the glowing things out of Celine's hands before they can fully take shape. “Stop it!” she snaps at Celine, who is Rumi’s guardian, who is a Hunter, who looks so angry, the angriest the mutt has ever seen.
Celine is turning to her, oh no, turning the full brunt of her fury on Rumi—
And the anger dissolves into something else, something horrible, like terror, like abject pain.
Zoey’s hands squeeze the mutt’s shoulders; she hadn’t noticed them touching her at all.
Mira huffs. She’s planted herself directly in front of the mutt. “Let's try that again, huh? Kid, this is Celine, who is usually cooler than this. Celine, say ‘hi, kid who can barely squeeze a lemon without feeling bad about it’.”
Celine abruptly schools her expression into perfect neutrality. She’s looking directly at the mutt from behind Mira’s shoulder. Something in her intent focus is almost reminiscent of Rumi. Truly, this is the gaze of a hunter.
Rumi’s stance has softened. She doesn’t touch Celine, but she leans into her space, almost as if she’d like to. “I told you, remember?” she says, voice low. “She’s like me.”
“Yes, I hadn’t expected…” Celine does not finish the sentence. Instead, she shakes her head slightly and inclines it to the mutt in an almost-bow. “Hello, it’s good to meet you.”
The mutt swallows, the urge to run fighting with the urge to placate the Hunter fighting with the urge to duck herself closer behind Mira and all resulting in her doing nothing but shaking like the miserable, useless creature she is.
Zoey’s hands squeeze her shoulders again, comfortingly, pulling her back to her body.
Celine bends down to pick up her bag, finally looking away.
“Do you want to go back into the kitchen?” Zoey asks quietly. “You can stay in there as long as you want.”
The mutt shakes her head. If she went, she would never come back.
“You’re sure? I can go with you if that helps,” she adds.
But the mutt—the mutt looks over at Rumi, and Celine, and their intense gazes. She’s like me. Her voice shakes, but she still manages to force herself to speak. “I want to be brave.”
This, of course, makes Celine grimace.
“You’re doing great,” Zoey says, and she lets go of the mutt’s shoulders—the mutt resists the urge to lean after the loss—and slips around to walk beside her.
The silence on the way to the couch is deeply awkward. And when they sit down.
“I am sorry,” the mutt says, remembering.
Everyone looks at her.
“About your tupperware,” she clarifies for Celine. “I should not have stolen it.”
And despite how Rumi and Mira and Zoey had talked about how upset Celine would get over the good tupperware being gone—though only ever when they thought the mutt could not hear, which meant the consequences very much would impact the mutt—Celine does not get angry.
“It’s alright,” she says. She does not sound like she means much it, everything flat and hollow, but she says it. “The girls can get new ones.”
The mutt wishes that she would just be upset. It is easier than kindness, even real-kindness and not false-kindness, though she knows it would make Mira, Zoey, and Rumi sad if she said that. Even so, it can feel like waiting to be hit.
At least if Celine just hit her, she wouldn’t have to wait.
Unfortunately, Celine seems to have a preference for waiting.
Her voice had been so warm and alive, behind the door, when she was speaking to Rumi. And then she had seen the mutt, and became quiet and careful.
The mutt understands. When you’re dealing with an unknown threat, it is smart to wait and observe. But she is in no way a threat to Celine, and she knows how dangerous it is for her to be perceived that way. What she doesn’t know is how to fix it.
Mira catches her eye and wiggles her eyebrows. The mutt does her best to wiggle back.
“Orange slices, anyone?” Mira says in a perfect monotone.
“Yes, please!” Rumi and Zoey say almost in tandem, and then smile warmly at each other.
The mutt collects all these looks for morale and looks at Celine. “You—you have raised Rumi well,” she stumbles. “She’s—great.”
Rumi smothers a laugh with an orange slice. But Celine frowns.
“Thank you,” she says slowly. “She is.”
Rumi chokes the orange down and fans herself. “Oh, go on.”
Celine eyes her sidelong. “With an ego to match, I’m sure.”
“I do nothing by half measures,” Rumi agrees.
“Mm,” says Celine, and is silent again.
Mira turns to Celine. “How about you ask her a question?” she says bluntly.
