“Always,” I answer, and the bond hums the word into our bones until it becomes law.
Let Me Be Enough
Taeyang
I wake before the light learns the window.
Yuna sleeps on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek, the other spread over the half-moon beneath her bandage. The crescent over my sternum warms in answer, the new sigil Seori inked there hummingNot yourseach time the old brand tests the frame of me like a thief checking windows.
It still whispers. Heel. Burn. Fix the world the only way you were taught.
I press two fingers over the cut and breathe through the ache. The whisper sulks. I can live with sulking.
I ease from the bed and stand in the thin blue of almost-dawn. Linen, moon mint, the faint sweetness of wisteria the garden sneaks in when it thinks no one is paying attention. I should be able to hold this—the quiet, the proof that we didn’t die.
Instead my hands remember the angle of a sword going wrong. Her breath catches in sleep. My body moves before thought: palm to her shoulder, a thumb at the hinge of her jaw, counting the soft clicks of a life I put at risk and then promised to defend with the rest of mine.
“Still here,” I whisper, a vow to the room as much as to her.
The corridor is colder. Courtiers pretend not to stare at the demon who walks the queen’s halls. I take the stairs two at a time and step into the training court where the palace keeps its unsaid things—splintered posts, scarred stone, the ghost of old sweat. I wrap my fists and meet the wooden man that has learned every soldier’s rage. It learns mine too.
Strike. Breathe. Reset.
I hit until the brand stops trying to be a mouth and starts to be a bruise. I hit until the wordsorryin my throat stops being a flinch and becomes a promise with shape. The old drills come back the way smoke finds the seam of a roof: foot low, shoulder soft, turn on the exhale. A clean line. A choice.
Footsteps. Not loud. Not sneaking. Rheon never sneaks; he just arrives and the world rearranges.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, because shadow sees more red than light ever will.
“Just enough to feel real,” I answer, breath fogging.
He leans against the low wall, the king of places people forget are thrones.
“What does the brand say today?”
“That I am a knife pretending to be a hand,” I say without decoration.
“And what do you say back?”
I flex my fingers.
“That a knife can learn to cut rope instead of throats.”
The corner of his mouth nods.
“Minji says you can’t out-apologize a wound,” he says. “You can only out-practice it.”
“Minji is usually right in the most irritating ways,” I admit.
He tips his chin toward my chest.
“You won’t be perfect,” he says. “You’ll be present. That’s the higher spell.”
I grunt.
“What if present isn’t enough?”
He pushes off the wall, shadow sliding after him like loyal night.
