Chapter Text
Rumi's pov
Jinu’s face registered surprise at their collision, which made him seem less threatening. He took a prudent step back, a visible effort to make space for her. As if he somehow knew she needed it.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to- Are you okay?” He peered at her with a squint that suggested a mixture of concern and confusion. Rumi pressed her body more firmly into the wall, absorption into concrete would be a preferable fate.
“I’m fine.”
“Really? Because you vowed to me a long time ago I would be dead next time I caught you wearing- those,” he pointed to her rubber duck socks. If Rumi wasn't debating so many things at once she might've sprung off the steps to choke him dead. It was true, she had promised that. She was flooded with embarrassment. But not because of her socks. Rumi didn't have the time to rebound insults, and she certainly didn't have room in her head for conversation.
“Why not take the elevator? It’s a long way down.”
“I don’t like elevators.” The truth emerged before she could suffocate it. The word “like” was much easier to offer than the real reason. Panic, memories, the sense of being boxed in with no egress. Mirrored walls multiplying her shame into infinity.
“I’m heading to the bar.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the bowels of the hotel, “You should join me.”
Her chest constricted, “I don’t drink.” It was truer now than ever, a rule she’d only recently enforced with the absolute clarity of experience. The words came out barbed, and his blink was like a recoil.
He didn’t take it personally. Instead, he nodded, slower this time, and took another small step back.
“Right. Sorry. I forgot. We could just talk then. Or, you know, sit in companionable silence.” He grinned. She stole a glance at his face, searching for the condescension or amusement she’d been primed to expect from men. Instead, she found patience. It made her uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t name. Return to the suite and face Zoey, or accept Jinu’s offer.
“Just talking,” she repeated.
“Just talking,” Jinu echoed, head tilting, “You can even ignore me if you want. I’ve got plenty of experience with that.” He waited, not moving until she did. Rumi uncrossed her arms, smoothed the front of her hoodie, and forced her feet to move. The descent resumed, one step at a time.
“Fine.”
Jinu's face brightened at her acceptance, but he did not let the smile linger or grow. Instead, he offered a little bow and a deliberate, almost silly, sweep of his arm toward the exit, "After you, Your Majesty." The gesture hovered somewhere between mockery and actual respect. For a split second, Rumi felt the urge to laugh, or at least roll her eyes and give him grief. Instead, she passed him with a careful sidestep.
Her hand closed on the cold metal door handle, and she hesitated. One final check over her shoulder to make sure he hadn't moved closer, that he wasn't preparing for some unwanted touch or intimate comment. But Jinu just waited on the landing, hands in the pockets of his slacks. Regarding her with something that looked like patient neutrality. She turned the handle and pushed, feeling the weight of the moment behind her. Everything she was running from (Zoey, the little fort, that excruciating kiss) remained sealed in the stairwell for now.
Rumi matched her pace to Jinu’s, careful not to lead or follow, walking exactly side by side yet always a pace or two apart. He did not try to talk. The silence between them morphed quickly from awkward to companionable, or as close to that as Rumi’s brain would allow.
They reached an elevator landing and, true to her earlier claim, she skirted the elevator entirely, heading for the secondary stairwell. Jinu hesitated before following her. If the detour annoyed him, he gave no sign. They descended in silence, the stairwell here wide and well lit, with treads of pale stone that were cold and slightly damp under her socks. They found themselves in the lobby. Earlier today she hadn't been able to truly take in how glamorous and expansive it was. But it was both glamorous, and enormous.
The bar was a moody dark. The carpet was indigo, almost black, flecked with specks of metallic thread that caught the low light. The walls were paneled with wood. Tiny spotlights illuminated shelves of liquor in rainbow rows. Whiskey, gin, sake, plum wine, vodka in blue glass bottles. A faint blue glow ran along the edge of the counter.
Rumi hovered near the entrance, momentarily overwhelmed by the density of textures and the music.
Jinu claimed a spot three stools down from the only other occupied seat at the counter. Then, with a small, perhaps apologetic smile, he gestured for Rumi to select her own perch. She took the stool a seat away from him, enough space to feel comfortable but not so much as to imply offense. She sat upright, back rigid, hands folded in her lap.
It was only then, in the relative safety of the dim bar, that she realized she still wasn’t wearing shoes. Her favorite ducks staring back as they always had. She tucked her feet onto the lowest rung of the stool.
