I. Taehyung

There were exactly four hours until the Ganju delegation arrived, and Kim Taehyung had spent the last three of them dyeing the Crown Prince's ceremonial robes the color of a peony in full, humiliating bloom.

He stood at the edge of the drying line strung between two persimmon trees behind the eastern laundry house, arms crossed, admiring his work with the quiet satisfaction of a man who knew he was about to be executed for it and had decided the crime was worth dying for.

"You're insane," said the laundry maid, Bora, who had helped him — under significant duress and an even more significant bribe of dried persimmons — carry the robes out to dry. "You do know he'll have you flogged."

"He won't." Taehyung tilted his head, considering whether the pink had taken evenly across the left sleeve. It had. Beautiful. "He'll have me flogged in his head about four hundred times and then he'll do nothing, because if he tells his father why he wants me flogged, everyone will know I won."

"Won what?"

"Everything," Taehyung said, with the serene confidence of a man who had never once lost an argument in his own head. "It's an ongoing war, Bora. You wouldn't understand. You have a normal life."

She looked at the robe — pink, unmistakably, gloriously pink, the kind of pink that did not exist in any respectable dye recipe in the entire history of Hanju court fashion — and then looked at him.

"He's going to greet a foreign princess in that."

"Yes."

"Today."

"Yes."

"You're insane," she said again, and left him alone with his crime.

Taehyung did not consider himself insane. He considered himself a man engaged in a decades-long campaign of psychological warfare against Jeon Jungkook, Crown Prince of Hanju, future king, universally beloved paragon of grace and composure — and the single most punchable person Taehyung had ever had the misfortune of growing up next to.

It had started, if you asked either of their fathers, when they were six years old and Taehyung had put a frog down the back of Jungkook's ceremonial collar during a memorial rite, and Jungkook — six years old, already unbearably composed — had not screamed. He had simply turned, very calmly, and informed the entire assembled court that Taehyung had "the manners of a barn animal and the face to match," in a tone so flat and so devastating that three elderly ministers had laughed out loud during a memorial service, which was, by all accounts, a scandal that took two years to fully die down.

Taehyung had been informed by his mother, much later, that this was the exact moment General Choi and King Han had turned to each other and started laughing so hard they'd had to leave the hall.

Twenty-one years later, nothing had improved. If anything, it had gotten worse, because now they were both adults, both dangerously intelligent, both entirely too skilled at finding the precise soft, humiliating center of the other's pride and pressing on it with both thumbs.

The pink robes were retaliation. Three days ago, Jungkook had somehow — Taehyung still didn't know how, and it ate at him every single hour he thought about it — replaced every training sword in the east courtyard with wooden replicas so light they might as well have been kindling, timed exactly for the one day Taehyung was demonstrating swordsmanship in front of two visiting generals. Taehyung had swung with the force appropriate for actual steel and gone stumbling sideways into a fish pond in front of forty witnesses, twelve of them military officers who would remember this for the rest of their careers.

So. Pink robes. On the day of a foreign state visit. It was proportionate. It was, in fact, restrained.

Taehyung was still admiring the drying line when he heard footsteps behind him — unhurried, deliberate, the footsteps of a man who had already decided how a conversation was going to go before he arrived to have it — and did not need to turn around to know exactly who it was.

"Taehyung."

"Your Highness." He didn't turn. He let the smile creep into his voice instead, slow and pleased with itself. "Lovely morning."

"My robes are pink."

"Are they? I hadn't noticed. I've been very busy. Being here. Coincidentally."

Jungkook came to stand beside him — close, deliberately close, the way he always did when he wanted to loom without technically looming, because he was half a head taller and had never once in his life failed to weaponize it — and looked at the robes with an expression of such magnificent, controlled fury that Taehyung had to physically stop his mouth from twitching into a full grin.

"The Ganju delegation arrives in four hours."

"I'm aware."

"I am meeting a foreign princess in four hours."

"I'm aware of that too."

"In these."

"They're a lovely color," Taehyung said. "Very warm. Very — inviting. People will think you're approachable. It's a gift, really, when you think about it. I've done you a diplomatic favor."

