Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

♖♜

When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

Anything that touches.

— Mary Oliver, “Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way”

♖♜

The banquet room of the T’ak manor is secluded from the rest of the estate, but Jimin still hears the commotion of the party. He can still taste the wine from each of the dozens of cups, can still feel the breath from a governor’s laugh drifting across the back of his neck. The plates spread out in front of him are almost empty, but he hasn’t taken a single bite.

“Are you feeling well, Jimin-ssi?” Asks his date for the evening. Ambassador Hua, from an inner quadrant moon that has belonged for the Empire for as long as their records have existed.

Jimin purses his lips in a smile, and looks up demurely through his lashes. He can feel the makeup sticky on his face, each mote of powder as heavy as a stone. He can smell the garlic from Hua’s last dinner on his breath; he can hear everything, from the birds shifting in their nests outside of the manor to the rush of Hua’s blood through his veins.

“Of course, Ambassador,” he demures. A hand placed against Hua’s arm, feeling the imperfect weave of the silk scratch against his fingers like sharpened teeth. “I’m afraid I overindulged at the reception.”

“Ah,” Hua says. His eyes flick, unsubtly, down to Jimin’s lips. Around the table, conversation hasn’t paused for them, and Jimin’s mind hasn’t paused cataloguing it, saving the important scraps that the Empress will ask him for when he returns from this assignment.

This assignment is short, at least, but—usually, Jimin stays inside the palace. Usually, when the Empress gives him to an ambassador or merchant to take to a banquet, as a sign of her favor, the parties are hosted in the miles-long swath of decadence enclosed by the palace walls, where the wealthiest and most powerful of Empire citizens enjoy their manors at the expense of their ruler.

Usually, after assignments, Jimin can stumble into Hoseok’s rooms when he’s finished with the debriefs, and feel the closest he thinks he might ever get to quiet. To peace, from chafing inside the softest fabrics in the galaxy and the oppressive weight of seeing and feeling and hearing everything at once.

“Don’t worry,” Hua tells him, like there’s anything in this manor that could make Jimin worry that isn’t himself, and the way he can feel his senses spiraling out of control. “Lady T’ak has offered us quarters for the evening, so you won’t have to worry about making it back to Namsan.”

It’s not a reassurance, but it is Jimin’s duty.

He makes his most honored thanks to the lady of the manor, when she summons a servant to see them to their room.

“It is my honor,” she says, with the arch of a perfect eyebrow. “Anything for guests of her Majesty.”

Hua beams at the praise. Jimin bows, winces at the scrape of his clothing against skin, the heavy weight of his earrings. His jaw is clenched so tightly that his teeth ache at the root. The ambassador kisses Lady T’ak’s hand, and one servant in the back passage behind the banquet room begins whispering to another about a theft from the study, and somewhere not far away in the mountains a branch cracks off a tree and crumbles down to the earth.

“Your chambers,” the servant says, before Jimin can begin to pull himself out of the dizzying buzz of the world around him.

Ambassador Hua thinks him dull, Jimin knows. Most of the officials he meets see the glazed look in his eyes, the ways he’s been trained to smile and duck his head, and they write him off as the second prince’s pet, a pretty reward they’re allowed to parade on their own arms for a particular job well done.

Most of the people Jimin is gifted to are barely important, or at least not prominent enough to be offended at the offer of the prince’s leftovers. Yet they think him a prize, most of them as over-eager as Hua, and Jimin bats his eyelashes and plays the fool and always, always pays attention to the most important person in the room.

“Don’t worry,” Hua tells him again, as he smooths his hand down Jimin’s spine.

Jimin blinks his eyes wide, and lets himself be manhandled. Onto the bed, the heated floor burning his skin even through the soft layers of down, onto his stomach, as he does his best to feign participation. Hua isn’t much taller than him, or much broader, but he uses the leverage Jimin gives up willingly to be more aggressive than Jimin thought he would.

It hurts, he muses at the hand gripping his wrists, overwhelmingly damp with sweat. Even as he listens to Lady T’ak’s conversation with a senator from the Empire’s most recently acquired system, cataloguing the scraps of information that nobles like to hoard for themselves to try and hold leverage over other politicians, he can feel each time Hua blinks his eyes, the disturbance of the air from it buffeting him along with the rest of it, the frantic movement, the brutish way he seems to want Jimin to be small underneath him.

Sometimes, deception takes more active participation than this. This—this is easy, Jimin thinks, half-desperate. He just has to lie here. He doesn’t even have to think about how his clothing hurts anymore. Now it’s just sweat, and too many currents of air, and hot heavy breath and hands and pain that feels like a punishment for something he hadn’t even known he had done wrong.

“Gorgeous,” Hua groans, though he can’t even see Jimin’s face.

Jimin does his best to moan, to show whatever appreciation might be appropriate. He doesn’t think this would hurt for anyone else, because he’s careful in his preparation for these evenings, but he’s too sensitive for even the air to feel good against the sweat-damp patches of his hair.

He doesn’t want to be listening to three different clandestine conversations. He doesn’t want to be memorizing the details of the manor, doesn’t want to have read the documents across the room when he feigned misdirection into the Lady’s study, doesn’t want to be half-meditating just to get himself through Hua’s relentlessness.

Jimin wants Hoseok’s lips, dry and gentle against his forehead. He wants those delicate hands smoothing down his shoulders, and the awful kind of relief that follows where all Jimin can hear is the soft thump of Hoseok’s heart, where all he can taste is the familiar air of the prince’s quarters.

It’s not perfect, it doesn’t take it all away, but anything is better than this.

“Oh,” Jimin moans, when he knows he’s supposed to. He arches his back, turns his cheek to the awful scrape of the satin pillow, cranes his neck to toss the image of darkened eyes over his shoulder as Hua shudders to a finish inside of him.

He collapses onto the bed, as soon as Hua’s weight lifts off his back. Jimin trembles, hopes that it reads as pleasure, because he can’t stop himself from shaking all over. His hands clench into fists in the blanket, under the pillow, and he blinks wetly across the bed as Hua relaxes into a self-satisfied kind of glow.

It’s been more than a day since Jimin spent any time alone with Hoseok. It’s been more than a day since he’s had any kind of respite from the onslaught of the world around him.

He remembers, almost, the way it felt before this. He’s not sure if the memories are real or dreamt, because they feel so muted when he calls them up. Everything blurry, and soft, even if when he was small he found it all so overwhelming.

The Empress, years ago, sent out soldiers to Namsan’s orphanages. The palace is the city, and the city is the palace, but the place Jimin remembers was dirty and small and cramped, crowding with too many children for the matrons to keep much semblance of order outside mealtimes, when they all lined up with empty bowls and perfect manners.

The soldiers inspected all the children, and took the four who passed a series of tests Jimin can no longer remember. Four of them—one for each member of the Empress’s family. The prince, the princess heir, the king consort, and the Empress herself. Jimin was the youngest, at seven.

Jimin is the only one of those children still alive.

He rolls onto his side, when Hua retreats to the washroom. He hears the chime of a bell, the servant approaching from a back passage with a tray of luxury washes and oils and scents, and then feels the burst of steam as the bath is drawn. Under the sound of Lady T’ak’s conversation with her husband, Jimin can hear the water in the pipes underneath the manor itself.

He closes his eyes, to try to block at least one sense. It only barely works; he can see a million different scattered lights behind his own eyelids, can practically see past the membrane, everything more and more sensitive the longer he goes without Hoseok.

This hadn’t been what killed the other children, but—Jimin watched their sanity slip from them, one by one, as their senses grew more and more impossible to control. Until Nara shrieked at the burn of light even in perfect darkness, and Yejun clawed at his own ears until they were bloody, and Seohee stopped eating when the taste of a meal across the forest became impossible to stand.

Through it all, watching the three of them disintegrate, Jimin clung to Hoseok and trembled as he waited for those awful things to happen to him, too.

He doesn’t remember the softness of before, really. He has impressions of it, knows the way he thinks other people exist, but—mostly, Jimin remembers the nothingness.

It’s how the doctor broke them. Jimin remembers the man’s spectacles, the pinch between his brows, the sleek capsules he guided each of them into, after an injection to their arms that made Jimin’s whole body buzz, a swarm of wasps underneath his skin. He remembers trying to climb out, when the soldier above him started to close the door, and the heavy shove to his chest, and the click of the lid sealing shut. The hum of a machine, the cool press of something almost-liquid underneath him, and then—nothing.

He doesn’t know how long it lasted. With the distance of Jimin’s memory, it could have only been an hour, but he thinks it must have been days. Days of darkness, of silence, of feeling absolutely nothing against his skin. He doesn’t think he could feel himself breathing. He remembers thinking that he was dead, and trying to scream, and not being able to feel his own vocal cords.

When the doctor let them out of those capsules, Jimin’s fingernails had grown long enough to curl. He felt weak and thin and terrified, the world sharp and impossible to understand and so overwhelming that he sobbed the first time the doctor turned on a light.

And then everyone else was dead, barely four years later. Yejun lasted the longest, until Jimin was almost thirteen, before he slipped his guards one later afternoon and threw himself onto a rail line.

The bathwater shuts off. Jimin breathes out at one less thing to listen to, and turns instead to the sound of Hua’s splashing, the bubble of the product in his hair, the taste of the oils he must have sprinkled into the water. If everything wasn’t so much, right now, Jimin thinks he might take the time to draw himself a new bath. To fill it with nothing but water, and sink under the surface, and pretend that the world around him was always as muffled as it seems when he’s cocooned in the embrace of a bath.

But the tub would still have lingering traces of Hua’s products, and his skin, and no matter how tightly he clenched his lips Jimin would still be able to taste it.

When the ambassador wraps himself in a pale robe and sends Jimin off with a quick probe to where he’d fucked, Jimin stumbles into the washroom and makes do with a damp cloth, rubbing off sweat and makeup and perfume until he feels as clean as he’ll be able to manage.

He’s had what he needs, what the Empress had asked him for, since the reception earlier in the afternoon. He is useful, if not always to keep Hoseok safe, then to at least use the gifts the Empire gave him to its advantage. The Empress knows by now that she cannot separate them for long, that she has to send Hoseok off-world if she needs Jimin for his skills, but recently she’s gotten loose about sending him around Sansegye, the planet just large enough that Jimin feels the space between here and the palace like the length between solar systems.

That night, Jimin doesn’t sleep. The sheets are rough, the dark is incomplete, the manor around him is still teeming with sound. Hua smells like something floral and soft, and like himself underneath all of that; his breath drifts between them, and Jimin tastes the remnants of dinner underneath the clean crispness of his nightly wash.

They board the train, an agile silver beast that winds itself through the endless mountains, an hour past dawn. Jimin trembles in his seat, and keeps his eyes fixed on the horizon, and tries to keep himself from collapsing from the weight of things that no one else understands.

♖

Hoseok meets Jimin at the train station. It’s below him, and the guard just to his left is deeply displeased, judging from the frown digging into his lips, but Jimin can’t bring himself to care. The train had pulled to a stop with an awful screech, something in the mechanism the conductor warned them about as they boarded, and it’s ringing in Jimin’s ears louder than anything else, the vibrations in the air still shuddering as he trips his way onto the platform.

Under the red arches of the pavilion, Hoseok glows. His gold circlet shines in his hair, his layers rustle in the mild autumn breeze, his hands are tan from sun and so familiar when they reach out that Jimin almost cries when he stumbles within their reach.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok coos into his hair, as he tugs Jimin close. “How was your trip?”

Hua is later off the train than Jimin, and slightly disgruntled from it if the noise he makes is any indication. But Jimin doesn’t care, because—some of the noises are receding, the city fading into a less distinct mess of input, and Hoseok is all he can smell, all he can taste in the scant space between them.

