Frostburn.
Ugly. Raw. Angry red and white, a bloom of ruined flesh radiating out from a single blackened core—circular, perfect, as if winter’s sun had scorched his fire to the bone.
Haneul stared.
His face twisted—not in mockery, not in pride, but something tight, something fragile. Regret. Fear. Remorse. Emotions that looked foreign on a face built for war.
He looked at Seungho, then back at the wound.
Then—without a word—he leaned in, and licked him.
It was not obscene.
It was not childish.
It was slow. It was holy. One long, deliberate stroke of his tongue, cool as fresh water, sliding from the shadowed dip between Seungho’s pectorals up to the base of his throat. He lingered there, mouth pressed to the burn, breath icy, as if pouring benediction into scorched earth.
Seungho’s heart hammered.
Not from lust—not yet—but from something older, something more frightening.
No one had ever touched him like that.
Not lovers. Not concubines.
Not even a mother’s hand, long gone from memory.
Haneul leaned back, scowl returning like a mask—but his eyes were enormous, wide and glassy and ringed in starlight, theglow still trembling in their depths. A drop of sweat—or was it a tear?—slid down his cheek.
“There,” Haneul said, voice a whisper cut with pride and shame and a new edge of lunacy. “I kissed it better…”
He fiddled with the hem of Seungho’s robe, not looking up, face burning. His fingers twisted silk between them, as if unsure how to let go.
“So… if I promise not to throw the word ‘cock’ around anymore…” Haneul muttered, voice uncertain for the first time, “…can you not be mad?”
It wasn’t coy. It wasn’t cute.
It was honest. Raw. It was everything no one had ever given to the Fire King: an apology without shame, a truce without terms, the truth of a creature who’d never learned how to lie.
Seungho didn’t answer right away.
He reached up instead, cupped the back of Haneul’s head, sliding his thumb into the hollow behind his ear—steady, grounding, reverent. He pulled him close, slow as sunrise, pressed his lips to Haneul’s brow.
Once.
Long.
Soft.
A promise, not a question.
And whispered, low and rough, into hair still scented with cold and storm:
“I was never mad.”
“Liar…” Haneul muttered, voice gravel-rough, lashes still clumped from tears and sweat, the world wrecked around them and his dignity somewhere on the floor with the roasted boar. He glared up—brat, menace, storm-born prince unbowed—and pointed at the bruise already rising on the Fire King’s left pec with a look that would have shamed the gods.
“You slammed me on this table so hard I thought you were gonna—”