Jungkook turned his head, finally, and looked at him — and there it was, the look Taehyung had been waiting for since he'd first mixed the dye, the one that made all three hours of tedious, itchy, dye-stained labor completely worth it. It was a look that contained absolutely nothing of the composed, gracious, endlessly patient Crown Prince that the rest of the palace believed in. It was murder. Elegant, restrained, court-appropriate murder, but murder all the same.

"You have," Jungkook said, very softly, "made a grave miscalculation."

"Have I?"

"I have a spare set."

Taehyung's grin faltered by exactly one degree. "You don't."

"I had one made after the fish pond. I assumed retaliation was inevitable. You're predictable, Taehyung. You always have been." Jungkook's mouth curved — not a smile, nothing so generous as a smile, more the architectural suggestion of one. "So I will, in fact, be perfectly presentable in four hours. And you will have wasted an entire morning ruining silk that belonged to the royal treasury, which I am fully within my rights to report, and which would mean your father explaining to my father why his son is destroying state property days before a diplomatic visit."

Taehyung felt his stomach do something unpleasant.

He had not considered the treasury. He had considered many things — the dye ratio, the drying time, the deeply satisfying mental image of Jungkook's face upon discovery — but he had not considered that the robes were, technically, government property, and that his father, General Choi Wooyoung, commander of the entire royal army, might have Opinions about his only son committing what amounted to petty treason four hours before Hanju's most important trade negotiation in a decade.

"You wouldn't," Taehyung said, with far less confidence than he intended.

"I would."

"Your father would ask why you even noticed. He'd know you'd been baiting me for a week straight with that swords stunt."

Something flickered across Jungkook's face — quick, almost missable, gone before Taehyung could name it. Uncertainty, maybe. Or something adjacent to it.

"I wasn't baiting you," Jungkook said, and for one strange, suspended second, it almost sounded true.

"You replaced actual steel with kindling."

"I improved your form. You lean on your weight too heavily on the downswing. You've always done it. I've been telling you for fifteen years."

"You pushed me into a fish pond."

"The fish pond was incidental."

"There is no version of that sentence where the fish pond is incidental, you absolute—"

"Careful," Jungkook said, low, "how you finish that."

They were standing very close now — closer than either of them had probably intended, close enough that Taehyung could see the exact shade of brown in Jungkook's eyes, could see the small crease between his eyebrows that only ever appeared when he was more rattled than he wanted to admit, could see, absurdly, that Jungkook's collar was slightly crooked, and that some old, traitorous part of him wanted to reach up and fix it.

He did not reach up and fix it.

He took a step back instead, because that was the rule, had always been the rule, the one neither of them had ever spoken aloud but both understood with total clarity: they did not do this. Whatever this almost was, in moments like this one, when the insults ran out half a second too early and something else tried to crawl into the silence. They did comedy. They did war. They did not do — whatever the crease between Jungkook's eyebrows was asking him to do.

"I'll tell your father myself," Taehyung said, recovering his footing, "that I did it for the good of the kingdom. Pink is a very calming color. Princess Yeon-hwa will feel instantly at ease."

"Princess Yeon-hwa," Jungkook said, "will think the Crown Prince of Hanju cannot control his own household staff, let alone a border treaty."

"She'll think you have excellent taste."

"She will think," Jungkook said, stepping past him toward the drying line, reaching out to finger the ruined silk with something that might have been genuine, weary despair, "that I have spent twenty-one years failing to civilize you, and she would not be wrong."

"You've never once civilized me."

"Believe me," Jungkook muttered, almost too quiet to catch, "I've noticed."

And there it was again — that strange little undertow beneath his voice, something Taehyung couldn't quite name and didn't have time to examine, because Jungkook was already turning on his heel, robes over one arm, already composing his face back into the flawless, gracious mask he wore for everyone who wasn't Taehyung.

"I have a spare," he said, over his shoulder. "You've achieved nothing except ruining good silk and wasting your own morning. As usual."

"As usual, you mean I've achieved a masterpiece and you're too proud to admit it."

Jungkook didn't turn around. But Taehyung saw his shoulders move — one short, sharp exhale that was almost, almost a laugh, quickly strangled before it could become one — and felt a small, stupid flare of triumph that had nothing to do with winning.

The spare robes did not fit as well as the ruined ones.