"So," he said, after a brief pause, "excited for tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” What Zoey was doing now. Still in the fort? Was she pacing the suite, or had she already decided to sleep it off and pretend the whole incident was just a fever dream?
Jinu seemed content to let her drift in thought. He flagged down the bartender, a bespectacled man in a waistcoat and crisp white shirt "Whiskey, neat," Jinu said, then turned to Rumi.
"Water," she replied. "With lemon, if you have it."
The bartender nodded and set to work, a cube of ice, a twist of lemon, the careful pour of amber liquor. Jinu leaned against the bar, elbows braced.
“You know you never texted me back,” Jinu spoke as he took his drink in hand not taking a drink.
Rumi winced, “Shit- sorry,” She recalled the brief exchange of words over messages. That was during the party after she had completely lost her mind and freaked out on him, “I just- didn't feel much like talking.”
“Okay well… my heart was very hurt. I was left on read,” there was banter in his tone. And any other night she might've told him he was being a baby. But her mind was so full again. So full and in danger of exploding outward.
“I'm sorry I freaked out at the party on you.”
“It's cool.” He twisted his drink the liquid sloppily bouncing against the glass. “Really, I didn't mean to say anything to make you feel- uncomfortable.”
“It's not your fault.” Rumi looked up to the shelves of bottles, inwardly imagining each one just tipping off and shattering onto the floor, “Something happened and I- I was not in a very good headspace.”
“I saw-” Jinu paused the sentence, then scooted his drink away, he still hadn't taken a sip, “I saw everything online about Tayhun-” Rumi stood from the stool, scraping the carpet almost tipping backwards. Both out of fluster and fear. Of course he saw it. Those messages were everywhere. Everyone knew. And he knew how gullible she was. Easy to trick, easy to get alone- “Rumi wait- I just wanted to-”
“Tayhun is a liar. Nothing happened.”
“I'm not on his side or anything - Ru- I-I just wanted to apologize-”
“I don't need your apologies.” He clenched his jaw turning back to his drink. She should sit down and stop being so overdramatic. Jinu hadn't given any signals of danger. Rumi hovered near her stool for a moment, unwilling to sit, unwilling to go.
After a prolonged silence she abandoned her water and Jinu. She was so good at running away she wondered how she hadn't been able to do it then. Why was it that she didn't walk away when Tayhun greeted her in the lobby? Why didn't she run away when she was in the hotel room? If it was so easy for her to leave, why hadn't she done it then? Why had she let herself stay, and why couldn't she let herself stay now when people were just trying to undo the damage that had been done?
There was no undoing it. And she couldn't run them, but she could run now. And she would keep running forever if it meant she would always be safe.
Rumi had no plan, no destination, only a compulsion to keep moving, to keep her body as far from everything and everyone as possible. She wandered past the lobby, past the elevator bay, through a corridor lined with framed photographs of rivers and cityscapes and black-and-white prints of people who had probably died decades before. Her feet padded across carpet, then cool tile, no sound at all even as her thoughts screamed at her.
On the other side of the hotel, the air was cooler, the lights dimmer. This wing of the ground floor was closed for the evening, the restaurant and the buffet area stripped of its bustle, chairs inverted on tables. She passed a grand ballroom, the doors slightly ajar, a shaft of white light branding the darkness inside. She peered into the empty cavern and saw nothing but a polished floor.
She was walking past an alcove lined with velvet banquettes and tiny cocktail tables when she realized she’d stopped moving. Ahead, at the far end of the deserted lounge, was a grand piano, its black lacquered hull gleaming under a shaft of wan moonlight that leaked in from a row of windows. She hesitated at first, her mind cycling through a thousand reasons not to go near the thing. She was sure she wasn't supposed to.
She skimmed her fingers along the backs of empty chairs, felt the plushness of velvet against her palm, before her arm fell to her side, limp. At the piano, she circled once, appraising it from every angle. It was a Steinway, not the rarest but certainly not the cheapest, and it looked as if it had been waxed and polished for some lavish wedding or event that never occurred.
She slid onto the piano bench, which groaned under her weight, a sound startling in the quiet. She ran a hand over the smooth wood, then lifted the fall board to expose the keys. Perfect, prestine. She flexed her wrists and let her hands hover just above middle C. She pressed a single note, a high E, letting it ring and dissolve into silence.