Celine obligingly turns to look at the mutt, and the mutt does her very best to meet her eyes. She manages only a glance. There’s something unfocused in Celine’s gaze. “How are you finding your room?”
“Good,” the mutt forces herself to say. “It’s—it’s very good.”
“Hm,” says Celine.
The mutt wants to wipe her sweaty palms on her nice new linen pants, but she resists.
“She’s been into linear algebra lately,” Mira says pointedly. “She thinks eigen decomposition is elegant.”
“I see,” says Celine.
The mutt has something stuck in her throat, she’s pretty sure, although she hasn’t touched the orange slices.
Rumi slaps her thighs. “Okay! Celine, I have a sponsorship proposal I wanted to run by you. Could you join me in the office for a moment?”
It takes everything Rumi has in her not to immediately snap at Celine and ask her what the hell she’s thinking once the door is shut behind them.
She takes a deep breath through her nose, grabbing her temper tight. “I don’t know what your issue is, but you better work it out before we get back in there.”
Celine doesn’t say anything.
Rumi doesn’t know what she expected, but it wasn’t that.
She turns around.
Celine is still standing at the door.
Rumi presses a hand against her temple, tired. “Look, I—I know I’ve done a lot of things that weren’t necessarily what you’ve wanted, but—“
“What?”
“She’s just a kid,” she finishes, nonetheless. “Whatever it is, don’t take it out on her.”
Celine looks—stricken, for some reason, at this remark. “Rumi-ya, I—I didn’t mean—I’m sorry, I never meant—I promised—“
“To protect all that was left of my mother, I know.” Rumi’s only heard it a million times. “Is that all you care about?”
“No, I—“ Celine closes her eyes and leans back against the door. “Before that. Miyeong made me promise her that I would never hold the demon against you.”
And Rumi’s breath stops. Her anger falters.
The demon means her father, however rarely Celine has spoken of him. Rarely enough that Rumi’s never heard this before.
“And I know she isn’t guilty of…” Celine pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes. “She looks so much like him.“
“Guilty?” Rumi echoes, the lump in her throat a violent and living thing.
(She doesn’t remember when she first came to the quiet, sickening conclusion that her father had raped her mother. She does remember the moment—the exact moment, watching Jinu look at that little girl with her hand drawn card—when she’d let herself consider anything else.)
Celine opens her eyes. “I never once looked at you and saw anything other than someone your mother loved. I know she isn’t your father. I’ll get over it, I promise. I just need a minute.”
(The consideration turns to ash.)
“Oh,” Rumi says.
“I’m messing this up,” says the mutt, worrying at her cuticle with a thumb. “What should I do?”
“No, you’re not,” Mira grumbles, visibly annoyed. “Celine is.”
“You were cute as a button!” Zoey agrees, and takes her hand so that now the cuticle-worrying is a much greater logistical challenge.
“Are buttons very good at making a good first impression?”
Zoey giggles. “Well… Celine is notoriously hard to impress.”
“It’s not your fault,” Mira says firmly.
The mutt frowns. None of that sounds right. “You don’t need to lie,” she says.
Mira looks offended. “I don’t lie.”
“She’s a Hunter,” says the mutt. “I’m a demon.”
“Can I make it any more obvious?” says Zoey. “No, Mira’s right, though. Even if that was her problem, no way that’s your fault. She knows better by now.”
“I think she’s… scared of me,” says the mutt.
They both laugh.
The mutt slips her hand away and tucks it in her lap.
“Nooo, sweetie, I’m sorry,” Zoey scrambles. “It’s just, we know Celine. She doesn’t get scared like that.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s a block of granite brought to life,” says Mira.
The mutt stares at her lap. She trusts their judgement, so much more than her own. But she knows what fear looks like.
On the streets, in a situation like this, the best strategy was to run. But, maybe here there could be a better option. She had rarely had the opportunity to clarify her intentions. Well, except—except for the woman who had taken the containers. And now she’s gotten to apologize for that too.
For all the good that did. In order to explain herself, she needs to be able to explain stuff.
But maybe she can prove it.
Zoey says, “That would explain her abs.”
Mira snickers.
The mutt considers her plan. Her thumb starts to drift towards her cuticle again.