“It was good,” Jimin replies, because Hua is still in earshot. “I had fun.”

Their code, between them, for awful.

Finally, when their embrace has gone on for long enough that the smallest imperfections in Jimin’s silk have stopped weighing on him, Hoseok lets him go.

“I’m so sorry, Ambassador.” Hoseok is charming enough that even Jimin believes it, when he beams at Hua and offers his arm out, leading him away from the train and toward the shaded walkways of the outer city. “Jiminie and I have been close for so long, you know, it’s always wonderful to see him home.”

Now it’s Hua’s turn to demure, to play at obsequence, as Hoseok leads him through the path to the inner palace. Hua doesn’t live remotely close, of course; he’s no more than a ten minute walk away from the train station, and the public ship docks are just past this pavilion. He’s not nearly important enough to live close to the Empress, and Jimin knows for a fact that Hoseok had to look his home moon up when Jimin received the assignment.

Jimin follows them at a respectable distance, just behind Hoseok and just in front of his guard. Namsan is safe, of course, and closely guarded, but—the Empress is always cautious, and Jimin doesn’t blame her. He hears enough military gossip on assignments to be wary, even if Hoseok never takes any threat of danger particularly seriously.

He relishes the feeling in his core as he walks, the skin-deep sense of being settled that he’s been aching for for more than a day. It’s not enough, not nearly enough, but Jimin can’t tuck himself into Hoseok like he wants to in public, and Jimin can’t ever strip himself of his skin and crawl inside Hoseok’s body like he dreams about sometimes either, even in their most private of moments.

No one can tell why Hoseok calms Jimin like this. The doctor had been baffled by it, but each time Jimin saw him, until he was punished for his three catastrophic failures, he assured the Empress that he was sane. Sane, and growing slowly used to the power of his new senses.

He doesn’t remember when they identified Hoseok as the cause. Maybe when they isolated him for testing, and Jimin got worse and worse until he felt like he would die as one after the other, people approached to try to calm him down. He remembers vanishing into the smell of antiseptic, the sting of it at his nose and throat, and losing himself to that one sense, that one smell, until they let Hoseok in to try and coax him out.

Hoseok hadn’t been that much older than Jimin, but he took the responsibility with a solemn weight that Jimin still sees in him, when Hoseok thinks he’s asleep.

He belongs to you, the Empress had said, and Jimin heard it from across the inner palace and trembled at what it meant. Princes take care of their things.

It’s what Jimin is. He knows it, as he fades into the background of Hoseok’s conversation with the ambassador. The guard knows it; he doesn’t spare Jimin a second glance, and Jimin is more grateful for that than for any other kind of attention. The hum of the city is a familiar kind of noise, at least; he’s had more than a decade to learn it all, and while nothing is ever the same twice, he can focus enough on Hoseok to get a sense of Namsan as a whole, as a buzz of scent and color in the back of his mind.

Now, on the leisurely walk back to the palace, Jimin can take the time to look him over again. Years have taught him the texture of Hoseok’s skin, each dip and groove in his pores; hours of study have taught him the feel of all those textures under his fingers.

He likes the certainty of it. The palace changes, the Empire changes, but Jimin will always know Hoseok better than anyone else alive. There’s a comfort in knowing his place; the pallet in the chamber just off of Hoseok’s, the floor familiar to his knees behind Hoseok’s cushion on the dais, one step behind him and always ready to serve. A prized, and useful, possession.

They leave Hua to his modest estate, and Jimin presses his fingers against the palm of Hoseok’s hand, when Hoseok stretches it behind him. He can’t catch up, walk with Hoseok arm in arm, because here the paths are littered with fruit trees and the winding paths up to estates, and Hoseok is recognized as his people’s Prince and approached accordingly. A gaggle of children bring him hastily-picked flowers, and Hoseok crouches on the stones to fling his arms around them, and their fathers hang awkward under the trees until Hoseok waves them over to offer a blessing.

None of them spare Jimin any overt attention, but he sees the lingering looks when Hoseok turns away. Some of the men whisper, and Jimin hears every word, and he ignores them with the placid smile that fixes onto his face as surely as the green shade cast by the trees.

Slowly, waylaid by citizens of all standings, the inner palace looms. Jimin gets more twitchy as they approach, has to clasp his hands behind his back to stop them from fidgeting, the press of smells from a nearby spice market and tastes from street vendors clogging him up until he feels like he might burst from the pressure. He can see tension in Hoseok’s neck, knows he would hurry the journey if he could, and smothers a stab of resentment at the kindness of coming to meet him.

Just beyond the wall of the inner palace, Hoseok falls back to take Jimin’s hand. He squeezes, once, and Jimin settles again. The world, just for a moment, narrows down to the touch of skin. The way the spice-tinged breeze coming off of the nape of Hoseok’s neck is tinged now with sweat, familiar salt that Jimin tastes on the tip of his tongue.

This time, the blessing is unspoken. Hoseok is the royal of the people, the one who leaves the inner palace to walk among them, who knows their grandmothers and their children. He blesses each one in turn, a gift from his ancestors, and Jimin knows the cadence of it by heart.

He hears without hearing the way Hoseok is giving him luck, like he always does before Jimin sees the Empress. Jimin knows he doesn’t need it—the mission was successful, and he heard enough that the Empress will be pleased at the risk she took in sending him—but there’s a cold bit of fear in his chest. That next time she’ll send him farther, that he won’t make it back in time before collapsing into himself.

“I’ll be in the garden,” Hoseok says, by which he means the library. He likes to walk among the flowers, until the insects take a liking to the gold-patterned flowers on his sleeves.

The door to the throne room looms, a deep red that always makes Jimin think of blood. Hoseok departs, his guard on his heels, and Jimin waits to be summoned.

He can hear inside, of course. The Senate has adjourned for the day, and the council of governors doesn’t meet again for another four months, and the ambassadors’ committees are held elsewhere in the palace, and the Empress is alone but for her guards and her daughter in the antechamber she uses as her study. He could walk in, if she wouldn’t have him punished for it; he hears the scrape of pen across paper, the flip of pages in the princess’s book, and knows that neither of them are doing anything particularly critical.

Instead, Jimin waits for the servant who disappeared at their approach to return. He listens to her footsteps, not even close to silent as hard as she tries.

She beckons him in, when she appears through the side door of the hall. This one is smaller, and almost vanishes next to the grandeur of the main entrance. Servants use it, mostly, and Jimin when he has to. Now, he feels pleasantly small in the passage just barely wide enough for him to fit in, the wood worn from constant footsteps, the light filtering in golden and peaceful for one last moment before he emerges.

“Oh,” the Empress says, like she’s pretending to not have expected him.

As soon as she speaks, Jimin sweeps into a bow. His forehead touches the floor, his form perfect, his whole body aching like one connected bruise from the insistence of Hua’s early morning advances. He hears the princess shift, her discomfort with him as familiar as Hoseok’s ease, and waits for the Empress’s huff of approval before he rises.

Empress Suro is difficult to look at. She isn’t extravagant, isn’t decked out in blinding gold or jewels, but—Jimin isn’t ever comfortable when she looks at him. He isn’t supposed to meet her eyes anyway, a small blessing, but she expects him to get as close as he’s allowed. So Jimin focuses on her jaw, the severe lines around her mouth, the small childhood scar hidden under the press of her lower lip. Slowly, he traces up; the graying hair at her temple, the neat tuck of her ears, exactly like Hoseok’s in shape and size.

“Jimin,” she says, almost pleasant. “What do you have for me?”

Quickly, quietly, Jimin tells her. He’ll need to write everything up later, but the Empress isn’t nearly patient enough to wait for a formal report. She takes careful notes, half her hand smeared with hours-old ink, and frowns through her glasses at the pad of paper crammed with immaculate handwriting. The princess listens with her eyes locked onto the pages of her book, but they’ve gone still enough that Jimin knows she isn’t reading.

He can’t fit in every word of every conversation, but Jimin spent the train ride condensing what he’d learned. He knows what she wants from him, and he knows the unexpected scraps that will make her happy, and he knows better than to expect a reward but he can’t help but want one anyway.

Even here, in the most soundproof room in Namsan, Jimin can hear the bustle of the spice market, the laughter of children at a puppet show. The princess’s perfume is sweet, modestly applied. Underneath that, she smells like the oils in the steaming baths her servants have been drawing for her since Jimin was forced to learn how to distinguish individual scents, to sort and categorize them to keep his sanity.

“Good,” the Empress says, when Jimin has run out of information. There isn’t any room left on the page, as she flips it over and continues writing far beyond whatever Jimin had given her. “You’re rather proficient at this, Jimin.”

“I serve at the pleasure of the crown,” Jimin replies, as blandly as he can manage. His stomach twists from hunger, his skin aches for touch that doesn’t make him want to scream.

The answer doesn’t please her, but Jimin knows by now that little ever does. Her lips purse; Jimin watches the shift of the pulse at her neck, just above the scarlet rise of her collar. There’s another scar underneath the fabric, from an assassination attempt just weeks into her reign. He’s never seen it, but the story is famous enough that he could recite it from memory even before he’d ever seen the inner palace. She killed the assassin herself, legend goes; Jimin believes it, like he believes in the ground underneath his feet.

Finally, she makes a haughty noise in her throat. Waves her free hand, and allows him to leave. Jimin bows, from the waist this time, and turns to go.

“By the way,” the Empress says. “You and Hoseok are to accompany Dawon on her next tour. I’ll summon you to discuss your assignments before you leave.”

Jimin freezes, with his hand just barely touching the door.

They’ve never been on tour before. Hoseok gets sick from warp flight, sometimes, and he’s more important on Sansegye than off-world, and tours are more about politics than about goodwill. Tour means constant attention, and assignments mean that Jimin will spend his share of time on a stranger’s arm, without the promise of privacy that comes with the entrance to Hoseok’s quarters.

“Of course,” Jimin says, as smoothly as he can. “Anything you wish.”

She dismisses him with another flick of her hand. Jimin feels the disruption in the air; before he can even think about it, he’s already gone.

♖

That night, when the moons cut across the sky outside Hoseok’s balcony, Jimin curls close into him. His pallet in the adjoining room is empty, barely used, and their skin feels good pressed close together. Jimin can savor the touch of wind drifting from the open balcony doors, can relish the smell of Hoseok’s sweat and bath oils heavy in the space between their bodies.

“We’ll be fine,” Hoseok says, like that will reassure either of them. “Ah, my Jimin. You worry too much.”

Jimin worries a perfectly healthy amount. He pouts up, and gets a kiss on his forehead for the trouble. They’re both bare from the waist up, Hoseok’s legs stretching out tan and muscular underneath a soft pair of shorts. Jimin missed being close to him like this, even for just a handful of nights. Not just how quiet it gets, how Hoseok brings him back down from the blur of sensation like nothing else can, but—the intimacy.

Hoseok knows that on nights like these, there are few ways that Jimin wants to be touched. This is one of them, and even as Jimin shifts to get closer, to tuck his head up against Hoseok’s chin like a cat, he can feel the remnant of the burn Hua left behind.

My Jimin, Hoseok calls him, affectionate. Always with a kiss, or a scratch against his scalp, and a reminder of Jimin’s place.

Most days, Jimin loves him for it. Like today, still sour with the taste of strangers, he drinks it up like water for a tree, his fruits heavy and burdensome and all for Hoseok to pluck at his will. There’s a simple kind of satisfaction in knowing that Hoseok, at least, finds him valuable. The Empress thinks he’s useful, but Hoseok—

“I missed you,” Hoseok says, for what must be the tenth time since they fell into bed.