She sat up straight, rolling her shoulders to loosen the knots that had been tying themselves since the moment she left the suite. She didn’t bother with words or lyrics. Instead, she started with a chord, and then broke it apart, letting each note ring before the next one. The melody she built was hesitant at first, but soon the notes came, gaining confidence as her fingers remembered how to play. The sound was warm, honey-rich, and it filled the empty lounge.
The lyrics came to her in fragments, some of them borrowed from her own songbook. Others from the inside of her head where they had been fermenting for months.
“I never said it, but I know that I
Can't picture anything past twenty-five
Not like I care to know the timing
Not like I'm looking for that silence-”
She let the vowels drag, not caring if she sounded good.
Rumi wasn’t thinking about Jinu, or even the ever lingering Tayhun. Her mind filled with the smell of minty chapstick, the way Zoey’s hands had felt on her back, the sudden, terrible nausea after she’d kissed her friend and felt nothing but panic and shame. She had created something ugly and unfixable. At least, that’s how it felt.
“I'll do whatever helps to sleep at night
Until I'm feeling like an island
Until I'm strong enough to hide it”
The taste of defeat when she realized she wasn’t healed, wasn’t brave, wasn’t anything except a person who tainted things she loved. Maybe she would have been fixed if she had said anything other than ‘I'm fine.’ Not just to her friends, but maybe in the therapist office (that would have been a good start.) Maybe then she could have just kissed Zoey without all the icky feelings to follow. And it could have been gentle- and nice and soft and- You ruined it. You always ruin it. You don’t deserve any of this.
All of it poured out through her fingertips, into the shape of a song she hadn’t chosen or planned out.
“What was I thinking looking for a sign?
As if I'd ever seen the stars align
Somebody take over the driving
Somebody notice how I'm trying-”
Her vigilance returned when she felt the seat dip next to her. She shot sideways nearly off the stool using the keys for support in a loud, Thawang!
“Woah woah! I come in peace, I promise,” Jinu threw up his hands. Rumi’s first instinct was to punch him.
“You jerk-” Rumi shoved at his arm hoping he would fall completely off the stool. But he had prepared for it, instead he leaned slightly. Laughing while her cheeks blossomed into anger. She scowled, and returned her gaze to the keys.
“How did the melody go?” Jinu asked trying it out for himself but not coming close to its solidarity. She shoved his hand away.
“This is why you lost the showcase,” she didn't exactly feel in the mood to tease him, but sometimes it was inescapable.
“Oh really?”
She played the notes again, first slowly, allowing him to copy it. It took a couple tries but eventually it was nearly exactly the way she had played it.
“And the lyrics went like-
Someone confiscate my license,
I panic-brake when I’m indecisive”
Rumi leaned against his shoulder instead of punching him, (like she still really wanted to,) he laughed but continued playing. Rumi could feel the emotion just at the tip of her tongue. Jinu continued the notes. And when she felt convinced she was safe enough she continued.
“How do you call it when
You're in your head?
Like when you're really keep inside of it
I only talk into the mirror
I'm only scared of getting bigger”
Jinu’s voice followed.
“At least I'll never turn to cigarettes
My brother shielded me from all of that
He said that smoking was a killer
He said he knows that I've been bitter”
“I kissed Zoey,” she blurted, off melody. At first Jinu continued the notes, but when Rumi didn't elaborate he stopped, pulling the lid back over the keys and leaning on it to give her his full attention.
“Zoey?” He repeated, narrowing his eyes.
“Yes. Zoey,” she confirmed, “-and then I freaked out and- then - why are you looking at me like that?” Jinu shrugged and shook his head, cleansing his features. Which wasn't anything nefarious, he simply looked… puzzled?
“Nothing. I just personally have always sided with the Rumira shippers,” he replied, “You know, you and Mira. Their evidence is quite compelling,” he continued, then shrugged it off. He was so aggravating to converse with.
“Do you ever take anything seriously?” She asked, what had she expected? Especially from Jinu?
“I take shipping very seriously. This is gonna break the fans hearts,” he twisted his lips and before pressing a dramatic hand to his chest, “Okay, okay, you kissed Zoey. And ran away.”
“Yes.” Rumi used a nail to glide over the surface of the cover.
