I don’t ask how she is. She wouldn’t answer and I’m tired of making her lie to me to keep from breaking. Instead I hand her a canteen and point my chin at the bench.
“Five minutes. Doctor’s orders.”
“You’re not a doctor,” she says, taking a drink anyway.
“Fine,” I say. “Best friend orders.”
Her mouth tugs like it wants to remember how.
“Bossy.”
“Effective,” I counter, and ignore the way she winces—barely—when the bond hums under her skin. The crescent warms and cools. She rubs it through her shirt, casual, like a person with a phantom itch. I pretend not to notice. She pretends I pretend well.
Later in the mess, she pushes her soup around until it looks busy. I steal her spoon and shovel a mouthful into my own mouth because I am shameless and it used to make her snort. Today she just passes me the bread like a mother indulging a child.
“Eat,” she says, and I want to shake her for spending all her softness on everyone but herself.
Rheon passes by and squeezes her shoulder without making it a scene. Seori drops a roll on Yuna’s tray and then on mine and tells us both to sleep like we’re rookies who think resilience is a spell you cast, not a practice you keep. Jisoo hovers at a distance he thinks is subtle. He’s learning. We’re all learning.
When night settles and the Guild remembers how to be a building instead of a battlefield, I crawl into Yuna’s bed the way I used to when we were kids who thought promises could armor a heart. She doesn’t say anything; she just rolls toward me and lets me tug the blanket over her shoulder. The ribbon at her wrist, frayed violet, brushes my knuckles. The mark beneath her collar pulses slow, stubborn. I know the rhythm now. I wish I didn’t.
“Tell me a happy thing,” I murmur into her hair.
She thinks, long enough that I regret asking.
“The rooky with the green boots,” she says at last. “She stood her ground today. Didn’t flinch on the feint.”
I hum.
“I bribed her with apple slices for a week.”
Yuna’s laugh is a breath more than a sound.
“Of course you did.”
We lie there listening to the building settle. When her breathing evens out, I stay awake anyway, counting the ways she’s changed without asking permission. She doesn’t hum under her breath anymore when she cleans her blade. She doesn’t tuck flowers into the rookies’ hair to make them roll their eyes and soften their shoulders. She checks the balcony twice before she sleeps—not superstitious, not really. Just… waiting.
I hate him for that. Not a righteous hate. A petty, personal one. I hate that he made me learn a new Yuna, a quiet Yuna, a careful Yuna who saves her tears for rooms with doors. I hate that she still looks toward the tree line like fog might bring him back if she wants it enough. I hate that when I see a black coat at the end of the corridor my body leaps before my brain can sayit’s not him.
I write letters in my head to a man I don’t owe grace:You don’t get to teach her silence and call it protection. You don’t get to starve yourself and ask her to thank you for it. If you love her, be brave. If you don’t, be gone in a way that lets her heal.
In the morning she rises with the dawn and the discipline of a queen exiled from a throne she never asked for. I watch her lace her boots, left then right, double-knotting like the world will loosen anything she doesn’t tie twice. The mark warms and she presses it, automatically, the way a person presses a bruise when they still can’t believe it belongs to them.
“Breakfast?” I ask, too bright.
“In a minute,” she says, eyes on the window.
“Yuna.” I say her name like a leash for my temper. “He doesn’t deserve… this.”
Her jaw works.
“I know.”
“Then stop feeding it.”
“I’m trying,” she says softly, and the honesty guts me more efficiently than anger ever could.
I cross the room and take her face in both hands, thumbs at the hinge of her jaw the way my mother used to do when the world got loud.
