Chapter Two: A Brief History of Hostilities

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.

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