Jungkook stood in front of the mirror in his private chambers while two attendants adjusted the shoulders and refused, absolutely refused, to let his face show a single flicker of what he was actually thinking, which was: he spent his entire morning on this. Three hours, easily. Maybe more. He wanted it to be perfect. He wanted me to see it and know exactly how much effort went into hating me today, and I did, and some idiot part of me thought it was — I need to stop. I need to physically stop this thought right now.

He did not stop the thought. He never did, not really, not where it counted, but he had gotten extraordinarily good at making sure it never once reached his face.

"Your Highness," murmured the elder attendant, "the collar."

He adjusted the collar. He thought about Taehyung's collar, crooked, twenty minutes ago, close enough to fix.

I should have fixed it. That would have been normal. Cousins fix each other's collars. Old friends fix each other's collars. There was no reason not to reach out and fix a piece of fabric except that I know, I know exactly what would have happened if I'd touched him for one second longer than strictly necessary, and it would not have looked like fixing a collar, it would have looked like something else entirely, and he would have known, and that cannot happen. That will never happen. I have had twenty years of practice at this and I am not going to fail now over a crooked collar.

"Your Highness, you're frowning."

"I am not frowning."

"Your Highness is frowning quite specifically."

"I am thinking," Jungkook said, with as much royal dignity as he could summon while wearing robes two months out of proper tailoring because his actual robes were currently the color of a bruised plum drying on a laundry line behind the kitchens, "about state matters."

The attendant, wisely, said nothing further.

Jungkook had been thinking about "state matters" — which was to say, thinking about Choi Taehyung — for approximately twenty years now, and had never once found it to get easier. If anything it had gotten catastrophically worse in the last several years, ever since Taehyung had stopped being a gangly, loud-mouthed adolescent who tripped over his own sword and had instead, with what Jungkook privately considered extremely poor timing, become a genuinely formidable tactician, a devastatingly sharp wit, and — this was the part Jungkook resented most, on principle — infuriatingly, distractingly handsome in a way that made concentrating on treaty negotiations feel like an act of heroic self-discipline.

None of which he had ever said aloud. None of which he would ever say aloud. He was the Crown Prince of Hanju. He was going to be king. Kings did not harbor a decades-deep, humiliatingly tender feeling for the general's son who had once put a live frog down his collar during a memorial rite and had spent every year since finding new and inventive ways to ruin his dignity in front of foreign dignitaries.

Except.

Except that when Taehyung laughed — really laughed, not the sharp performing laugh he used in company, but the short surprised one that escaped him when he wasn't trying to win anything — something in Jungkook's chest did something so violently soft that it frightened him.

Except that he had, in fact, replaced the training swords not to embarrass Taehyung, not really, not primarily — he'd done it because Taehyung had been overworking the same shoulder for two weeks straight, favoring it in every drill, and Jungkook had noticed, because Jungkook noticed everything about him, and had wanted an excuse to make him rest it without ever once admitting he'd been worried. The fish pond had been a happy, if mortifying, accident. He had felt guilty about it for four days. He had told no one this, and would tell no one this, least of all Taehyung, who would either laugh in his face or — worse, infinitely worse — understand exactly what it meant.

"The delegation will arrive within the hour," said Hoseok, appearing in the doorway with the particular blend of calm and long-suffering patience that came from being the Crown Prince's personal scribe for nine years. He looked, as ever, entirely unbothered by chaos, and entirely aware of far more than he ever let on. His eyes flicked once to the ill-fitting spare robes and back up to Jungkook's face without a single visible reaction, which Jungkook appreciated more than he could say. "I heard," Hoseok added mildly, "that there was an incident with the laundry."

"There was no incident."

"Someone told me your ceremonial robes are currently the color of a peach blossom."

"They are the color," Jungkook said, with immense dignity, "of a diplomatic miscalculation on the part of General Choi's son, and I would prefer it not be discussed further."

Hoseok's mouth twitched — the exact same small, suppressed twitch Jungkook had felt in his own chest twenty minutes earlier and refused to acknowledge. "Of course, Your Highness."

"Is Jackson already at the gate?"

"Insisting on greeting the delegation personally, yes, on the grounds that he is, and I quote, 'the only person in this palace who has actually traveled anywhere.'" Hoseok said this with the weary fondness of a man who had been listening to Jackson make that exact argument for three years running.