For all the ways he’s had to learn to keep himself standing, Jimin always melts when Hoseok says it. He wants to curl up inside of those words, wants to catch the feeling in a net and lock it away to look at whenever he can’t sleep in a stranger’s bed. Hoseok’s finger taps against his nose; they’re pressed together, chest to chest, and all Jimin can hear is the sound of Hoseok’s heartbeat.

In the morning, Hoseok supervises as Jimin helps his servants pack for the tour. In the morning, Hoseok is radiant in little but a golden robe, his hair tousled, his profile gleaming in the sun as Jimin sends off three months’ worth of politics-appropriate outfits to be loaded onto the ship.

The servants, as usual, barely spare Jimin a glance. They pay attention to him, Jimin knows, and he hears the hushed whispers that always start up as soon as they leave the room, but he’s so used to it that the things they say drip off of him as easily as sunlight drips from the metallic shine of Hoseok’s sleeve. There are servants who hate him for sleeping with Hoseok, and servants who hate him for sleeping with anyone else. They talk like he chooses it, like one day he’ll find someone else and stab their beloved prince in the back as a parting gift.

“What are we doing today?” Jimin asks, when Hoseok beckons him close. He accepts the sweet kiss, Hoseok’s thumb brushing across the sensitive skin at his wrist.

“Mm,” Hoseok murmurs. Kisses Jimin’s jaw, before pushing him just barely away. “I want to go to the library. Pick up a few books for the trip.”

“You think you’ll have time to read?” Jimin asks. Arches his eyebrows. Hoseok laughs, his regal profile breaking into fondness; he’ll be reading plenty on the journey, on the different systems and planets and governors they’ll be meeting with, on the cultures and barely-there language tics he’ll have to know to keep being the Empire’s most adored ambassador.

“Maybe not,” Hoseok agrees. He tugs on his clothes quickly, doesn’t feel the same barely-there deviations in the weave that Jimin does, and loops his arm through Jimin’s. “But you will, right? And I like it when you read out loud to me, so.”

The library it is. Jimin knows it’s not just that Hoseok wants him to have reading material for the trip; they both like the library, for different and similar reasons, and it will be a nice way to spend the morning before lunch with whichever Ambassador committee Hoseok has chosen for today, and an afternoon spent out in the city. Jimin grabs one last berry from the breakfast tray, and fits himself as close to Hoseok as he can, and closes his eyes through the shuddering, overwhelming burst of taste.

He doesn’t eat without Hoseok. It’s maybe the worst part—that with everything so impossible to handle, tasting anything in his mouth is agony.

The berry is sweet, and bitter on the tail end. It leaves a seed stuck under his tongue, and Jimin lets himself focus on the narrowest sensation. The juice staining his teeth, the flex of his jaw, the sound of his swallow. And Hoseok, always, smiling sweet with a calculating look in his eye that Jimin knows means that he’s thinking of the meals Jimin missed without him.

The library is across the inner palace, on the edge of the market. The building is public, mostly, but out of the way; most of the people who visit it are older, or children with their parents. The University is on the other side of Namsan, a bustling district, where Hoseok goes when he wants to wander the newer architecture, with more citizens nearer their age.

By contrast, the library is a haven. It’s surrounded by a grove of trees that Jimin hasn’t seen anywhere but the library and the forest, the building old and worn and cozy. Today, there’s a small group of elderly women sitting in the shade, and Hoseok gives them his deepest bow and his sweetest blessing. The eldest of them kisses his hand, and he kisses hers, and she smiles at him like he’s her own grandson while the rest of the women comment about how handsome he is, how wise to come to the library on a day like today.

It’s just as good as watching Hoseok with children. He makes easy conversation with everyone, it’s how he was raised, but it doesn’t feel less special no matter how many times Jimin sees it in a single day.

But the library is the real gift. Jimin relaxes as soon as he walks in. The light is soft, and the quiet is heavy, and stillness settles like a shroud. Still lingering in the afterglow of a night in Hoseok’s arms, Jimin can exist almost in a single room, the smell of paper and old ink stifling and comforting all at once.

And another thing about the library—

“I’m going to find Yoongi,” Hoseok whispers, and leaves Jimin with a half-hidden squeeze to his forearm.

Jimin takes it as the dismissal it is, and keeps his pace slow as he begins to browse the shelves. He can hear the other patrons, the footsteps and the rustling of pages, an under-the-breath whisper accompanying the scratch of a pen against paper. These books are old, the oldest under lock and key with centuries cracking their pages; they’ve been collected since the fourth generation of the Jung dynasty, with the farthest book sourced from a planet just a three systems away.

All the newer records, books from around the Empire and beyond, can be downloaded to the datapad Jimin has tucked away in his packed trunk, but there’s something about a book in paper and ink that he’s always been fond of. Every few weeks, Yoongi sets some aside for him, and Jimin adds to the stack with whatever catches his eye on the shelves.

Today, Jimin pulls a memoir, a copy of an ancient journal, and a drama from Sansegye’s sister planet, orbiting twin suns just a handful of lightyears away. Space travel was slower, when it was published; Jimin checks the date, and lets himself have the briefest daydream about the ambassador who might have found the drama worthy enough to be brought back to Namsan, precious weight on a more perilous ship than the ones Jimin knows.

Across the library, he hears Yoongi’s familiar murmur. Hoseok’s familiar blessing, the shift of air as Yoongi waves it off.

Yoongi and Hoseok have been friends for years. For longer than Jimin can remember, really; they’d been classmates before Jimin was anything more than an orphan at the edge of the forest. Yoongi is the son of a Senator, an important one, and so his position at the library was guaranteed as soon as he indicated that he wanted it. And he’s good with it, better than the other keepers who give Jimin the same sidelong glances as everyone else. He saves books for Jimin, and pays attention to his taste, and talks to him like he’s more than Hoseok’s shadow.

But of course, he’s Hoseok’s friend first. So Jimin gives them time to talk, gives less attention to their whispered conversation than he does to the first few pages of the romance. He likes them, for reasons he can’t explain; Hoseok laughs, when he asks Jimin to read out loud and catches him in the middle of an overly-dramatic confession, but he does it fondly.

Slowly, Jimin gathers his books. They’ll be gone for three months, with over thirty destinations planned, and plenty of travel time in between, so he stuffs his bag as full as he dares, leaving room for Yoongi’s picks in between.

He tries, too, to pick out some of the adventures and folklore that Hoseok enjoys. Mostly, Jimin will be helping him with his memorization for each of the stops on the tour, but sometimes Hoseok asks Jimin to read something different before he falls asleep. Jimin picks a book about a thief, and a collection of poems, and makes a note to save them for Hoseok’s more restless nights.

When he’s satisfied with his new collection, Jimin makes his way to the low table where Yoongi and Hoseok have been talking. There are books scattered around them, Yoongi’s latest research and notes taking up most of the space, but Hoseok has found room to brace his elbows to prop up his chin as Yoongi talks, low and quick, about music. Jimin looks at the sheets underneath one of the books, the lines and dots familiar from how long Yoongi has made this his pet project.

Hoseok shifts to make room for Jimin, instead of expecting him to kneel a pace away. Yoongi smiles at him, and welcomes him into the conversation, and Jimin doesn’t have much to contribute but he’s glad to be near them. He’s glad to have Hoseok’s knee touching his, to drain away the bustle of the city creeping into the library’s sanctuary.

Yoongi’s ink is strong, the smell familiar in its intensity. He’s well-practiced at speaking just loud enough to be heard, and Jimin sinks into the sound of quiet voices like submerging himself again in a bath.

When they’ve stayed long enough that afternoon is looming, and Hoseok’s lunch appointment with it, Jimin accepts the stack of books that Yoongi produces from a restricted shelf, sifting through the titles as quickly as he can without slowing Hoseok down. He catches another drama, and an anthology of mystery stories, and a half-dozen others that Yoongi had curated for Jimin. Just for Jimin, and no one else, and it’s easily his favorite part of visiting the library.

“Enjoy your trip,” Yoongi tells him, no less earnest for its softness, and Jimin thanks him with a bow hindered by the bulging bag hanging at his hip.

“I will,” he promises, with as much truthfulness as he can manage.

The thought of the tour makes anxiety lurch in Jimin’s chest, and the thought of assignments makes him want to curl up with his face in Hoseok’s neck and never emerge, but—he can try, at least, to enjoy what he can. To appreciate the time spent out of the city, in a much better soundproofed ship, and to see some of the landscapes he’s only been able to read about.

Soon enough, Hoseok is tugging on Jimin’s sleeve to go. He’s getting antsy, always does after having to keep himself quiet and restrained for so long, and Jimin can see him itch toward the noise of people outside, the promise of it lighting up his eyes.

Jimin takes a deep breath, and tries to bottle up a piece of the library in his chest to save for the next three months of travel, and follows Hoseok out into the sunlight.

♜

The three of them are set to leave Onjo in three days, and Taehyung still hasn’t packed.

“It’s not like it’s hard,” Jeongguk points out, with his legs hanging off the dock and his feet bare and kicking in the river. “You own four things.”

“I own more than four things,” Taehyung snips back, and wrings out his only spare shirt. His hair drips water down his chest, twisted into a coil and hanging across his left shoulder; his laundry pile is laughably small, and his only consolation is that Jeongguk has barely more than he does.

“Not by much.”

Jeongguk’s laundry is already hung, stretched out on the line in a single haphazard row, because Taehyung likes to bathe before he works. This section of the Tamjingang is clear and deep, the current pleasantly burbling and the water sweet, untainted by the waste from the city downstream. It’s a spot that Taehyung has bathed and washed in for years, for most of his life, and he still can’t make himself believe that they’re leaving.

“It doesn’t feel real yet.” He’s said it a hundred times; Jeongguk knows his answers by heart.

“It will feel real when we’re on the princess’s ship.”

The princess’s ship. Taehyung has heard Namjoon’s rationale for it over and over, but the words always sound hollow. A scholar, one of Onjo’s few, invited back to the Empire’s capital on the same ship carrying the princess and prince to their barely-significant moon.

Carefully, mindful of the worn fabric and the many-times-mended seams, Taehyung pins his clothes along the line. They look pathetic hanging there, compared to the impossible vibrance of the silks he catches glimpses of in Tamjin—he can’t imagine what royalty might look like, can’t imagine standing in a prince’s line of sight without his blood curdling from shame. As much as anger burns in him to think of the Empire, to remember what he’s lost to it, Taehyung can’t shake off how small he feels, how insignificant he is compared to the family that has the galaxy cupped in its palm.

Jeongguk splashes from the dock into the water. Taehyung has pulled away from him as much as he can in the last few days, feeling too much to want to take on Jeongguk’s emotions on top of his own, but there’s only so much he can do; the nerves and exasperation and sadness roll off of Jeongguk like the ripples he makes in the water when he surfaces.

Instead of snapping at him, Jeongguk’s irritation feeding into his own already-frazzled nerves, Taehyung wraps his hand around the totem hanging around his neck and breathes. The stone is cool from the touch of the river, the grooves worn down from how constantly he reaches for it.

Jeongguk wears a mirrored totem around his own neck. They never come off; Bo and Seonmul stay with them, no matter how far off-world they might go. It’s the only thing keeping Taehyung together, as he prepares for a journey he’d never intended to make.

He sits on the dock, and combs out his hair, and waits for Jeongguk to finish scrubbing himself with their half-depleted block of soap. Jeongguk yelps when a fish smacks against him, and Taehyung winces at the echo of pain that will likely leave a bruise. This is so familiar that it hurts. There’s a part of him, not insignificant, that wants to bar himself in their room and refuse to leave.

