Chapter One: The Color of War

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.

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