“We should do your nails sometime,” Mira says, passing her an orange segment, not casually at all.
Unfortunately, they took the peels off earlier, so all the fiddling that she could do with the orange would be messy. She takes it anyway.
“Ooh, yes!” Zoey agrees. She holds her hands out in front of her, examining her nails. “Since we’re on hiatus right now, glam won’t even yell at us for at-home mani-pedis; we could have a chill hangout here or we could make a whole thing of it.”
The mutt knows this is an attempt to distract her from thinking about Celine. She hides her smile behind the orange segment. Lucky that she came up with an idea already.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Mira adds. She gestures between herself and Zoey. “We might be beholden to makeup culture and shit, but you shouldn’t be.”
The mutt considers this, for a moment. Zoey had helped her clean and trim her nails once, on the same day she had taught her how to wash her hands properly (all while rambling about how being several centuries old did not mean that a demon couldn’t keep up with advances in hygiene).
It was nice, having someone hold her hands so gently.
“Maybe,” she says. She would need to know more about what ‘a whole thing of it’ means first.
Before she can explain that, she hears footsteps down the hall, and goes still. Now it is time for her to put her plan into action.
Rumi comes in first, and she looks at the mutt, and she is… devastated. It is such an expression that the mutt looks down at herself, half-expecting to see blood spreading across her warm new shirt.
But there is nothing. And now her timing is off.
It is only after Celine comes in to the room, and not before she enters, that the mutt manages to sink to the floor, kneeling properly.
“What the fuck,” Rumi breathes out, looking wild eyed. “Zoey?”
The mutt ignores them. She’s already been distracted enough. She needs to do this correctly.
She looks only at Celine. “You can hit me, if you want,” she tells her, quiet and clear. “Or cut me with your—those big knives. I’m not gonna bite you, or, or anything.”
“No, no no no no—” Rumi chokes out, and starts to step in front of the mutt, and the mutt wants to wave her away, wants to tell her that if Celine could only cut her a little and feel reassured it would be so worth it—
But—rather than summon her knives, or look reassured, Celine drops to her knees in the mutt’s mirror image, and lets out a long, broken keen that reverberates jarringly through the Honmoon so far off-tune it hurts. She puts her face in her hands. The Honmoon pounds through the mutt’s head to the rhythm of her sobs.
She’d braced for pain. But this is worse.
Rumi stutters between them in two aborted movements. Then she bends down to press a hard kiss to the top of the mutt’s head and whirls around to wrap herself around Celine.
Celine doesn’t hug her back; the tips of her fingers are white where they clutch at her head. She’s quieter now, but her body is still shaking with her sobs, and the Honmoon is still knocking through the mutt like a nauseating drum.
She thought she’d understood. Celine had clearly wanted to hurt her when she’d first seen her. Had been clearly afraid and unsettled after that. She’d thought—if she made the offer in good faith, to show she is harmless, that she means no harm—
But Celine is hurting. Celine is hurt, maybe, in a way the mutt doesn’t in fact understand.
“Kid,” Mira is saying. “Kid, no—no one gets to—no.”
And the mutt does not know when she came close, but she does know that she cannot move, not when Rumi is holding Celine and Celine is crying and the Honmoon is shaking and—
Rumi buries her face in Celine’s hair, her voice low and hurried. “I’m okay, we’re okay, nothing’s going to happen, it’s not you, we re okay, it’s not you, nothing’s going to happen, I swear.”
“Rumi?” Zoey says, her voice high and thin as she breaks the stream of Rumi’s words. “Rumi, what do you mean?”
Rumi doesn’t move, just keeps holding Celine, and they are both shaking now, the mutt thinks.
“I can’t,” Celine whispers. The Honmoon screams an echo.
The mutt winces as it hits her, rattling her ribs, and Celine judders towards her, her tear-streaked face such a ragged mess that the mutt almost wants to flinch back at the sight of it.
But she does not, and Celine grabs her face with ungentle hands and rapidly pats her way down the mutt’s shoulders in search of injury before collapsing again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I tried to keep my promises, I did, I swear.”
The mutt sits, stiff and confused, as this woman of stone crumbles into her. She does not know what to do, and it is terrifying.