"Tell him to behave."

"I have told him to behave every day since the Ganju visit was announced. It has had no measurable effect."

Jungkook allowed himself, finally, one small breath that was almost — almost — a laugh, and let the attendants finish adjusting his robes, and did not think about Choi Taehyung, standing by the drying line an hour ago with pink dye still faintly staining the creases of his knuckles, looking entirely too pleased with himself, looking — infuriatingly — the way he always looked right before he did something that made Jungkook want, in roughly equal measure, to strangle him and to never let him out of arm's reach again.

He did not think about it.

He thought about it the entire walk to the front gate.

III. Both — The Gate

By the time the delegation's banners appeared at the base of the hill, Taehyung had changed into his own formal attire — dark blue, the Choi family colors, sword at his hip in the ceremonial style, hair properly pinned for once in his life — and taken his position among the assembled officials at the base of the palace steps, three places down and one row back from where the Crown Prince stood.

He was not looking at Jungkook. He was extremely deliberately not looking at Jungkook. He was looking at the approaching delegation with the focused, professional attention of a general's son who took court appearances seriously, and if his eyes drifted twice — only twice — to check whether the spare robes fit properly across the shoulders, that was purely a professional assessment of the prince's ceremonial appearance and nothing else whatsoever.

They don't fit as well, he thought, with some satisfaction. Good.

Beside him, General Choi Wooyoung leaned very slightly toward King Han Deokwon, both men watching the delegation approach with the composed patience of two rulers of consequence, and murmured, low enough that only the king could hear:

"I heard the ceremonial robes had an incident this morning."

"I heard," the King murmured back, not moving his gaze from the approaching banners, the corner of his mouth betraying nothing except twenty years of intimate familiarity with exactly this conversation, "that my son had a spare made three days in advance."

"Ah."

"He's gotten faster."

"Taehyung," General Choi said, with the enormous, weary pride of a father who had genuinely given up trying to reform his son sometime around age nine, "spent three hours on the dye ratio. Bora told my wife it was, and I quote, 'the most beautiful color of pink she'd ever produced by hand.'"

"They're going to be unbearable at the banquet tonight," the King said.

"They're going to be unbearable for the rest of their natural lives," General Choi agreed, and there was something in his voice that was not quite despair — something warmer, something that had been building for twenty-one years and showed no sign of stopping. "Ten more years. I give it ten more years before one of them says something."

"Ten," the King said. "You're an optimist. I said fifteen, to your wife, at the spring banquet. She still owes me eleven silver pieces for it."

"You're both wrong," said a third voice — Lady Baek, court physician and shaman, who had appeared at the King's elbow with the silent, unnerving efficiency that made half the court faintly afraid of her. She did not look at either man. She was watching the same two points on the palace steps that they were: the Crown Prince, standing perfectly composed, eyes flicking exactly once toward the general's son and immediately away; the general's son, jaw tight, shoulders squared, deliberately, painfully not looking back. "It'll happen sooner than that. Something's already shifted. I can feel it."

"Feel it how," General Choi said, with the particular caution of a military man who did not entirely trust matters of feeling, but had learned, over three decades, never to bet against Lady Baek.

"I don't know yet," she said, and there was something in her voice — thoughtful, a little sharp, entirely too pleased for a woman discussing nothing in particular. "But I'd start saving your silver."

Neither king nor general asked her to explain further. They had both learned, a long time ago, that Lady Baek said exactly as much as she intended to say and not one word more.

Below them, at the base of the steps, the delegation's front riders came into view — and Han Jungkook, Crown Prince of Hanju, drew one slow breath, arranged his face into the perfect, gracious mask that had been trained into him since birth, and thought, with a clarity that frightened him more than any foreign delegation ever could:

I hope he's watching. I hope he sees that I can do this too — be exactly what everyone needs me to be, effortlessly, while he stands there in his perfect blue looking like he's already won something. I hope he's watching, and I hope he never, ever finds out why it matters to me whether he is.

Three places down and one row back, Choi Taehyung watched the prince's spine straighten, watched the mask slide into place with the seamless ease of two decades' practice, and thought, with the particular irritation of a man who refused to examine his own feelings too closely:

Show-off. Absolute, insufferable show-off. I hope the princess trips on the stairs.