But the elders, for all their flaws, have told them to go. For as long as Taehyung’s duty has been to the Sect, it is now his duty to leave them.

“I can tell you’re moping,” Jeongguk says, when he hauls himself, dripping and naked, back onto the dock. Taehyung doesn’t deign that with a reply; he gestures with the comb, and Jeongguk scoots backward to offer him his head, hair hanging down just barely shorter than Taehyung’s. Jeongguk winces when Taehyung yanks at his tangles, but keeps his hands obediently down after Taehyung smacks them away the first time.

“I’m fine,” Taehyung promises. “We’re both nervous. It’s normal.”

He doesn’t know what’s normal for going off-world, and neither does Jeongguk. If things were different, Taehyung thinks, he might have had a different life. If things were different, Taehyung might have grown up going off-world, at least to Amnok, and he wouldn’t have to be afraid of the darkness of space.

But things aren’t different, and Taehyung wastes too much time anyway pretending like they could be, and the only thing he has to think about right now is the vicious clump of hair just at the nape of Jeongguk’s neck, like his hair took the opportunity of a bath to tie itself into impossible knots. They’ve been released from their duties for these last few days, and Taehyung attacks the tangle with as much strength as he’d put into buffing statues, into kneading dough in the ancient kitchen behind the temple.

“Ow,” Jeongguk whines, but he doesn’t pull away. He lets Taehyung feel his pain, and Taehyung bites down on his lower lip and works through it, until Jeongguk’s hair is half-dry and shining and smoother than the current. The ends are wavy, starting to fluff out, almost due for a trim where the ends are starting to split. Taehyung ties it up for him, groping for one of the identical hairpins they’d left on the dock with their laundry, and turns his back on Jeongguk in turn.

This, he reassures himself, won’t change. He and Jeongguk won’t be separated, and so they can at least try to hold onto the rituals they’ve built for themselves, the ones that Taehyung has clung to since he stumbled, half-dead, into the arms of a Twin.

His hand ghosts, barely-there, over the tangled mess of scars at his side. It was meant to be a killing blow, would have been a killing blow, if Taehyung hadn’t felt the breath of regret, and then of resolve, that came before his uncle pulled the trigger. If he hadn’t dragged himself bleeding out of the manor and into the arms of the first stranger in white he saw, hopelessly staining the fabric and giving himself up to the only people he knew he could trust.

These days, the clothes of the Twins are patched with poorly-bleached scraps they’ve salvaged from the city. There’s a grass stain in the knees of Taehyung’s better pants that won’t ever come out; his smallclothes have all been mended three times over. Everything dries slowly, so when Jeongguk finishes his hair Taehyung stretches himself out on the dock and trails his fingers in the water, lets the warmth of the suns fill him up.

Instead of rushing back into the temple when the first sun touches the horizon, Taehyung only pulls on his robe and dips his legs back in the stream, watches the fish glint under the surface as Jeongguk presses himself close, hooks his chin over Taehyung’s shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

This close, he can feel the shape of it against his tongue. Jeongguk’s body, inside and out, might be Taehyung’s own; they’ve lived on top of each other for so long that not breathing as one seems impossible. Like severing a limb, like gulping in a breath at the bottom of the river.

Taehyung isn’t Jeongguk’s guide, and Jeongguk isn’t even truly a sentinel, but that doesn’t matter when Jeongguk’s hand slips under Taehyung’s robe to press against his ribs. His fingers graze the edge of scar tissue, his forehead presses against Taehyung’s ear. The water is cool and quick and slips between his toes like it’s trying to tug him away, downstream and through the city and down into the yawning mouth of the endless ocean.

“I don’t know,” Taehyung says, and hears the words sink, a pebble thrown against an unrelenting current.

Onjo is a small moon, with only a single continent of rivers and mountains and mine shafts, but it’s still Taehyung’s whole world. Even with all the blood soaking its soil, Onjo is the world his family worked to build. There’s a part of him that whispers traitor every time he thinks about leaving it behind.

♜

On the Empire’s first day in Tamjin, Taehyung overhears a familiar argument.

“I can handle it!” Jeongguk isn’t quite shouting, his voice echoed down the temple’s hall where Taehyung has been trying to meditate. “I know you don’t think I’m strong enough—”

Though the Sister speaks quietly enough that her words don’t carry, Taehyung can recite them from memory.

Not that they don’t think he’s strong enough, but that so few sentinels of their generation have survived induction that it isn’t worth the risk. That Bo and Seonmul are being forgotten, that soon the temple will be abandoned, and that this is for the best. None of these are answers that Jeongguk will accept, not before he’s being sent off on what they all know is an impossible mission. None of them are answers that any of them truly believe.

He wants to be inducted. Taehyung can’t blame him for wanting it, but the urgency in his voice as he rages sends a sliver of cold through Taehyung’s chest.

Artificial induction is difficult. Jeongguk has lost himself in the forest more times than Taehyung can count, and always stumbled home with a new scar or bloodied feet or dark circles under his eyes that take weeks to fade. He’s tested his breath against the river, and the ocean, and anything else he could find from the memories of the Twins who could recite the old texts in their sleep.

You want it too badly, Taehyung remembers the oldest brother saying, just weeks before he passed. Jeongguk had looked—shattered, he thinks is the word.

Taehyung doesn’t have to say anything, when Jeongguk drops to his knees next to him. He breathes in, wraps his hand around his totem, tries to shield himself from the burning anger and humiliation at Jeongguk’s core, the self-inflicted hurt too deep for Taehyung to reach out and soothe with a touch.

“I don’t understand,” Jeongguk lies. Taehyung can feel the tears stinging hot against his eyes; before he can reach up and catch the phantom drops, Jeongguk wipes at his own angrily.

The statues loom above them, so tall that their faces are shrouded in darkness at the ceiling. The suns are still high, but the temple is overgrown and hidden enough that little of the light filters through; Taehyung watches Bo and Seonmul through the flicker of candlelight, the lamps burning low where they’re set into the walls, and tries to commit the room to memory. He’s lived here for years, has prayed here for years, but—part of him is terrified that if he leaves, he’ll forget the forest route, the hidden corners where he spent so much of his childhood, the secrets he poured hours into unlocking.

There’s nothing Taehyung can say, so he takes Jeongguk’s hand. He knows it doesn’t help, that there’s nothing in Jeongguk’s mind that Taehyung can soothe, but he likes the illusion.

If they were born generations ago, Jeongguk would have been initiated as a child. He wouldn’t have to beg like this, and be turned down, and suffer through the death of their gods. The statues are already creeping with overgrowth, their legs covered up to the knee by flowering vines that the two of them have been forbidden from cutting back.

But for generations, sentinels have been dying. The two of them are the last acolytes the Twins will ever take; they’ve been refused initiation, because the elders are taking the last secrets of the order to their graves.

Everything Taehyung owns is in a pack on the floor beside him. The beds in their room have been stripped, the windows sealed shut, the dust already beginning to collect on the surfaces. He’d said goodbye to it early in the morning, while Jeongguk still slept splayed out on the single bed they’ve shared for years, and crept out to make his farewells to all the places he won’t see again.

In the afternoon, with the last of the elders to see them off, they start the trek to Tamjin.

By foot, the journey takes hours. Taehyung is less used to it than Jeongguk, more reluctant to make the monthly trip to the city for supplies; without them, he doesn’t know how the elders intend to survive. They sold the wagon years ago, and no one but Namjoon in the city knows the temple’s location, and so no one will bother sending oil for the lamps or feed for what little livestock they have left alive.

The Twins have been dying for a long time, but leaving them feels like pouring dirt into a grave.

Mostly, they follow the Tamjingang. Jeongguk walks in the shallows for a while, shoes discarded to pick his way over slick stones. He catches frogs in his hands, and offers them out to Taehyung like a courting gifts, and Taehyung accepts them all and lets them rest on his shoulders until they look likely to jump, when he sets them back down on the bank.

They don’t talk to each other much, and when they do they don’t talk about what lies ahead of them. They certainly don’t talk about what they’ve left behind. Instead, Taehyung listens to Jeongguk chatter to his frogs, and then hum to himself when all the frogs start going into hiding at their approach, and then sing half-remembered nursery rhymes when they stop to cool their feet in the water and share the meal the elders packed for them.

At the temple, Jeongguk rarely stops talking—to the chickens or to Taehyung or to Bo and Seonmul themselves. In the forest, he isn’t much different, until they leave the riverbank to find the road. The road brings people, in heavy wagons and on foot, and Jeongguk keeps his mouth shut and his jaw stiff, his eyes fixed on the tamped-down earth.

They’re both tense, when they get near the city. They don’t wear white, or at least not all white, and no one spares either of them a second glance, but there are too many eyes, too many voices, and Taehyung breathes through the long-familiar fear and tightens his grip on his pack.

Tamjin is packed, the city thronging with people flocking from farms and mining towns to see the prince. Taehyung keeps his head down, pulls his hood up, and lets Jeongguk guide him through the streets, ducking when he can into half-empty alleys until they’ve made it to the inn where Namjoon rents his room.

The common rooms, unsurprisingly, are empty. So is the desk where the matron or one of her girls usually sits, so Taehyung tugs off his hood and follows Jeongguk as quickly as he can to Namjoon’s room, knocking quietly on the half-open door. There’s a thud, and a curse, and a familiar litany of grumbling that gets closer and closer until Namjoon shoves at the door to let them in.

The room is a mess. Mostly Namjoon is packed, but there are pillows and bedding strewn over the floor, the desk piled high with books loaned from Amnok’s university library, the barely-touched remnants of a meal half-shoved underneath the table itself.

“Oh good,” Namjoon says, and Taehyung recognizes the wild look in his eye, the unrelenting twitch of his hands.

Namjoon hadn’t been inducted, because he hadn’t known he was a sentinel. Any of the signs the Twins might have caught would have been useless, since they came after the ancient texts had been drowned and the city’s statues collected and burned and the order itself sworn to die out rather than be stolen by the Empire. So when he got lost following the river, and found himself caught him a rainstorm and stumbling into the temple, the Twins couldn’t refuse him induction because it was already too late.

“Taehyung-ah,” Namjoon says, almost pleading. “It’s so loud.”

He isn’t a strong sentinel, Taehyung knows. All the elders have confirmed it, have tested Namjoon again and again. But it’s enough that sometimes, he gets panicked and overwhelmed at too much stimulus, and the city is more crowded than it has been since the day the Empire unfurled its banners, and Namjoon is shaking all over like he doesn’t even realize it’s happening.

And Taehyung isn’t his guide either, likely won’t ever be someone’s guide, but he takes Namjoon’s face in his hands anyway.

“Breathe,” he whispers. Just a ghost of a breath, because Namjoon will hear it. “Come on, look at me. It’s just me right now. Just me, and my heartbeat. Can you hear it?”

Namjoon nods. His eyes are wide and dark and fixed on Taehyung’s, his hands finally going still as they rest on Taehyung’s hips. The Twins at least recited these texts to him, even after the originals were destroyed, and so Taehyung knows that Seonmul could pull Bo back into the world with a single touch. That the two of them lived inside each other, that nothing would ever be as perfect as finding the sentinel he was born for.

But even if Taehyung won’t ever find someone he can guide like that, instinctive and perfect, he can still help Namjoon. They taught him to visualize it—a lake inside of him, placid and calm, spilling over through his hands to fill up Namjoon’s chest.

If he closes his eyes, Taehyung can almost feel the rush of water. Can feel Namjoon smoothing out, a turbulent river smoothing into something more contained. He still trembles when he breathes, but the noise has ceased. The panic is fading from his eyes, as he listens to Taehyung’s heartbeat.