But Rumi follows, her voice breaking, the Honmoon stinging like tears on the mutt’s cheeks. “You did.”
Mira’s hands are on the mutt’s shoulders—still, again, she doesn’t know, but they are rigid and stiff and the mutt feels like she is disappearing between them, an unthing.
And Rumi looks at Mira and Mira looks at Rumi and Celine holds tight and the mutt says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I only wanted, I wanted to say that I am not going to bite.”
But no one hears. Mira says, “Rumi, what did you do?”
And Rumi says, “I’m okay.”
And the Honmoon pounds.
Mira’s hands are heavy, and Celine is heavier, and the Honmoon squeezes, squeezes her, until she is nothing, nothing, until she is gone—
And pops back into existence, crouched on all fours, on the other side of the room.
“Holy shit,” Zoey blurts out. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
Neither did the mutt. If she had, it might’ve made so many things so much easier, not least of them one of her dad’s very favorite experiments.
But now she has everyone’s attention. This is nearly always bad. And things are quite bad already.
The mutt does what she used to do in such a situation: make herself small, bow down, and wait for the consequences.
She can hear a shuffle, and then Mira’s soft voice: “No, give her space.”
Rumi’s anxiety is almost audible, a tightly wound thread. The mutt has no room for it in her head. She presses her forehead to the cool floor and tries to breathe through clenched teeth.
“It’s okay. We’re okay.”
“I really need you to stop saying that for a second.”
The Honmoon is no longer on her, suffocating her; she’d left it behind, as confused as the rest of them, all the way across the room. Still, it’s so hard to breathe properly. She tries, she tries.
More shuffling. A stagger. A horrible step in her direction. If anyone touches her, she might bite after all.
But no one does.
“Please forgive my… outburst.” Celine’s voice is gravelly and rough, though it no longer trembles. “Are you hurt?”
The mutt shakes her head against the floor.
“Good.” Celine is silent for a long moment. The mutt can hear her breath; it’s loud, deliberate. Persuasive. “I did not require or expect an apology from you. I regret making you feel that I did.”
That’s no good. That’s worse. Without apologies, there is truly nothing the mutt has to offer.
“If I did, I would never—” Another pause. “I—have been trying not to deal in unnecessary violence.”
The mutt thinks of glowing twin blades, taking shape from the Honmoon; of the intent for violence gleaming in narrowed eyes. She knows that look well.
Celine seems to follow her train of thought. “It’s a work in progress,” she says. “Clearly.”
The mutt swallows. It scrapes. “You think I’m dangerous,” she manages.
“No. I—” Celine makes an impatient sound. “My sense of danger could use… calibration.”
“I won’t hurt you,” the mutt tells her quietly. “I do not hurt people.”
“All right,” says Celine. “I believe you.”
The mutt abruptly wants to cry.
“Would you believe me when I say that I will not hurt you?” Celine asks her.
The mutt swallows, again, twice. The fear is still there, a hard persistent lump. She understands about needing calibration. She wants to try. “...Okay.”
“Mm.” Celine takes in a long noisy breath. The sound is a strange relief. “I find eigen decomposition rather elegant, as well.”
The mutt wiggles backwards, and finds she’s already at a wall. She clings to it, trying to convince herself off the floor. “I like—I like vectors.”
And in eigen decomposition, they didn’t change. Well, they did, but not in speed or direction. Impossible consistencies hidden in the wonder of mathematical chaos.
(Her dad taught her numbers, and she had to keep doing math ever since to budget her (mostly stolen) scraps of won, necessary to obtain what she couldn’t just steal directly—usually things like access to showers.
She’s been working on reading, too, but math is so much easier and so much more fun.
Numbers, in the end, always made sense.)
Celine hums, and the mutt manages to grab tight onto the baseboard, and push herself upward.
“Of course you agree,” Mira mutters, affectionately. She is holding Rumi, tightly, like she had to stop her from coming over, and Zoey is holding Rumi like one of them might die if she let go. Celine is standing, looking ready to fall over, between them.
The mutt wants to apologize. She had made such a mess of things, getting on her knees this way. But Celine does not want that.
Zoey laughs. The sound is forced. “Orange slices, anyone?”
“Maybe some water?” Rumi says, softly. Mira does not say it at the same time.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.” Zoey scampers off to go get water.
