I don’t turn. I won’t give the day the satisfaction of watching me look for him. But my fingers find the ribbon at my wrist, now anchored by green glass, and hold on.
The silence doesn’t stop burning. It just learns my name.
The Bond Still Burns
Taeyang
I told myself I could outlast it.
Run far enough, bleed long enough, drown the ache in missions and noise until the bond thinned to a rumor my body stopped believing. A pretty lie, stitched from guilt and old discipline.
Bonds don’t fade. They fester.
The barracks stove ticks like a nervous heart, throwing a mean, inconsistent heat. I sit on the floor with my back to the cot, a half-empty bottle hooked in two fingers, watching flame lick the iron door and spit shadows up the wall. The room smells like oil and smoke and the ghost of clove on leather—hers, not mine.I cracked the window to cut it. Winter climbs in anyway, sharp enough to polish bone.
I press my palm to the crescent under my sternum.
It answers me low, stubborn, a bruise that learned to throb to someone else’s rhythm. I tried everything to quiet it. Spellbinders sewed cold wards along my ribs until my skin sang with static. Rune-smiths burned iron staves through the ink to blur the edges of fate’s handwriting. Twice I took a blade to it myself, cold steel, clean line, the way you excise rot from wood before the whole beam goes. The mark healed brighter, like light annoyed at being told where it could not live.
It’s hers. I’m hers. Every breath a confession.
If I had stayed—if I had taken what the bond offered—she would have learned the parts of me built for ruin. The berserker the old houses bred on purpose. The weapon that hums in my wrists when a room goes wrong. I could have handed her the parts I hid and asked her to call them anything but monster.
I didn’t. Cowards can lift mountains if they call it strategy.
I tip the bottle and let the last mouthful burn a path down my throat. It doesn’t touch the real fire. Nothing does. Not even the drill I do until my hands split and my shoulders shake. Not perimeter watches so cold my teeth remember the shape of prayer. Not the missions I take because they come with permission to bleed.
A knock threads the wind. Two beats, pause, two again.
“Taeyang.” Jisoo’s voice through the wood—stern, tired, that angelic patience he’s been trying to make into a habit. “Open.”
I don’t move. He opens anyway. He always could unhook a lock without insulting it.
Lamplight draws him in—wing clipped close, bandage neat, eyes taking in the bottle, the stove, the band around my chest where I wrapped myself too tight for a man who claims he isn’t running. He doesn’t sigh. He knows better than to waste breath on theatrics when I’m the audience.
“Perimeter,” he says. “North wall. Rheon wants eyes that know how to see past their own ghosts.”
“My ghosts are punctual,” I say, standing. Everything aches the way a room does after a fight, nothing obviously broken, everything aware of edges.
Jisoo sets a tin cup on the stove, adds water from the kettle like he lives here. He doesn’t look at me when he asks the thing he came to ask.
“You saw her last week.”
It isn’t a question. Angels don’t gamble with grammar when truth is the point.
I close my eyes.
Saw her is too small.Haunted meis closer. Yuna in a black cloak that made her skin look like dawn—the wrong metaphor, too gentle—and an ache riding her mouth that should’ve belonged to me to carry with her. The burial ground was quiet by then. No smoke. No noise. Just wind worrying rosemary and the tin chime Rheon salvaged, singing to prove the air could still move.
She stood in the gray and let tears fall like she’d finally found a place that knew their language. There was ash in her braid and a green bead on the ribbon at her wrist the color wind makes when it remembers how to be a river. I gripped the eave until the woodbit back and waited for my body to decide whether it was a door or a wall.
I stayed a wall.
“I didn’t speak,” I tell Jisoo. “She doesn’t need my silence close to hear it.”
“You should,” he says, because he refuses to build a life on should-nots anymore.
“I don’t know how to touch her without…stopping.”