Behind them, Taehyung can also feel Jeongguk’s seething jealousy. It will be hidden by the time the two of them break apart, and he’ll greet Namjoon as warmly as ever, and Namjoon will keep on not knowing that Taehyung almost boils over with a rage that hasn’t ever belonged to him every time Namjoon zones like this, and needs Taehyung to bring him back.

“There,” Taehyung says, fully voiced this time. “Better?”

Namjoon’s smile is more relieved than happy. He pecks Taehyung on the forehead, and the jealousy roils into anger, and Taehyung grips Seonmul around his neck and smiles through a jaw clenched so tight that it aches.

Namjoon takes them out into the city, because he’s sick of packing and he knows they don’t come often. Taehyung has most of the temple’s money on a data stick weighing heavy in his bag, so he buys himself and Jeongguk street food and relishes the grease of it, the overwhelming flavors that the Twins haven’t had enough money to buy in years. Namjoon greets people he knows in the crowd, and keeps Taehyung firmly behind him, and Jeongguk glowers like Namjoon is supposed to know that that’s his job, even though he keeps getting distracted by the sights.

No one pays Taehyung any special attention. Children shove past him, barely high enough to reach his waist, and chatter fills the space along with vendors hawking their wares, carts creaking as they stall in the crowds, everywhere filled with noise and light and a brimming excitement that Taehyung feels giddy with.

It’s so many people. Taehyung gets impressions as he follows in Namjoon’s wake—one woman’s irritation, another’s concern, a man’s amusement at his children. Everyone anticipating, everyone feeding into him until Taehyung stops in Namjoon’s shadow, dumbstruck and overwhelmed even as Jeongguk presses a grounding hand at the base of his spine.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk snaps, but Namjoon isn’t listening. Namjoon’s excitement floats to the surface, as Taehyung leans forward to press his forehead against his shoulder, and some of the tidal wave ebbs away even as Namjoon says something, lifts one hand to point.

“The prince,” he repeats, and Taehyung hears it this time, and listens, and looks.

True to Namjoon’s words, it is the prince. The excitement swells, bloats, the courtyard about to burst. All of a sudden everyone is shouting, and bowing from the waist, and cramming together to clear a path for the prince and his procession to walk, shaking hands and offering blessings as he goes. The three of them end up in the middle of the crowd, Namjoon pressed against Taehyung pressed against Jeongguk up against a produce cart, the owner grumbling good-naturedly as she cranes her neck and stands on one of her overturned crates to get a better look.

Taehyung manages to push Namjoon, frustratingly tall and remarkably oblivious, behind the two of them. Manages to brace his hands on Jeongguk’s shoulders to strain his head, tamping down on the rage simmering low in his stomach as the prince beams, and kisses a little girl’s hand, and bows to an ancient grandmother supported by a cane and a gawking gaggle of her family.

For a moment, Taehyung wants to scream. It’s the Empire’s fault that he’s leaving Onjo—it’s the Empire’s fault that the Twins are dying—it’s the Empire’s fault that he’s numb from scar tissue on too much of his torso, his family dead in their beds, the banners flown even as Taehyung fought for his life in a temple that suddenly had too much to lose. The prince is shining and beautiful and smiles like he doesn’t care that Taehyung’s mother was killed by her own blood, just for Onjo to have a seat in the Senate.

Taehyung and Jeongguk are leaving their home to protect the secrets of the Twins. Namjoon’s contact in Namsan gave them everything they needed to know; that there had been experiments, and destroyed records, and a half-recovered document from the Tamjingang’s bank that the Empire found, and learned from, and toyed with.

It’s an impossible mission. Taehyung had known it even as he accepted. It’s vague and uninformed and reckless and neither of them knew what they were getting into when Namjoon offered them passage with him to Sansegye, but they both agreed that it was better than dying alone in a crumbling temple, or abandoning it to make their livings in a mine. The elders agreed to it, and even the echoing aftertaste of their pity couldn’t force Taehyung to change his mind.

He expected this. The anger at the prince’s radiance, the fear and uncertainty mixing in his hungry stomach, the pounding in his head as the second sun begins to dip, and lanterns twinkle to life in the courtyard around them, scattering light in impossible fractals among the crowd. He expected to be overwhelmed.

But the prince comes closer, accepts gifts and doles out blessings, and something in Taehyung’s chest constricts.

Between the prince and his guards, someone else is walking. He’s silent, light-footed, his face blank and eyes lowered. Modest, in every way, except that Taehyung, suddenly, has forgotten to breathe.

The prince is close. Just a few bodies away, the three of them falling back to let the crowd surge up and around, and Taehyung feels Jeongguk brace him with an arm around his waist, holding him up, keeping him steady. But it all fades—even Jeongguk fades, Jeongguk who has always lived in Taehyung’s chest—when the prince’s companion passes by.

There are things about this mission that Taehyung expected. The confusion and the noise and the anger. But not this.

The prince’s companion is a sentinel. Taehyung knows, like he’s never known anything before, and fear is copper and sharp on his tongue, and the sentinel’s eyes stay lowered and his shoulders stay stiff and he follows exactly in the prince’s footsteps like a trained dog. The prince’s companion is a sentinel, and Taehyung for the first time feels alone in his own skin, quiet and still and wholly himself.

And then the sentinel passes, as close as the two of them can get with the bodies twisting between them, and he stumbles. Just barely, just enough to notice, his eyes wide as he catches himself and blinks and just barely shakes his head.

There is nothing like it, Sister Shin told him, years and years ago. Nothing like it in all the world.

The Empire has created a sentinel, and Taehyung knows that nothing now can stay the same.

♖

A month into the tour, Jimin feels ready to lock himself in the lowest depths of the Imugi and never crawl out again.

Hoseok is shining, restless and overeager in the days it takes to travel between systems; there’s nothing that suits him more than extravagant parties and walking through marketplaces, leaving the politics to Dawon as he stuns the hordes of citizens with his smile and his wit and his kindness. His title fits him like a second skin, and Jimin finds in the quiet of the night that he misses the Hoseok he sees in the library. He misses that quiet, constrained animation—the way he so clearly hates turning his volume down, but will sit and listen to Yoongi talk for hours anyway.

Instead of getting to watch that quiet rapture, Jimin has been passed from arm to arm for the last four weeks, a toy for puppies to gnaw on and discard. He spends banquets on the other side of the room from Hoseok, itching out of his skin with noise and touch and sensation, and has to tremble through tapping reports into a datapad as he stumbles back to the Imugi whenever his assignments are finished with him.

Hoseok always welcomes him into bed, quiets Jimin’s panic in the small hours of interplanetary morning, but Jimin feels dirty. No matter how much he scrubs during his allotted time in the ship’s strict bathing schedule, he can’t get the fingerprints off his skin.

Now, following in Hoseok’s footsteps in the square of the capital city of a barely-relevant moon, Jimin stumbles. For the barest moment—silence, ringing louder than the infinite chatter in his ears.

A single second where the wind of thousands of breaths lifts, and the smells recede into something soft and blurred, and Jimin has just enough time to trip over his own feet before it all comes crashing back in hard enough that he has to fight to keep his balance.

It takes the rest of the evening for Jimin to convince himself that he imagined it. The rest of the evening, after the market and the hurried change of clothes and the unbearable dab of makeup onto his face, after greeting his date for the evening and hanging off of his arm and listening for every scrap of conversation he can retain. He almost forgets it, but for the memory of impact. His hands shake more than usual, but no one pays him enough attention to care.

Until—

“Are you okay?” Someone asks, and Jimin is so busy listening to the governor of Amnok, the planet this moon belongs to, that he takes a long moment to realize that someone is talking to him.

Jimin’s arm is limp in his assignment’s grasp. He blinks at this stranger—tall, young, pretty—and paints on his sweetest, ditziest smile.

“Of course,” Jimin says. His water trembles in its delicate flute, enough that he gestures out blindly to set it on the tray of a passing server. “I must have—overindulged.”

If he had a moment of peace for how many times he’s used that excuse, Jimin would never have to attend a banquet again. The stranger squints, a funny smile pulling at his lips, glances just barely at Jimin’s date before seeming to dismiss him as irrelevant.

“You haven’t taken a single sip,” the stranger points out, and Jimin’s smile goes brittle.

“I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

No one sees him, at these events. They see a toy, an empty-headed plaything, because it is the part that Jimin has worked hard to perfect. It’s what the Empress asked him to be, the first time she sent him to a dinner with a senator’s daughter, and Jimin blundered his way through his first attempts at espionage until the Empress’s stubborn insistence sharpened him into a more refined tool.

The stranger blinks, and his expression twists, and he sweeps into a bashful bow that Jimin’s date is still too engrossed in conversation to notice. Jimin’s own attention is wandering, too many conversations at once and too much food and drink to taste in the air.

“Kim Seokjin,” the man says, to introduce himself. “Onjo’s senator-elect.”

Oh. Important, then, or he will be one day. Jimin gives Senator-elect Kim as much of his attention as he dares, and carefully untangles his arm from his deeply uninteresting assignment. That seems to please Seokjin, and he offers out his own arm in turn. Jimin takes it, hopes the Empress will forgive him for it, and fixes on a softer smile.

He introduces himself, when prompted. Adds no title, but that he’s a member of the Prince’s entourage, and Seokjin seems as interested in that as is polite. He doesn’t ask any questions about Hoseok or his marital plans, which is a welcome change of pace, and he doesn’t offer Jimin a drink, or food from any of the trays floating around on black-clad arms.

“Your date seemed to be boring you,” Seokjin says, when Jimin sweetly asks him why. “And—Jimin-ssi, you’ve been trembling all night.”

Jimin clenches his hands into fists. His empty stomach lurches—he hasn’t eaten anything tonight, a few mouthfuls from Hoseok’s snack tray snatched during their wardrobe change—and Jimin swallows down on the sharp taste of his own saliva. Seokjin looks perfectly pleasant, his head tilted, his eyes wide, but Jimin has been playing dumb and pretty for years now, and he knows how to spot the mask on someone else’s face.

“I’m perfectly fine,” Jimin says, and makes to disengage. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“I didn’t mean to offend.” Seokjin cuts Jimin off, adjusts his arm to give Jimin the freedom to slip away without making a struggle obvious.

“Then what did you intend?” This time, Jimin’s smile is sharper. He wants to unclench his hands, but he’s listening to Onjo’s premier mining tycoon tell an ambassador from Hoseok’s retinue about the untapped wealth of all of Amnok’s moons, and he’s listening to Dawon talk gritty politics with Onjo’s governor in his office, and under all of that he’s listening to Hoseok breathe and laugh and dance with one person after the other, in his element and thoughtless to the way Jimin is ready to scream until he dies as bloody as all the orphans they tried to train for this impossible task.

“I just thought you might appreciate some quiet,” Seokjin says, and pulls Jimin’s attention back to him. He gestures vaguely up, and Jimin instinctively looks at the ceiling, then back down to Seokjin’s vague amusement. “I live here. In the manor. If you need a room to yourself for a moment.”

Jimin blinks. The room shifts, a dazzling puzzle of movement and sound and light. He thinks—he’s been trained so well, a pet on a leash, that no matter how awful he feels now he’s grateful for the party, because at least at the party he doesn’t have to be on his knees.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. “That’s kind of you, Senator, and I appreciate it. But I’m—working, right now.”

He gestures vaguely at his assignment, and lets Seokjin make the assumption.

The assumption, Jimin knows, isn’t wrong. Everyone on Sansegye knows that he’s bought with good behavior; they frown on Hoseok for keeping him around, but they’d riot if he tossed Jimin away to someone who would keep him for themself. Seokjin’s expression stays remarkably smooth, but for a quick lift of his brows.

