Chapter Three: The Storm That Started It

I. Jungkook

Six weeks after the Ganju delegation's visit, the royal court rode out for the autumn hunt, and Han Jungkook had already decided, before they'd even cleared the palace gates, that it was going to be an unbearable week.

Not because of the hunt itself — he liked the hunt, actually, liked the cold clean air and the long rides and the rare, precious stretch of days where he was allowed to be something other than perfectly composed in front of a hundred watching eyes. He liked the forest. He liked the horses. He liked, if he was honest with himself, which he tried not to be too often, that the hunt was one of the only times all year he got to spend entire days riding beside Choi Taehyung without either of them needing an excuse.

That was precisely the problem.

"You're doing the thing," Hoseok said, riding up alongside him on the forest road, voice pitched low enough not to carry to the rest of the party strung out ahead and behind them.

"I am not doing a thing."

"You're doing the thing where you watch him and then pretend you're looking at the trees."

"I was looking at the trees."

"Your Highness," Hoseok said, with the patient, weary affection of a man who had been managing this exact denial for nine years, "there are no trees in that direction. There is a horse. The horse is Taehyung's. Taehyung is riding it."

Jungkook did not dignify this with a response, mostly because there was no response that wouldn't make things considerably worse, and instead fixed his gaze very deliberately on the road ahead, where — coincidentally, entirely coincidentally — Choi Taehyung happened to be riding twenty paces up, laughing at something General Choi had said, head tipped back, entirely unguarded in the way he only ever was out here, away from court, away from the hundred watching eyes that made both of them so careful.

He looks happy, Jungkook thought, before he could stop himself. I like him happiest out here. I've always liked him happiest out here. Nobody else gets to see this version of him and I resent every single one of them a little for that, which is insane, because half of them are his own family, and I am the one being insane about it, and I need to stop thinking before Hoseok reads it off my face, because he absolutely can, he's been doing it for years—

"You're doing the thing with your face now too," Hoseok observed.

"I hate you."

"No you don't. You're just embarrassed I'm right." Hoseok's voice softened, just slightly, dropping the teasing edge. "You know nobody would actually mind, don't you? If you told him."

"Everyone would mind."

"Your father wouldn't. General Choi wouldn't. I certainly wouldn't. Jackson would probably cry from sheer excitement, honestly, he's been waiting years for this—"

"Hoseok."

"I'm simply saying the list of people who would mind is considerably shorter than the list you've built in your head."

Jungkook said nothing, because there was, buried somewhere underneath twenty years of careful denial, a small and terrible fear he had never once said aloud to anyone, not even Hoseok, who knew nearly everything else: that the one person whose opinion actually mattered in all of this was also the one person he could never, under any circumstances, risk finding out. Because if Taehyung laughed — and Taehyung would laugh, Taehyung laughed at everything, that was half of why Jungkook loved him — Jungkook did not know if he would survive it. And if Taehyung didn't laugh, if Taehyung simply looked at him with quiet, careful pity and gently, kindly let him down, that would be so much worse than any insult either of them had ever traded, because it would be true, and it would be final, and there would be no clever retort to throw back at it.

Better, he had decided years ago, to keep the war going forever. Wars, at least, you could survive.

II. Taehyung

The morning of the third day, deep in the eastern hunting grounds, the sky had gone the particular flat, bruised grey that Taehyung's father always called "storm weather waiting to happen," and General Choi, twenty-eight years a soldier and considerably more cautious than his son about matters of weather, had already given the order to start heading back toward camp before the light failed completely.

Taehyung, of course, had wandered off the main trail anyway, chasing what he swore afterward was a genuinely enormous stag, deeper into the tree line than anyone had noticed, right as the first real gust of wind came tearing through the canopy and the first fat drops of rain began hammering down through the leaves.

He heard Jungkook before he saw him — of course it was Jungkook, because apparently even a life-threatening autumn storm couldn't stop the man from following him around like an extremely irritating, extremely persistent shadow.

"Taehyung!" Jungkook's voice, sharp with something that wasn't quite anger, cutting through the rising wind. "What are you doing out here, everyone's already—"

"I nearly had it," Taehyung shouted back, grinning despite the rain now plastering his hair flat, despite the fact that visibility was dropping fast and the wind was starting to genuinely howl through the upper branches. "You should have seen the antlers on it, it was—"

"It is storming."

"It's barely raining."

A crack of thunder rolled directly overhead, close enough that both of them felt it in their chests, and the sky, which had been merely grey a moment before, went white for half a second with a flash so bright it left spots swimming in Taehyung's vision.

"That," Jungkook said, already crossing the distance between them at a dead run, grabbing Taehyung's arm with a grip that was nowhere near as gentle as it could have been, "is not 'barely raining,' you absolute—"

He didn't finish the sentence.

Later, neither of them would be able to fully agree on the exact order of what happened next — it happened too fast, in the space of maybe two seconds, the kind of two seconds that stretch and compress themselves strangely in memory afterward. What Taehyung remembered was a sound like the sky tearing itself apart, and Jungkook's face going white, and Jungkook's hand yanking hard on his arm, shoving him sideways with a strength Taehyung hadn't known he had — and then the old oak directly above where Taehyung had been standing, split clean down its trunk by a bolt of lightning, coming down in a groaning, splintering crash of branches and white light and the smell of scorched wood.

What Jungkook remembered, for the rest of his life, was the half-second where he genuinely believed Taehyung hadn't made it clear.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***