“I think the ending will be what it is whether you practice for it or not,” he says dry. “Practice for the part where you live inside it.”
We stand until our breath makes a soft fog and the wards hum contentment at being watched. When Jisoo relieves me,he doesn’t speak as he passes; his wing brushes the stone like a benediction. I take the inner stairs down and cut across the moon garden because I am weak or honest or both.
The arch is bare this time of year. Wisteria sleeps with its fists closed. The bench under it remembers us whether it wants to or not. The air smells like cold water and old vows. My chest warms. No footsteps. No cloak. No ribbon.
Just the bond, sayingherethe way a compass points whether I deserve the way it helps.
I press my hand flat over the crescent until the heat steadies into something I can breathe around.
“I am not good enough,” I tell the garden, because sometimes you have to say the ugly thing so it stops pretending to be true just because it’s quiet. “But I can be willing.”
The under-light along the path brightens like it heard something it approved of.
Back in the barracks, I scrub the stove clean like penance and set the bottle on the shelf where it can glare at me in daylight. I wrap my knuckles, hit the wooden man until my shoulders are glass, and stop before pain turns stupid. I wash my hands. I run the band under warm water and knot it looser. I open the window again, let winter in, and count the stars until numbers run out.
The bond doesn’t sleep. It never does. It isn’t a leash or a mercy. It’s a door. I keep telling myself I can survive without walking through. Truth sits in my mouth, hard and small, and cuts when I swallow:
She is in my blood. My curse. My salvation. And I walked away.
The mark under my palm burns—not punishment. Reminder. I close my eyes. I see her anyway.
Yuna.
I wake three times before dawn with her name on my lips like I bit it to keep from crying out. Each time I stare at the ceiling and listen to the bond make its slow, patient case.
It doesn’t grow quieter. It learns my language. And it keeps telling the one story I can’t drink or bleed or run out of me:
She is the one thing I can’t burn. I think she’s going to ruin me. I think I want her to.
Echoes of Her Name
Minji
Silence has a sound. It lives between footfalls in the hall and inside the pause before someone answersI’m fine. It lives in Yuna now.
Her laughter used to stick to the rafters of the Guild like sunlight—loud, careless, contagious. These days it comes out thin, polite, like a song she can’t remember the verses too. I keep a running list of things that used to make her laugh—Seori’s deadpan threats, Jisoo’s dramatic flourishes, my scandalousgossip about the quartermaster—and cross them off one by one when they don’t work.
I miss her.
She’s here, technically. She drills. She spars. She files reports with tidy handwriting and no jokes in the margins. But the girl who braided my hair without asking, who stole apples “for morale,” who danced on the training mats to make the rookies relax—that version of her lives somewhere I can’t get to.
Somewhere with him. Taeyang.
He left clean—no goodbye, no explanation, no shards to sweep. Just… absence. Yuna pretends it’s fine. She pretends a lot of things. Then she turns her face to the window and presses her palm to the spot beneath her collar where the mark lives, and I see the truth flare under her skin like a coal that refuses to go out.
The bond hurts her.
No, that’s dishonest:hehurts her by staying close enough to burn and far enough to make it look like the fire is her fault.
I watch her on the mats and try not to look like I’m counting. Her form is perfect—scythe-clean, ruthless, no wasted motion. It’s like watching frost carve a pattern: beautiful, and also the death of anything soft. She finishes a set, pivots, and slips on loose gravel. Nothing dramatic. Just gravity reasserting itself. She goes down hard on one knee and doesn’t even curse. She stares at the floor like maybe if she’s still enough it will swallow her and she won’t have to keep doing this.
I’m there before the rookies can blink, hand out, and voice easy.
“Come on get up”
She takes my hand and lets me brush dirt off her shoulder.
“Thanks,” she says. The smile she gives me is the one she uses on dignitaries and old women who pinch cheeks. It doesn’t touch her eyes.