Neither of them noticed Lady Baek watching them both, nor the very small, very satisfied smile that crossed her face before she turned back to the approaching banners.

Some storms announce themselves for hours before they arrive.

This one was going to arrive in about six weeks, on a hunting trail, during a lightning storm neither of them saw coming — and it was going to change absolutely everything.

End of Chapter One.

I. Twenty-One Years Ago

The first time Choi Taehyung ever saw Han Jungkook, the future Crown Prince of Hanju was standing very still in the middle of a memorial hall wearing robes too formal for a six-year-old, hands folded exactly the way his tutors had taught him, looking like a small, extremely irritated porcelain doll that had been wound up and placed in the correct position by someone else entirely.

Taehyung, also six, had taken one look at him and thought: I hate him already.

He would spend the rest of his life insisting this was a purely instinctive, unprovoked reaction — that something ancient and correct in him had simply recognized, on sight, a fundamental incompatibility with this particular human being. His mother, when she heard this story for the hundredth time at some family gathering fifteen years later, would always laugh so hard she had to set down her tea, because the actual reason was considerably less mystical.

The actual reason was that Taehyung, six years old and covered in mud from an unauthorized detour through the garden pond on the walk into the hall, had been loudly and specifically scolded by his mother in front of the entire assembled court — and Jungkook, from across the hall, had looked at him with open, undisguised, deeply satisfied judgment, the exact expression of a child who had never once in his life been scolded for anything and intended to make sure everyone knew it.

"You're dirty," six-year-old Jungkook had said, when their fathers — already thick as thieves after years fighting side by side, and thrilled at the prospect of their sons becoming friends — had steered them together for a formal introduction. He'd said it not unkindly, exactly, but with the flat, clinical precision of a child stating an obvious fact about the weather.

"You're boring," Taehyung had shot back, with the instant, undiluted fury of a child who had correctly identified an insult and had no intention of losing the exchange.

"I am not boring. I am the crown prince."

"That's the most boring thing I've ever heard someone say about themselves."

King Han Deokwon, standing three feet away, had made a sound like he was choking on something, which turned out — General Choi would tell the story for decades afterward — to be the sound of a king trying very hard not to laugh during a state memorial service.

That should have been the end of it. Six-year-olds insulted each other over nothing constantly; it rarely meant anything; it was rarely the foundation of two decades of increasingly elaborate warfare. But three days later, at the formal reception that followed, Taehyung had found a frog in the palace garden — a magnificent, enormous, warty specimen that he privately named General Frog on the spot — and had marched directly up to the boring, perfectly composed prince and dropped it straight down the back of his ceremonial collar.

He had expected screaming. He had, frankly, been counting on it. Screaming would have been satisfying; screaming would have proven that underneath the porcelain-doll composure there was an ordinary, panicky child just like everyone else, and Taehyung would have won something important by revealing it.

Jungkook had not screamed.

Jungkook had gone rigid for exactly one second — Taehyung, watching closely, caught the flicker of genuine alarm cross his face before it vanished — and then he had turned, slowly, with a dignity that no six-year-old should have physically been capable of producing, faced the nearest cluster of ministers, and announced, in a clear, carrying voice that reached every corner of the hall:

"General Choi's son has the manners of a barn animal, and unfortunately, the face to match."

Three elderly ministers, standing close enough to hear, had burst out laughing — the kind of sudden, undignified laughter that no one could stop once it started, the kind that spreads. Within seconds half the hall was trying and failing to suppress it, at a memorial reception, over an insult delivered by a six-year-old with a live frog visibly wriggling somewhere inside the back of his own robes.

King Han and General Choi had needed to physically leave the hall. They had stood in the corridor outside, doubled over, wheezing, for a full three minutes, while inside, the boy who would one day be king extracted a frog from his collar with the same flat, unbothered composure he'd use twenty years later to negotiate a border treaty, and the general's son stood there, red-faced, utterly humiliated, and utterly, thoroughly delighted with himself despite it.

It had, everyone later agreed, been the single best moment of that entire tedious decade of formal court functions. It had also, unfortunately, ensured that the two boys would spend every year from then on trying to top it.

II. Seven

By the time they were seven, the rivalry had a name — the fathers called it, fondly, "the ongoing incident" — and a shape. It went like this: whatever one of them was praised for, the other would find a way to either match it or ruin it, usually within the same afternoon.