“My apologies,” Seokjin finally says, and sounds like he means it. “I know Secretary Yang can be incredibly boring.”

Jimin can’t stop himself from barking out a laugh. It sounds harsh in his own ears, rattling around the space between them until Seokjin cracks a smile, takes a sip from his own glass, shrugs his shoulders in a way that makes him seem at once more personable, more self-assured.

“He’s not the worst,” Jimin admits, because he’s seen the worst, has laughed at their jokes and knelt at their feet. Once or twice, he’s managed to find someone who talks to him as more than a trophy, but he’s content enough these days to hang off the arms of the Empire’s blandest officials. Seokjin at least seems interested, though Jimin knows better than to trust first impressions at a banquet meant for turning the moon’s best cheek to royalty.

As pleasant as Seokjin is, Jimin has to slip away when the secretary starts getting antsy. He makes his excuses, promises to say hello to Seokjin at his inauguration, and brings his assignment a new drink and his best smile. His hands are still trembling, but not as badly; he rests his cheek on his assignment’s shoulder, and plays it off like he’s slipping into alcohol-fueled drowsiness. The princess is still speaking to the governor. Hoseok is still laughing, his attention caught by a wash of brightly-colored people of little political importance.

Everything is so bright. Jimin imagines darkness every time he blinks. He moans hot and breathless into the secretary’s mouth in an empty spare room, and remembers—when he almost screams at sudden nails raking down his thighs—that terrifying moment of emptiness in the market.

Maybe he’s finally breaking, Jimin thinks, as he bites down into the meat of his palm. Maybe he’s going insane, like all the others. Maybe nothing can help him now, not even Hoseok, and the idea almost makes him laugh.

“You like that?” The secretary asks, and drags his nails across the meat of Jimin’s ass.

He tries to make the pain sound like pleasure. There are still people talking, talking; he hears Seokjin’s voice coming from somewhere below them, Seokjin and Onjo’s governor, Seokjin with anger wound tight in his voice. That’s—interesting, Jimin focuses on it, holds onto the sound as he tries to let go of the way his nerves scream at just the drag of the sheets, the battering of the secretary’s breath against his skin.

The Twins are dead and gone, Seokjin is saying. What does the Empire have to do with them?

It is not your concern. The sound of wood against wood. Footsteps. Jimin clenches when instructed, feels teeth sink into his shoulder. Your predecessor and I concluded that business with the crown.

I am serving our people. I deserve to know.

You are also serving me.

The conversation slips into vague tension and nothing-words. Jimin doesn’t understand much, but he catalogues it anyway. Onjo is new to the Empire, just fewer than twenty years under its rule. Before that, there was a period of tension—Amnok had been annexed, but its only inhabited moon refused to accept the terms of the Empire. Their position changed with the moon’s ruling lord, and Onjo signed the treaty, but this stop on the tour had been added on the promise of Hoseok’s presence—he always helps with the goodwill of the public.

What feels like hours later, the secretary rolls off of him. Jimin straightens himself as best he can, but still feels the lingering burn of shame as they wander back out to the last dregs of the party, just a few people left sitting and drinking and talking quietly among themselves.

Hoseok is wrapped up in conversation. Dawon has left, is likely already back in her quarters to send her notes from the day to the Empress. Jimin politely and firmly declines the secretary’s offer to bring Jimin back to his home for the rest of the evening, and takes just the briefest moment of deliberation before sitting quietly at Hoseok’s feet.

The man Hoseok is talking to stumbles over his words when Jimin leans his head against Hoseok’s leg. He leaves it to his prince to wave it off, leaves the strangers to their assumptions, leaves everything but for one blissful moment of muffling before he returns to his task of listening.

When he peels his eyes open, the world behind his lids bright enough that it’s hard to realize he had them closed, Seokjin is watching him from across the room. Understanding, maybe, Jimin’s true place.

Hoseok’s fingers slide unthinkingly through Jimin’s hair. The manor buzzes with conversation, low and breathless, as the night descends.

♖

Taehyung boards the Imugi through the servant’s entrance. He and Jeongguk leave Namjoon at the entrance to the docks, to make their way around the bulk of the ship to the smaller, less obtrusive doors; his hand trembles around his papers as the stewardess inspects them, her eyes narrow and her lips stern.

“You’ll be working for your keep,” she says, as sharp as the severity of her bun. “We lost three servants at the last stop for black market trades. The princess has no patience for nonsense.”

Taehyung’s papers are forged. After a tense, terrible moment, she waves them through.

A boy Jeongguk’s age or younger brings them to the servants’ quarters. Three beds are conspicuously stripped, sheets folded neat at the foot of them, one on top of the other slotted into the wall.

“Flip a coin?” Jeongguk asks, as if anyone has carried coins in centuries, and Taehyung willingly cedes the bottom bunk. He likes being higher up, likes the way he feels just barely safer out of arm’s reach. He has just enough time to make the bed, to feel the unfamiliar weave of the sheets, before the stewardess reappears with a presence that has everyone lingering in the room springing out of beds and straightening their backs.

Quickly, efficiently, Taehyung and Jeongguk are walked through their new duties. Aside from assisting Namjoon with anything he needs, they’ve also been assigned rotations in the kitchen, the laundry room, the botanical garden, the observation deck, and half a dozen other sections of the ship that Taehyung hasn’t had time to learn the names of, much less memorize. Neither of them will be alone for these rotations, will always have someone assigned to train them, but the scope of it seems daunting. Though most of the work will be custodial, or consist of bringing the royals and their retinue anything they might require, it’s still so different from the peaceful routine of the temple.

Somewhere, Namjoon is probably meeting with the prince. He’s been panicking about it since Taehyung and Jeongguk arrived, had restyled his hair four or five times by the time they had to leave for the docks, and Taehyung feels Jeongguk’s nerves deep in his chest. He wishes, suddenly, that Jeongguk had been inducted—that he could hear what might be happening on the other side of this ship, and reassure Taehyung that everything is going as well as can be hoped.

But wishing that only makes him think about the prince’s sentinel. The prince’s sentinel, who Taehyung hasn’t seen again, who he hasn’t told Namjoon or Jeongguk about, not yet.

It’s not that he isn’t sure. It’s that he’s too sure. The sentinel is too strong, Taehyung felt that as surely as he can feel the rhythm of Jeongguk’s breath, a truth in his bones he couldn’t ignore if he wanted to. If Namjoon is a palmful of rainwater, then this prince’s pet is the Tamjingang itself.

Taehyung keeps his shoulders hunched, his face turned down, until the stewardess returns them to their quarters. There’s a datapad mounted by each of their beds, that she tells them has been programmed to alert them when Namjoon calls. It sets Taehyung’s teeth on edge, but he bows to her anyway, and immediately props his pillow up to hide the darkened screen. Jeongguk smacks his thigh for it, but—it’s almost time for the midday meal, and it doesn’t matter now since he won’t be here to see it.

He doesn’t like being at Namjoon’s beck and call—at the whims of any of the prince’s twittering flock, really. Taehyung’s vows made him a servant to his gods, not to any conquering Empire’s prince.

Bo and Seonmul don’t ask for much. They ask for his patience, for his hard work and sweat and the long hours of daylight. Taehyung is used to labor, but always with the understanding that the Twins were a humble order, that he should give them the work of the life they had spent countless hours and resources trying to save, when he was nothing but an injured and terrified child, refusing to sleep for the fear of his uncle, for the fear of someone coming after him to finish the job. When he recovered, when the Twins explained to him where he was and why he couldn’t leave, Taehyung hadn’t even wanted to argue. Without the Empire, they told him, he would have eventually come to them anyway.

As it is, Taehyung has to get used to the feel of the ship. He understands, suddenly, that he won’t ever be alone here. There’s nothing like the quiet parts of the forest, like submerging himself in the river to cut himself off from whatever Jeongguk might be feeling most at any moment. Instead there are people, close and then far, separated by layers of metal that matter little to Taehyung and probably even less to the prince’s sentinel.

A girl around Taehyung’s age takes him to the kitchen, after they eat. She explains that they’re mostly there for things the cooks can’t keep up with, when they’re beholden to the prince’s whimsy; Taehyung fits an unfamiliar knife in his hand, and loses himself in chopping strange vegetables and scrubbing dishes in water so hot that his hands go pink and raw by the end of the evening.

“Jeonghwa,” the girl introduces herself cheerfully, on their way back to the quarters. “You’re a lot more efficient than Sungmin was.”

Taehyung is exhausted, and his nerves are burning, and he can’t stop feeling everyone around him like another sense. Jeonghwa is quietly pleased, and relieved, and grateful for his presence, though, and he feels terrible for brushing something like that off.

“I’m glad to help,” Taehyung tells her, because it’s mostly true. At least labor is something to ground him, the familiar ache of his hands.

He’ll be spending weeks here, if no one catches his forged papers, and it will serve him to build up goodwill with the other servants. So Taehyung smiles, makes polite conversation, talks to Jeonghwa on their walk back about Onjo, about Namjoon and Jeongguk and the little he remembers of Tamjin, pretending like it’s the only place he’d ever known.

The conversation at least takes Taehyung’s mind off of his anxiety; sooner than he realizes, they’re back at their quarters, and the screen mounted by Jeongguk’s bed has lit up with a notification.

He catches Jeongguk outside the door, returning with his own partner for the evening. Taehyung has a vague idea of where Namjoon’s rooms are, has a new access key at his belt that will let him into all the rooms he’s authorized for, and the rail line drops them off on the opposite end of the ship. The architecture here is different—there are open spaces, dotted with splashes of art and color and cushions clustered around tables. None of the people hanging around spare them a second glance. Their uniforms, received with their bedsheets, make them as good as invisible.

They aren’t invisible to Namjoon, clearly. His door slides open as soon as Taehyung presses his key to the reader; he greets them with a vibrating sort of urgency. He’s in his finest clothes, Taehyung notes, and wonders what scrutiny Namjoon will be met with when he starts having to work through the rest of his wardrobe.

“Are you okay?” Jeongguk is the first to ask, strangely solemn. Namjoon shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders, tugs his fist in his hair.

“He’s a guide,” Namjoon says, and Taehyung is lost until Namjoon stops pacing, stares at both of them with wild eyes like he’s expecting them to understand, to know exactly what he’s talking about. “Taehyung. The prince. Did you know?”

Did you know, Namjoon asks, like Taehyung would have been able to feel anything with the prince’s sentinel following in his footsteps. Did he know—of course he didn’t know, because he stopped paying attention to the prince as soon as he got one firm look at his delicately pretty face. He’d assumed there was nothing going on behind it, the routine of people-pleasing as engrained as some of Taehyung’s own reflexes.

Namjoon is still talking. He doesn’t seem to care whether or not Taehyung knew. He’s shaking and rambling and every time he turns his back Jeongguk looks at Taehyung with wide eyes and points, making gestures that indicate that Namjoon is, clearly, losing it.

"—insufferable,” Namjoon is saying. “He was so smug and so—so obnoxious when I talked about my research, and he refused to let me get three words into a sentence, and—”

“The prince?” Jeongguk asks, clearly baffled. Namjoon just looks at him, perfectly blank.

“Obviously.” And then he’s off again, and Taehyung sags back against the wall and resists the urge to slam his head against it. There have been sentinels from off-world before, and guides, but so rarely that he’s only ever heard a Twin mention it in passing. Never more than an addendum to a name, a descriptor half-remembered from a text they destroyed before Taehyung ever got to set eyes on their library.

