It wrecked me. Not because it meant I still mattered, but because I hadn’t earned being a thought she let herself have.
I pressed my fist to my mouth and breathed through the urge to run to her and the urge to run from her and the old, familiar urge to break the world so it couldn’t ask anything of me.
Jisoo stood, joints popping like the woods were letting him go.
“I’m going to Minji,” he said. “We don’t fix ourselves alone.”
He started to leave, then paused.
“You say it’s too late like it’s protection. It sounds like fear.”
“It is,” I said, and the admission felt like stepping onto a floor that might hold. “I don’t know how to love her without wanting everything.”
“Then want everything,” he said, almost smiling. “And give it back if she asks.”
He went. The branches took him in. The clearing breathed.
I stayed with the statue and the mist and the quiet that scrapes. My hands looked like a sentence someone else wrote. I opened them anyway. I set them palm-up on my knees and let the mark speak to my bones the way storms speak to shore.
A pulse. Another. No command. No promise. Justthere.
“I hear you,” I said, not sure which of us I meant. “I’m sorry. I am… tired of being a coward and calling it care.”
A wind slouched through the trees and made the red mist shiver. Far off, something howled and something answered, and neither of them sounded hungry.
I tipped my head back against the faceless stone and closed my eyes.
If I went to her and she turned away, I would stand in the dark and keep the knives off her door until my knees failed. If she asked for truth, I would hand it to her with both palms and let her cut away whatever didn’t belong. If she asked me to leave, I would go and still make the road safer for her feet. If she asked me to stay—
The thought was a cruelty and a kindness.
Across the bond, a tremor—small, stubborn—like a girl tucking a bent blossom deeper so it can lean without breaking.
I opened my eyes to the ugly, honest woods and the sky that never learned blue and the path I had carved by pacing. I stood.
Even if she never reached for me, I would learn how to walk toward something other than war.
Even if I shook, I would knock.
Garden of Fae and Fire
Yuna
The garden isn’t of this world. Or maybe the world has always been this beautiful and I just forgot how to look without bracing for pain. Vines braid themselves along black stone like stories waiting for a brave tongue. Crimson lilies bloom from cracks no bloom should survive. Moon roses glow with a patient, ghostly pulse. Magic hangs thick in the air—sweet, heavy, alive—too much like hope to be safe.
It’s supposed to be peaceful. It isn’t. Not when the storm under my ribs is learning thunder. Not when every breath comes as a warning and a want.
Not when I know he’s coming.
The bond has been a live wire for days—sleep skipping me as if we’re strangers, power hitching and flaring in my palms until the lilies shiver in their beds. I told myself I wouldn’t call him. I told myself I would be stone.
And yet: the prickle along my nape; the way the night pulls itself taut; the first footfall, low and controlled—danger wearing manners.
I don’t turn. Let him cross the path lined with moon roses and soft lies. Let the silence stretch across us like silk pulled tight.
When I finally look up, he’s there—shadow and regret wrapped in a body I remember too well. His eyes find mine and hold, like prayer and punishment at once. He looks at me like I am a sacred thing and a curse he has chosen to keep.
“I shouldn’t have come,” he rasps.
