Haneul snatched it like a lifeline, lashed it around his waist, then tried the sky-blue robe. It dwarfed him, fabric slipping from one proud shoulder, then the other, hem dragging behind like the train of a spurned empress. His jaw worked in frustration. He yanked it off, flung it onto the bed, chest heaving.
“Fuck—it’s too big…”
His voice was low, sullen, as if the silk itself had betrayed him.
For a second, he just stood there: sharp-chested, slim-hipped, half-dressed and bristling with the naked pride of a god too wild to fit inside a king’s gift. He twisted the hem of the inner jeogori between his fingers, staring at the floor.
“…Maybe I’ll just go with the pants and the inner layer…”
It wasn’t a statement. It was an almost-question, a private surrender.
Seungho stepped forward, careful, slow. He picked the robe from the bed, folded it once, twice, made it small enough for a leaner, smaller man, held it open.
“Let me.”
Haneul blinked, bristling at the offer, but did not refuse. He let Seungho drape the silk over him, cinch the waist, fold the collar,adjust the sleeves with a slow, deliberate tenderness that was all command and no mockery. The king’s hands moved with the same precision he brought to battle—ruthless, sure, and reverent.
And when Seungho stepped back, what stood before him was not a joke, not a foundling, not a weapon out of place. It was a vision: sky dressed in silk, a storm caught in light, the boy who would not bow now crowned in the color of his own name.
Haneul’s eyes flicked down, stunned, chest rising quick, as he took himself in—how the robe fit now, how the sash lay just so, how the silk followed the long, hard lines of his body and pooled around his feet. He loosened the collar with a grunt, rolled his shoulders with a soldier’s caution—always making sure, even now, that he could still move, still fight, still run if he must.
He nodded—no praise, just that sharp, invisible tilt of the chin.
He averted his face—because letting Seungho see this reaction was more naked than standing there in nothing.
“You sure know how to dress someone…” Haneul muttered, jaw tight, trying to sound threatening, but failing, the gratitude raw and unfamiliar.
Seungho arched an eyebrow, dangerous and amused.
“How many concubines have you dressed up… huh? A hundred? A thousand?”
Haneul scowled, throwing the words like knives, but they were dull with confusion, blunt with jealousy he didn’t know how to name.
“Perverted… lunatic…”
His fists curled. He looked, in that moment, both divine and desperately, infuriatingly young.
Then:
“Let’s go already before I rip this stupid thing off and throw it out the window.”
There was the thank you—wrapped in teeth and thorns, a challenge, a dare, a confession he’d never say aloud.
Seungho said nothing. He smoothed one last fold of Haneul’s sleeve, knuckles lingering a heartbeat longer than they should, and murmured, voice thick, deep, almost reverent:
“Let’s go, Sky.”
And so they went—Haneul draped in blue and gold, every inch a wildling storm reborn in the king’s silk, Seungho’s fire shadowing him, their heat and cold trailing behind like banners in a world suddenly too small for both.
The doors to the inner sanctum groaned open—fire-hinges singing, echoes leaping ahead of them. The hush that followed was immediate, absolute. Court functionaries stilled mid-stride, a concubine nearly dropped her tray of honeywine, the palace guards at the gate—men who’d watched kingdoms rise and burn—stood, blinking.
There stood Seungho, Fire King, clad in gold-hemmed robes and midnight-black, crowned in red, expressionless, untouchable.
And beside him—
Haneul, in a robe the color of morning. Sash tied with ruthless delicacy, collar loosened in studied asymmetry, pale collarbone bared to the whole golden hall. His braid swung like a comet, hips rolling with the predatory grace of a cat who would not becaged, eyes fixed straight ahead, not once deigning to acknowledge the palace that dared to judge him.
Frost curled from Haneul’s fingertips, lazy and unbothered, as if cold was merely his birthright; heat shimmered off Seungho’s broad shoulders. The tension between them was a living thing—electric, sharp, hungry.