Taehyung remembers the temple library. Cramped shelves, long empty, accumulating dust. Sound echoed, there, and so he always held his breath, stepped in the same tracks he’d left on the grimy floor the last time. He just wanted to know, he’d rationalized; when a brother caught him, he’d stumbled through explanations burning red with shame and not knowing why.

He said goodbye to it with the rest of the temple. It had been long enough since he’d gone in that those footprints had faded, blurred out by dust and dirt and time.

Now, with Namjoon stumbling over his own thoughts and Jeongguk frantically trying to get Taehyung to calm him down by force, the library feels an eternity behind him. There’s a headache gnawing at Taehyung’s temples, and Namjoon’s anxiety winding tight in his gut, and Jeongguk’s nerves on top of the feelings of too many other people. He can’t think—he doesn’t think he could calm Namjoon down now if he tried. He doesn’t think he could soothe the senses of a gnat if it landed in his palm.

“I’m sorry,” Namjoon finally says, on the tail end of something Taehyung doesn’t catch. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I know it’s not easy for you either.”

Taehyung blinks. Namjoon might have been talking about adjusting to the ship, the strangeness of it for even him, who’s been living in Tamjin for as long as he can remember.

“I’m fine,” Taehyung says, half-blank. They both just look at him, Namjoon’s hands jittering, Jeongguk’s arms folded. There’s a screen covering half of the opposite wall, lit up with the image of a forest Taehyung doesn’t recognize, the ambient noise of it too realistic to be natural. In the forest, there’s never silence, but it’s nothing like this manufactured series of noises either, nothing like the same chirp of a single bird over and over until Jeongguk touches Taehyung’s shoulder and he jumps.

“Sorry, hyung,” Jeongguk says, though he doesn’t sound particularly sorry at all. “I should get him to bed.”

Namjoon pulls Taehyung close, and Taehyung can feel all the exasperation drained out of him for concern, for two hands solid on Taehyung’s shoulders and a dry kiss pressed to his forehead.

It should make him angry, to be coddled and manhandled like this, but Taehyung is too tired to put up a fight. His hands ache from scrubbing at dishes; something inside him feels ready to fracture, too many people around for his insides to be anything but a tangle of feelings he doesn’t know how to separate.

He clutches Seonmul around his neck, and prays for strength. Namjoon tugs gently at the cord of the necklace, always fond, and lets Jeongguk tug Taehyung away from him.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Namjoon promises. A smile, dimpled, mostly for Jeongguk. “And I’ll save you dessert.”

Tomorrow, the Imugi leaves port. Tomorrow, Taehyung will be able to stop hiding his face every time footsteps echo from behind an unfamiliar corner. He’s been afraid for so long that he doesn’t know how he’s going to live without that caution, hide your face and don’t give anyone your name and stay in the temple, Taehyung-ah, for your own good. Tomorrow, Taehyung and Jeongguk leave Onjo for the first time in their lives.

He lets Jeongguk guide him to bed, but Taehyung doesn’t sleep.

♜

Jimin leaves the prince’s suite only when he’s sure that Hoseok is truly asleep, his mouth fallen open and nose upturned and arm splayed out to cover the space where Jimin usually fits himself.

It’s something about the noise, he thinks, that makes this room so impossible to relax in. It feels like an echo chamber, all the prerecorded noise sets turned off for Jimin’s sake and leaving the room hollow, drafty, strangely shaped in a way he can’t get used to. Hoseok hasn’t seemed to notice, either the room or how often Jimin slips out of it, except to comment that Jimin seems more tired these days, that he isn’t suited to so many parties in a row.

It’s not like Jimin disagrees with him, on that point. He wraps a silk robe around himself, a silver-stitched thing Hoseok passed down to him when he noticed how often Jimin slipped it on anyway, and knots it loose around his waist. He keeps his feet bare, because the warmth of the heated floor under his feet is something pleasant to focus on, instead of the unpleasant prick of the inside of even his softest slippers.

He used to be better than this, after sleeping with his cheek pressed to Hoseok’s bare skin. It used to be easier.

There are a dozen places that Jimin could go, small spots of the Imugi that he’s scoped out in the four weeks they’ve spent on tour. There’s the laundry room, almost always empty past the middle of the ship’s programmed night, and the desert rooms of the botanic garden, a place that tortures his senses but soothes his mind, and the almost-outdoors charm of the oncheon. He stands outside of Hoseok’s quarters for a moment, running through a list of them in his head, taking stock of his own body to try to assess what he might be able to handle tonight.

Finally, as quietly as he can, Jimin makes his way to the observation deck. It’s the most risky, the most often populated after dark, but the view is worth it. The stars, hundreds and thousands of lightyears away, don’t care that Jimin can see a speck of dirt on a shirt across a crowded banquet hall. They just burn, and sting his eyes if he looks too long, and reveal none of their secrets no matter how hard he might stare.

They’ve been gone from Onjo for less than six hours, but already its twin suns are points of impossible light against a blackness that even Jimin’s eyes can’t break.

He sits on the floor, cross-legged and straight-backed, just inches away from where the reinforced window begins. Resists the urge to reach out and touch it, like it might cure him, like it might turn him back into a thing that can be soothed by Hoseok’s touch.

Too soon, Jimin hears footsteps. They’re slow, deliberately quiet. A breathing pattern that Jimin doesn’t recognize, even from any servant on the ship. He should be worried, maybe, but all he can do is sit with his eyes fixed on the stars of Onjo’s system and hope that this stranger passes the observation deck by.

It’s a futile hope, of course. Jimin hears the stranger’s breath catch when he passes, hears the sudden jerk of a heartbeat, feels the air in the room shift with the presence of a body in the wide, open doorway.

Jimin stays still, and keeps hoping. There’s nothing to indicate that the stranger has seen him, and Jimin doesn’t know if he can handle being spoken to now. Especially by a new servant, judging from the sound his slippers make across the floor, the sound of his clothes as they shift on his frame. They’d lost a few servants, when the stewardess caught them trying to barter some of the ship’s rarest pleasures, and Jimin is confident and dismayed at his assessment that this must be a replacement, picked up at the last stop.

He thinks back, picks through different catalogued conversations, remembers a mention of servants in one of the tense exchanges between Hoseok and the Onjan scholar he seemed to loathe on sight. Jimin hadn’t taken much note of it, because he’d been too busy trying to stifle amusement at the way Hoseok bristled when the scholar mentioned his collaboration with Yoongi and the Namsan library.

The mention of the library, at least, had been a welcome reminder of home. Jimin clings to that memory of peace, and clenches his teeth as the servant wanders further into the room, and refuses to move his eyes even when he hears all the telltale signs of having been seen. Surprise, a repressed flinch, a gust of breath.

But the stranger doesn’t speak. He holds very still for a moment, like he’s expecting Jimin to reprimand him for clearly wandering around when he isn’t supposed to be, for taking a moment of leisure on a part of the ship reserved for those traveling on it instead of working. But Jimin doesn’t have the energy for that, and if the servants spread gossip as quickly as he’s come to rely on, this stranger already knows that he could laugh in Jimin’s face with fewer consequences than would come for kicking a puppy on the street.

Silence. Another breath, careful. The rustle of fingers under fabric, across skin, maybe reaching up to touch something. A necklace, Jimin judges, from the position of the sound.

He’s so tired. His eyes hurt from it.

The stranger sits, on the floor, cross-legged. Far enough away that if Jimin were normal, he might not be able to even hear him breathe.

The companionship, as nice as it might be under any other circumstance, is agonizing. Jimin holds his breath until he can’t any longer, until it all comes flooding out of him loud enough that the stranger must notice. It leaves him trembling, everything wound tight in his chest, everything feeling impossible to handle when all he wants is Hoseok, and Hoseok is now unbearable, and Jimin has to force himself to acknowledge that what he wants—calm and quiet and peace—might be something he’ll never get to have again.

Even when they arrive back home, even in the familiar noise of Namsan, Jimin is so afraid that he’ll reach out for Hoseok’s hand, and feel nothing but skin and sweat and pressure.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. The stars spin past him, the ship moving impossibly quickly and yet slow enough that the stars are almost fixed, the shape of them so different than the ones Jimin is used to seeing from the palace gardens, the constellations that have been mapped from Sansegye for hundreds and hundreds of years.

The stranger is trembling. Jimin can feel it, his skin getting more and more sensitive the longer he sits, the barest shifts in the air smacking him as forceful as monsoon winds. The stranger is trembling, and shaking the room around them, and Jimin’s teeth ache from grinding together to keep himself from screaming.

It’s so much that it starts to black out everything else. The pinprick points of stars, the constant shout of the engines, the remnants of perfume lingering in the back of his throat. There’s nothing but the buffet of recycled air, the silk robe shifting against his skin, the sensation of touch too much and impossible to ignore and the only thing that matters, suddenly, even—

With the part of his mind that isn’t panicking, Jimin recognizes this.

It happened to the others almost every day, by the end. They got sucked into one sense, so overwhelming that they could barely breathe. Seohee stopped talking, after she spent so long screaming through an episode that blood pooled in her mouth, her throat torn to shreds. Jimin got them sometimes, when they kept him away from Hoseok. He still gets them, in quiet moments, when he doesn’t have a million different things to ground himself outside his own head.

This hurts. It hurts so badly that Jimin wants to scream, even as his muscles spasm and his throat clenches as tight as it gets with a stranger’s fist around it.

Silk feels as vicious as needles. His own hair drags against his cheekbone when he flinches at nothing that feels like everything, and the prick of it is savage, is knives gouging against his skin. He wants to cry, but suddenly his eyes are pressed too tight to let anything escape and he doesn’t know if he could bear the heat of tears against his skin.

He wants Hoseok. He wants how Hoseok used to be, how touching him used to feel.

The air shifts. The stranger gets closer. Jimin can’t see, and can’t hear, and can’t taste anything. All he can do is feel, helpless and as vulnerable as he ever gets, everything blurry except for the sharpness of his skin.

The humiliation of it is revolting. The shifting stops, the air goes still, but Jimin can feel the stranger’s breath. He can feel the unconscious movements, the way the body never really stops moving. His eyes are closed and there are colors behind them that he can’t connect his mind to, can’t name; he can hear but nothing makes sense. It’s like the doctor’s capsule all over again, different and yet just as excruciating.

For a flash of a moment—a terrible thing—Jimin can’t help but wish that he were on the other side of the window. Floated out to the void of space, cold and breathless and quiet, finally.

The moment passes like a lightning strike, and then Jimin can breathe. He can understand, again, the reds and oranges behind his eyelids, can catalogue the sound of someone else breathing beside him. The air tastes over-filtered. The stranger beside him smells like a soap Jimin isn’t familiar with.

He’s sitting closer, now, like he might have thought Jimin needed support to work himself through an episode. There’s a sheepishness to the slump of his shoulders. Jimin looks out of the corner of his eye, and sees nothing but a dark curtain of hair, two hands sitting idle in the stranger’s lap. His pants are patched three times over at the knee; Jimin can see the stitching from the different repairs.

Lips part. Jimin hears it, the slick sound of the inside of a mouth, and leans his whole body away.

He still hasn’t unlocked his jaw. He’s afraid of screaming, like the rest of them screamed at the end. There were nights when Jimin couldn’t sleep, because he could hear Yejun screaming from all the way across the palace grounds, in one of the soundproof rooms the Empress ordered built just for them. He looks back at the stars, fixes his eyes on one that burns almost blue, doesn’t want to look to see that curtain part, to show him the truth of whatever this servant might feel.

The mouth shuts. Teeth click. The body beside him tenses, holds its pose, and then slides into motion.