“Why did you do that?” He asked, a layer of what she could easily mistake as condescending but because she knew Jinu she knew he had meant it differently.
“Because-” she suddenly remembered who she was talking to. There was no way he actually cared about the why. There was a small chance he did, but she apparently wasn't a great judge of character, was she? “Because- I don't think-” she kept fighting for the words, but all of them linked back to Tayhun, and though Jinu knew about him, she wasn't willing to tell her side of the story yet to anyone outside of her safety circle.
“Is it because of the something that happened?”
Rumi parted her lips, her story and the events of the timeline she would never be able to erase. She could recall the exact moment she felt unsafe. The moment she felt trapped. Every emotion, both good and incredibly bad.
“Yes.”
“But also the nothing that happened?” He was trying to get her to admit that something indeed happened. She pinched her lips, lowering her chin in defeat.
“Tayhun-” she tested the word Celine had called it, and it didn't feel like it fit. If she used that word she felt she'd be removing responsibility from herself, and after all she was responsible for the events of that day. “He was forceful,” Rumi admitted, her voice shaking near the end.
“You blame yourself…” he added. Maybe she imagined the recognition in his eyes. Fabricated it to make her feel a little less alone. Rumi nodded, “There's a group I meet with on Fridays. I know you have a show tomorrow. But I think it could really help-”
“Rumi! Thank God!” Jinu leapt upwards bumping the piano jostling sound as he did. Rumi also stood, especially as she noticed Zoey behind Mira. They were dressed as if ready to search beyond the hotel.
“I'm- I'll be in my room,” Jinu spoke awkwardly scratching his neck before giving her bandmates a wave. Zoey and Mira didn't acknowledge him as he took his leave, she watched him disappear, wishing she could shrink to half her size and sneak away too. Rumi stepped around the bench tucking her hands in front of her.
“Are you alright?” Zoey asked, her fingers pulling at each other.
“I'm fine- I'm really sorry I-”
“Do you ever think about how your actions affect other people?” Mira's voice, a bit raised, and angry. An anger she used often at interviewers when they crossed a line, or towards her parents. But this time it was directed at her. She's faced Mira's wrath a few times. Usually playful- never this visceral.
“Of course I- I try to-”
“Mira- everything's fine, now isn't the time to-” Zoey attempted but Mira’s emotion had reached the same boiling point.
“Really? It doesn't seem like you care about anyone beyond yourself.” Rumi clenched her jaw. Her hands fell helplessly to her sides.
“Mira-” Zoey warned, voice a slight snap.
“We've been looking for you. We had the attendant unlock the roof first. Just in case. And you've been down here- playing piano with Jinu?” What could she say beyond getting to her knees and begging for forgiveness. That wouldn't have mattered. She had really been selfish beyond her intentions.
“We're really glad you're okay.” Zoey smiled, not her normal one of course. One that reminded Rumi of what she had done to her lips and then how she left them, “Let's go back to the room. We can turn on a movie and-”
“I can't do the tour.” Rumi admitted. There were lots of things she couldn't do. But this was the thing she was starting with.
“That's okay- we can work it out with Bobby and-” Zoey tried to play the ever neutral forgiver.
“Do you know what seeing you on that balcony did to us Rumi?” Mira asked, viciously, “Did you bother to ask?” she was crying, a rare occurrence. Rumi didn't blame her. She couldn't find a single thing wrong with her friend at the moment. Rumi often felt like she should scream at herself, shake her shoulders and demand why she was allowing Tayhun to ruin her life, and her friendships she cherished so much.
“I didn't ask.” Rumi stared at her friends, “It must've been hard.”
“You think?” Rumi inhaled, forcing her body to keep her tears to herself.
“I know it was hard.” Rumi clarified, voice wobbly, “I know it's been hard. I'm trying to fix it.” Despite her efforts a tear slipped the barricade. But her voice remained clear. She quickly swiped it away and nodded to confirm it to herself, “I'm going to fix it.”
“Ru-” Zoey took a step towards her, it would be so easy to simply allow her touch, and comfort. But her body made her shuffle backwards, nearly tripping on the bench. With her unsteady hands she pressed them to the piano briefly before stumbling around it.
“I'm going to sleep on the bus. I'll see you guys tomorrow.” She dismissed herself with a bow that wasn't low enough to convey what she truly meant. Leaving once again.
Leaving, always leaving except for when she had really needed to.