The storm has started it 2

They went down together in the mud, Taehyung shoved half beneath Jungkook's body, a heavy branch clipping Jungkook's shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise that would last two weeks, both of them soaked through, both of them breathing like they'd run for miles, and for one long, ringing, silent moment neither of them moved at all.

"Are you—" Jungkook's voice came out cracked, nothing at all like his usual composed court tone. "Taehyung. Are you hurt. Say something."

"I'm—" Taehyung blinked up at him, rain running down both their faces, close enough that he could feel Jungkook's heart hammering against his own chest, close enough that for one strange, suspended second the whole storm seemed to go quiet around them. "I'm fine. I think. You—"

"I'm fine."

"Your shoulder—"

"I said I'm fine." Jungkook's hands were shaking, Taehyung noticed, distantly, through the ringing in his own ears — shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. "You absolute reckless idiot, you could have—" His voice broke, actually broke, on the last word, and he didn't finish the sentence, just pressed his forehead briefly, involuntarily, against Taehyung's shoulder, breathing hard, and Taehyung felt something electric and strange crawl down his own spine that had nothing at all to do with the storm.

Neither of them said anything else for a long moment. Rain hammered down around the wreckage of the split oak. Somewhere in the distance, muffled by the wind, they could hear the rest of the hunting party shouting their names.

"We should," Taehyung said finally, voice unsteady, "probably get up."

"Yes," Jungkook said, and did not move for another three full seconds, and Taehyung, for reasons he could not have explained if his life depended on it, did not push him off any faster than he had to.

III. After

By the time the rest of the party found them — General Choi at a dead sprint, face grey with a fear Taehyung had genuinely never seen on him before, King Han close behind, both of them shouting orders at once — Taehyung had a shallow cut along one temple from a flying splinter, Jungkook had a bruised shoulder and a scraped forearm, and both of them, physically, were remarkably, almost suspiciously fine, all things considered.

Lady Baek, who had insisted on accompanying the hunt this year for reasons she had not explained to anyone and now looked considerably less surprised by recent events than everyone else, examined them both by lantern light back at camp with a slow, careful thoroughness that made Taehyung distinctly uneasy.

"You were both struck," she said, finally, not a question.

"Grazed," Jungkook corrected. "The tree took the worst of it."

"Mm." She did not look convinced. She held two fingers briefly against the pulse point of each of their wrists in turn, watching their faces with an unreadable intensity that made General Choi shift his weight nervously behind her. "Any ringing in the ears? Strange taste in the mouth? Anything odd at all?"

"No," Taehyung said. Which was not, strictly speaking, true — his ears had been ringing faintly for the better part of an hour, a low, strange hum just beneath the edge of hearing, but it was fading, mostly, and he saw no reason to worry his father over something that would surely be gone by morning.

Lady Baek looked at him for one long moment, in a way that suggested she knew exactly how untrue that answer was, and said nothing further about it — which, Taehyung would learn much later, was very much her way.

"Rest," she said instead, straightening. "Both of you. Warm food, dry clothes, and no more chasing stags into storms." A pointed look, aimed squarely at Taehyung.

"The stag started it."

"The stag," Lady Baek said dryly, "is not currently sitting in my medical tent."

IV. That Night

Taehyung lay awake long after the camp had gone quiet, listening to rain drumming steadily against the canvas of his tent, turning the events of the day over and over in his mind — the crack of the lightning, the tree coming down, the terrifying strength in Jungkook's grip as he'd been hauled sideways out of the way, the sound of Jungkook's voice breaking on you could have—

He was almost asleep, finally, the low hum in his ears having faded to something barely noticeable, when it happened.

He's fine. He said he's fine. He's probably already asleep, snoring, completely unbothered, because apparently being nearly crushed by a tree doesn't even register as an inconvenience to him, meanwhile I am lying here reliving the exact moment I thought he was—

Taehyung sat bolt upright in the dark.

The voice — and it was unmistakably a voice, clear as if someone were standing directly beside him and speaking softly into his ear — was Jungkook's. Not Jungkook speaking. He was almost entirely certain, with the strange, absolute certainty that comes at three in the morning after a very strange day, that Jungkook's mouth had not moved at all.

He held very still, heart suddenly hammering, waiting to see if he'd imagined it — exhaustion, maybe, or the aftershock of nearly dying, playing tricks on an overtired mind.

—and I still haven't thanked him properly, not really, "I'm fine" isn't a thank you, but if I actually thank him he's going to ask why my hands were shaking and I don't have an answer for that which doesn't lead directly back to the one thing I can never—

"Oh," Taehyung said out loud, to the empty dark of his tent, in a voice that came out considerably higher than he intended. "Oh, no."

Because that was not the sound of his own overtired imagination.

That was Han Jungkook's actual, unfiltered, entirely private train of thought, arriving in his head with perfect clarity from a tent that had to be at least fifteen paces away — and it did not stop, not for the rest of that long, sleepless, thoroughly upending night, no matter how hard Taehyung pressed both hands over his own ears in the increasingly desperate and increasingly useless hope that it might somehow help.

By dawn, Choi Taehyung had learned several things he had never wanted to know, had not slept even slightly, and had come to one single, horrified, absolutely inescapable conclusion.

This, he thought, staring at the canvas ceiling of his tent as the first grey light of morning crept in, is going to be an enormous problem.

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