The mutt manages to sit up the rest of the way, and then she curls into a ball against the wall, her arms tight around her knees. She can’t tell if she wants a hug now or if she would still bite someone for trying.
Celine does something with her face when their eyes meet. It looks like a grimace, maybe?
The mutt wonders if Rumi and Mira and Zoey will wait until she, too, is out of the room before they start talking about whatever it is that Rumi ‘did’. Maybe the mutt could tell her about that, since she has better hearing than a human does.
(She should probably, at some point, explain about that. But a sneak-thief needs what skills it can keep up its sleeves, no?)
(Teleportation. Why now?)
Zoey returns, her hands full of glasses. “I brought water! With ice, in case anybody wants to hold some and have a grounding moment. Or something like that. Though you can just have cold water if you want.”
“Grounding moment?” the mutt echoes, confused.
The mutt watches the ice slowly melt in the heat of her hands, sliding around in the moisture. It’s cold, but—she doesn’t mind it.
It’s funny. Everything seems so stupid now. The instinct to kneel, to bow and scrape and beg, it seems so… removed. Why did she think it made sense, here? The contained chill of an ice cube, in contrast to the snug warmth of all the rest of her; of her hands, hot enough to melt it. Inarguably out of place.
She’d fallen in a pond, when she was young. It had been freezing, and she’d never learned how to swim. Her dad had fished her out, but not before she’d gone still and quiet, the cold an inseparable part of her. Maybe she’d accepted it, back then, taken it in and kept it with her. And she hadn’t even noticed that at some point, she’d let it go.
But she had. She must have. Holding it now in her hands, it’s clear. It isn’t inside her anymore.
The melted ice is dripping on the knees of her pants. She can feel eyes on her. She retreats to the kitchen to dump her handful of icy water in the sink.
She stares at her hands some more, raw and pink, stinging as the warmth comes back. That’s right. She remembers that too. That it hurts to warm up again.
Back in the living room, Celine and Rumi are talking quietly about house plants. Mira is listening, her head on Rumi’s shoulder. Zoey is on the floor, typing dexterously on her phone.
The mutt walks over carefully.
No one looks at her.
She sits on the floor next to Zoey. Scoots closer, closer, until their shoulders are touching. Without interrupting her typing, Zoey lifts up one arm, creating the perfect space for the mutt to burrow into. So the mutt does.
And Zoey keeps typing, and nobody looks at her, and the mutt is warm.
Zoey’s hand comes up to scratch over the mutt’s scalp, gentle and pleasant in the fuzz of the fresh shave (as they had all decided that her hair before could not be saved), and she all but melts.
It is comfortable here. Safe.
“Lunch?” Mira asks.
And the mutt doesn’t feel hungry, but Zoey and Celine say yes, and Rumi gets up to help, and so that is that.
She watches through half-open eyes as the tension returns to Celine’s body, tracking Rumi out of the room. Rumi did something, before. Before the mutt met her. Something scary. Something Mira and Zoey did not know about.
Sometimes they learn things like that with the mutt. Like that first day, when the mutt said What do you want to know? and Zoey and Rumi thought she was joking and disrespectful and she got scared because. Of what happened when she was disrespectful, before.
And even though she knew they would not hurt her, she was still scared.
So it makes sense, that even though Rumi is just going to get lunch, Celine is scared.
And it is not about the mutt at all.
“The kid helped with lunch,” Zoey says, scrubbing the hand over her head a little faster now, playful, intent on waking her. “She’s kind of become our favorite sous chef.”
“Really?” Celine asks, and she is looking at her, and not Zoey.
The mutt shrugs, and tucks herself a little smaller. She likes having so much food, and seeing that it is there. And Rumi and Mira and sometimes Zoey like teaching her about it. “Mostly I just put things in the pot when Mira said.”
“Given how insane Rumi always drove her whenever I left the two of them alone in the kitchen, I’m sure she appreciates having such a good listener,” Celine says, and her smile is in her voice, gentle and warm.
“God, I do,” Mira agrees, walking back in with bowls of banchan on a tray.
Rumi, trailing after, the big pot of the slow cooker in her hands, laughs. “All recipes require improvisation to become great!”