When Taehyung's sword tutor announced, in front of both families, that the boy showed unusual promise for his age, Jungkook had spent the following three weeks badgering his own tutors until he could match every drill Taehyung knew, and then some, purely so he could demonstrate it, unprompted, at the next family dinner, with the studied casualness of someone who had absolutely not spent three weeks preparing for exactly that moment.

When Jungkook won a calligraphy competition at eight — an actual, real competition, judged by an actual, real official, with an actual, real prize scroll — Taehyung had spent two entire days practicing in secret, ruining four brushes and most of a good ink stone, until he could produce something close enough to Jungkook's winning piece that he could present it at dinner and ask, with vicious sweetness, whether anyone could actually tell the difference.

(Nobody could. This bothered Jungkook for approximately eleven years.)

It was never, either of them would have insisted separately and with total sincerity, about affection. It could not have been about affection, because affection was not what either of them felt, not even slightly, not even a little, and any suggestion otherwise from either set of parents — offered, increasingly, with an unmistakable note of amusement — was met with identical, indignant outrage.

"We are not friends," seven-year-old Taehyung informed his mother, with the gravity of a diplomat delivering unwelcome news. "We are enemies. It is very serious. It has always been very serious."

"Of course, my love," said his mother, who had, in fact, watched the two of them fall asleep against each other during a long carriage ride home from a spring festival not three weeks earlier, curled together like a pair of cats, and had said absolutely nothing about it to either boy, because she understood — with the clear, patient wisdom of a mother who had raised a stubborn child — that pointing it out would only make things worse.

"He is the worst person I have ever met," seven-year-old Jungkook told his father, with equal gravity, on a different afternoon.

"Naturally," said the King, who had received, not two days prior, a small hand-carved wooden bird that Taehyung had spent an entire month making — badly, with the crooked, earnest craftsmanship of a child who had never carved anything before — and had given to Jungkook without a word of explanation, refusing ever afterward to admit he'd made it, insisting instead, unconvincingly, that he'd "found it" and simply "didn't want it anymore." The King had watched his son keep that badly carved wooden bird on his windowsill for the following fourteen years. He had never once mentioned it. He understood, with the clear, patient wisdom of a father who had raised a stubborn child, that pointing it out would only make things worse.

III. Twelve

At twelve, the rivalry acquired its first genuine casualty: a formal state banquet, ruined — thoroughly, spectacularly ruined — by a prank so elaborate that both fathers, upon hearing the full account, had to leave the room again.

Taehyung had discovered, through careful and dedicated investigation, that Jungkook harbored a deep and mortifying fear of a particular breed of large, hissing palace goose that patrolled the outer gardens. This was not common knowledge. Jungkook had gone to considerable lengths to keep it from becoming common knowledge, on account of being twelve years old and extremely concerned with dignity.

Taehyung, who had absolutely no such concerns when it came to Jungkook's dignity, had spent an entire week coaxing the largest, most aggressive goose in the flock into a covered basket using a truly heroic quantity of stolen kitchen scraps, smuggled it into the banquet hall during the confusion of the second course, and released it directly beneath the head table at the exact moment Jungkook stood to deliver a short formal toast that he had, Taehyung happened to know, been nervously rehearsing in his room for three straight days.

The goose had chased the future Crown Prince of Hanju around a state banquet hall, hissing, wings spread, for approximately ninety seconds, in front of forty visiting dignitaries, before palace guards finally managed to corner it. Jungkook had ended the ordeal on top of a serving table, robes in complete disarray, dignity in absolute ruins, glaring across the chaos at Taehyung — who was laughing so hard he'd had to hold onto a support beam to stay upright — with an expression of such pure, incandescent fury that several of the younger serving staff would later describe it as "genuinely a little frightening."

He did not speak to Taehyung for eleven days. This was, at the time, a personal record.

The retaliation, when it came, was patient, precise, and utterly devastating: Jungkook, having correctly deduced that Taehyung's single greatest source of pride was his skill with a bow — a skill Taehyung had been cultivating obsessively for two years specifically to finally, finally beat Jungkook at something in front of their fathers — arranged, through channels twelve-year-old Taehyung never fully identified, to have Taehyung's bowstring quietly, invisibly weakened before an archery exhibition in front of both families and several visiting officers.

The string snapped mid-draw. Taehyung, humiliated, went sprawling backward in front of everyone he'd wanted most to impress.

He never proved Jungkook had done it. He never needed to. The look on Jungkook's face — carefully blank, suspiciously, deliberately blank, blank in the specific way that only comes from working very hard to appear uninvolved — told him everything.

"Even," Jungkook had said to him afterward, quietly, so only Taehyung could hear, with a small, satisfied smile that contained absolutely none of his usual careful composure. "We're even now."

"This isn't over," Taehyung had told him, wiping dirt off his face, already — even at twelve, already — calculating what would come next.

"No," Jungkook had agreed, and there had been something in his voice that Taehyung, at twelve, was much too young and much too furious to properly identify — something that sounded, if you didn't know any better, almost like relief. As though the alternative to this — endless, elaborate, all-consuming warfare — was a silence neither of them wanted to sit inside. "It never is."

IV. Sixteen

At sixteen, something shifted, briefly, and neither of them ever spoke of it again.

It happened during a hunting trip — an earlier, smaller one, nothing like the one that would come years later — when Taehyung, showing off exactly the way he always showed off in front of Jungkook, took a bad step on wet rock along a riverbank and went down hard, twisting his ankle badly enough that he couldn't put weight on it, stranded a full hour's walk from camp with the light already starting to fail.

Jungkook had not laughed. He had not made a single comment about carelessness or recklessness or the twelve other things he absolutely could have said and would, on any other day, have said with relish.

He had simply knelt down, checked the ankle with a gentleness that startled them both into silence, and then, without a word of complaint, hauled Taehyung onto his back and carried him the entire hour back to camp, over uneven ground, in failing light, arriving with his own legs shaking with exhaustion and refusing — flatly refusing, several times, with real irritation — to accept any thanks for it.

"Don't," Jungkook had said, when Taehyung, halfway through the walk, voice small in a way it rarely was, had started to say something that might have been thank you or might have been something else entirely, something neither of them was ready for. "Don't make this strange. You'd have done the same."

"I would have made fun of you the entire way back."

"I know," Jungkook said. "You still would have carried me."

Taehyung, face pressed against Jungkook's shoulder, exhausted and in pain and unbearably, confusingly aware of how steady Jungkook's heartbeat felt against his own chest, hadn't answered, because he suspected — with a sudden, unwelcome clarity that frightened him more than the fall had — that it was true, and that the truth of it meant something he did not yet have any language for, and would spend the next nine years actively refusing to develop any language for, because language would mean admitting it, and admitting it was not a door either of them was prepared to open.

By the following morning, the moment had folded itself back into the familiar shape of everything else between them. Jungkook made a comment about Taehyung's terrible footing on wet rock. Taehyung called him an insufferable know-it-all who'd clearly enjoyed playing the hero far too much. They did not mention the ride back to camp again — not that year, not the next, not ever, though it settled somewhere quiet and permanent in both of them, the way a scar settles once the wound itself is long forgotten.

V. Present Day — After the Gate

Choi Taehyung, twenty-seven years old, sat on the low wall outside the banquet hall long after the formal reception for the Ganju delegation had ended, listening to the muffled music and conversation drifting out through the open doors, and thought — not for the first time, though he would never have admitted how often the thought came to him — about a hunting trip eleven years ago, and a hand that had checked his ankle with a gentleness nobody at court had ever seen before or since.

He did not know why he was thinking about it tonight, specifically. Something about the gate this morning — the crease in Jungkook's eyebrows, the half-swallowed almost-laugh, the strange charged half-second when neither of them had stepped back quite fast enough.

Twenty paces away, inside the hall, Han Jungkook stood beside Princess Yeon-hwa of Ganju, performing the flawless, gracious diplomacy that had been trained into him since birth, laughing at exactly the correct moments, asking exactly the correct questions about her journey and her kingdom's harvest and her father's health — and thinking, the entire time, about a general's son sitting alone outside in the dark, and how badly he wanted to go find him instead, and how completely, thoroughly impossible that was.

Neither of them said anything about it to anyone.

They had, after all, twenty-one years of practice at that exact particular silence.