Jimin lets his teeth part, when the stranger flees. And it is fleeing, Jimin knows. He hears the jerk of breath, the way the cautious footsteps pick up into a run as soon as he’s past the threshold. His jaw throbs as violently as his temples, his hands uncurl from their fists to rest red and trembling against his own thighs. The stars remain dazzling and indifferent, suspended in nothingness and as constant as Jimin is temporary.

Like he always does, Jimin crawls back to Hoseok. He strips himself down to nothing but smallclothes, and presses himself against Hoseok’s bare skin, and pretends like it helps.

Make it stop, Jimin begs ancestors he’s not sure have ever listened. Please, take it away.

The engine hums, as steady and unyielding as a star. Jimin closes his eyes and pretends to sleep, until he can convince himself that everything beyond Hoseok’s heartbeat is nothing but the sigh of wind through the mountains.

♖

For as frightened of it as Taehyung had been, his routine on the Imugi settles within the first several days.

Jeonghwa is his guide for each of his rotations, and has warmed to him enough to speckle their tasks with cheerful chatter about the capital and the half-dozen planets they’ve stopped at on tour. Taehyung learns almost everything from her, not only about the ship but its occupants, and tells her what he can about the small pleasures of Onjo just to see her light up when he describes the taste of a fruit she’s never even seen, when he tells her about the Tamjingang and the crisp water that flows from the mountains.

When they’re summoned to the public spaces, to run errands for lucky ambassadors and royal favorites, Jeonghwa breathes out names and titles and scathing epithets under her breath. Taehyung learns the names of ladies and their daughters, the ones most often paraded in front of the prince, and learns the name of each servant in their quarters, and learns the name of each room on the ship.

He learns the name of the sentinel, but not until three days after the Imugi leaves port.

“Him?” Jeonghwa asks with a blink, when they’ve turned back toward the kitchen for more champagne and finger desserts. The observation deck is crowded with the aftermath of dinner, a few lordlings and ladies lounging with the prince and his pet on the sofas and cushions, some of them reading or chattering quietly or mock-gambling with their nicest jewelry. “No one’s told you?”

“Only you talk to me,” Taehyung says, because Namjoon and Jeongguk hardly count. Jeongguk doesn’t get along with his guide as readily as Taehyung does with his own, and so Taehyung has started to let him take most of Namjoon’s personal calls alone, just to get some time to himself.

“Lucky you.”

Taehyung bows, sweeping his arm dramatically, and listens to his heartbeat under the sound of Jeonghwa’s laughter.

Eventually, the laughter quiets. Her face goes still, her pleased softness fading into something more serious, more concerned. There’s a moment where the only sound is the impact of their footsteps on the floor, the echo still unnatural even three days after the doors had sealed out the universe.

“That’s Jimin,” she finally says, like she’s never had to explain it to someone before. “He’s the prince’s.”

“The prince’s what?” Taehyung asks, because it sounds like he’s supposed to. Her lips pull down; she shrugs tightly, the tray tucked under her arm moving awkwardly with it.

“His—I don’t know. Pet, or something. He’s been around even longer than I have, and everyone knows what he does with the prince.” There’s disdain curling in the words, disdain fluttering in her chest and echoing into Taehyung’s. “The prince lets other nobles borrow him for events, like some sick reward or something. Other than that, they’re always together. It’s weird.”

Taehyung breathes, deliberate. He thinks of Jimin, this impossible sentinel, sitting pressed against the prince’s side. Reading quietly, carefully, every muscle locked in tension. It’s hard to imagine how it must feel, to sense everything on the ship, but—Taehyung doesn’t have to imagine. He feels it, every time they’re in the same room. The urge to reach out with that inside part of himself, to soothe the burn of it, to bring down Jimin’s senses to something reasonable, something human.

“Weird,” Taehyung echoes. He turns it over in his mind as he straightens his arm for another tray of champagne, a delicate flute of something clear and virgin for the prince, who Taehyung has learned—from both observation and Namjoon’s endless complaining—rarely drinks.

He believes Namjoon that the prince is a guide, because he’s never seen Namjoon worked up about anything before, but from watching him Taehyung would never have guessed. The prince is unflinchingly polite, and never anything less than cheerful, and gives no indication that he’s privy to anyone’s worst emotions. There’s never once been a blink out of place, a flaw in his smile, a hint that the person following in his footsteps is feeling so many things at once that Taehyung can barely stand to be in his presence.

And he wonders—what of that might be the prince’s perfect mask, and what might be dullness. There isn’t a measurement to guides like there are for sentinels, everything shifted on its head, but—most of the Twins left were guides, or nothing at all. Taehyung knows they felt things differently than he does, less intensely, more individual.

Namjoon and Hoseok can’t be in a room together without getting into an argument buried under the vicious smiles of propriety, their voices delicate and their eyes cutting. Taehyung can’t stand in front of Jimin without feeling like he’s been shoved out of the Imugi’s airlock.

“Hey,” Jeonghwa says, with a barely-there nudge of her elbow against his arm. “Don’t worry about it, okay? Jimin shouldn’t give you trouble, but if he tries to pull anything—no one would take his side over yours, even the prince.”

Bleak, Taehyung thinks, and holds back a wince that might have shuddered the tray on his arm. Even Jimin’s prince, his owner, would publicly back the word of a servant over him, if public opinion were at stake.

There’s a moment where Taehyung is tempted to let the tray crash to the floor, in a spray of shattered glass and leaking champagne. Just for the excuse of having to turn back, to clean up his mess and wait in the kitchen for another tray, or to be sent somewhere else on the ship to avoid having to go back into that room, with so many people and emotions and Jimin, who Taehyung couldn’t stop himself from pulling out of a zone even when he didn’t know his name. Jimin, who isn’t supposed to exist.

His arm stays steady. Jeonghwa accepts his forced smile and thanks, and Taehyung goes back to making the rounds among nobles and politicians, unseen and unseeing, focused only on keeping his face as blank as possible.

He waits for the prince to flag him down, before bringing the tray close. There’s a moment where Taehyung hesitates, before remembering the veiled threats of the stewardess, and approaches as quickly as he dares, as quietly as he can make his footsteps. His chest hurts the closer he gets, pressure building up even as he tries not to look down, to pay attention to Jimin pressed with his head against Hoseok’s shoulder, book propped up on one knee as he half-dozes.

But even with Jimin almost asleep, Taehyung can hardly breathe. There’s too much—pressure unbearable against his skin, every fine imperfection in the silk he’s wearing scraping as rough as fingernails, the noise overwhelming and impossible and Taehyung’s free hand tucked behind his back is shaking, as he bends to let the prince take his drink.

“You’re new,” the prince says, just barely loud enough to carry, and not a question. “Welcome to the Imugi.”

His smile is still perfect. Jimin blinks, lazy, even the darkness not truly dark, and then fixes his gaze up.

Taehyung goes cold all over, and he doesn’t know if it’s from Jimin or himself. He would scramble for the totem around his neck if he could, Seonmul wearing away at the edges from how often he grips at the stone, to stop himself from seeing through Jimin’s eyes in a way he didn’t know was possible. To stop himself from understanding what Jimin sees—from each dip in his retinas to the way he holds himself, an impossibly detailed look that takes in all of him at once, a trained kind of looking, a focused kind of interest. Recognition, Taehyung feels, and wariness, and under it all a kind of screaming that makes Taehyung want to topple to his knees and press his face against the carpet and tear out his own hair by the root.

“It’s my pleasure to be here, Your Highness,” he manages, and stumbles only on the honorific.

The prince’s smile is unspecific and generous, and Taehyung gets the impression that he’s been forgotten as soon as the prince looks away. But Jimin is looking, Taehyung knows without seeing. Jimin is waiting for Taehyung to meet his eyes, to say something, to break the silence that Taehyung knew wasn’t silence as soon as he felt Jimin wash over him that night on the observation deck.

It’s what Jimin wants, but Taehyung thinks it might kill him. There’s another lordling looking for a drink, now, patience wearing thin that Taehyung just barely can feel underneath the impossible current of Jimin.

He makes the mistake of looking back to the Prince. From there it’s inescapable—the fall of dark hair across the pale blue of the prince’s robe. The extended line of his neck, the soft part of his lips. Taehyung meets Jimin’s eyes, sees himself seeing himself, and almost collapses.

It’s the prince who saves him. The prince, who reaches up to pet an affectionate hand through Jimin’s hair. The prince, who breaks Jimin’s concentration enough that Taehyung can stumble away, just barely keeping his tray steady. He keeps his back to the pair of them, even as he can feel Jimin’s wariness fixed like a target on his back, and focuses on nothing but keeping his body fixed, rigid, carved from stone.

Jeonghwa is moving through the crowd like water, offering finger food. Taehyung focuses on that—the dip of her spine as she bends, the lightness of her footsteps, and tries to reflect it back at her. He floats, and keeps his eyes fixed anywhere but that particular lounge, and grits his teeth on a smile until his tray is empty and he can retreat, again, to the kitchen.

The kitchen is safe, for now. Taehyung breathes, and breathes, and just barely registers his fingers digging into his own sides. He notices the bruises when he strips off for his shower, and presses idly into them under the blur of steam.

It doesn’t get easier. Every day, when he sees Jimin across a room or passing through a hall in the prince’s footsteps, it just gets harder to stay away.

He’s almost grateful when the Imugi docks at Tammora Six, and Jimin vanishes into the crowd with his prince.

♜

Jimin isn’t sure how he’ll survive two months more of this. He says all the right things, and sits behind Hoseok on a raft that carries them through the floating markets of Vovin, and trains himself to hear anything under the current of this planet’s never-ending ocean. He does everything right, and still he wants to tear at himself until he bleeds, wants to crawl into one of the quiet places on the Imugi and stay there until the ship carries him home.

He wants the library. He wants to be spoken to by someone, anyone, as more than an object.

Even Hoseok is drifting away. He’s tired, these days, and Jimin doesn’t blame him—all his time is spent studying, and entertaining, with no time alone like they’re all used to in the palace. When he pulls Jimin close, he’s insistent like a toddler with a toy. When he demands Jimin read to him, he settles in with a pout that smooths away only as he slips into sleep.

Tammora Six is an ocean planet. Jimin hasn’t been to one before—even Onjo, with its vast expanse of water, had been a city firmly on land. Vovin, a city on stilts and rafts, is new and exciting and brings a light into Hoseok’s eyes that Jimin hasn’t seen since they stepped out under the pink skies of the first tour stop.

“Look at that,” Hoseok hisses to him, and points out a teenager on a motorized board, a sail catching the wind and sending her hurling up into the air over the uncrested waves that lift and lower the city itself. “Do you think they’ll let me try it?”

Jimin can’t stop a smile, at that. “I think you’d wipe out in four seconds.”

He has an unlimited credit stick on him at all times, courtesy of the crown, so the only thing Jimin has to offer in a bet is himself. Hoseok takes the whispered wager with a wink, and immediately gestures over Vovin’s ambassador and gestures at the teenager. There’s a quick conversation, a lot of smiles, and by the time they reach the next cluster of structures someone has rigged up a windboard for Hoseok.

Jimin leans back on his elbows, settled into a cushioned divot in the luxury raft, and watches Hoseok run through blessings with the gathered crowd before taking a quick set of instructions from another, clearly unimpressed teenager.

No one but Jimin is impolite enough to bet on the prince, but he can see in some of their retinue’s faces that they want to. Hoseok steps off the perilous-looking doc he’d stepped onto to make conversation, and wobbles as he grips the mast of the windsurfer, and laughs in delight as he steadies himself with no small amount of effort.

There’s always something enjoyable about watching Hoseok use his body. Jimin has always loved it, as long as he can remember; from the first dance lessons he was allowed to sit in on, to the sparring matches the two of them have in the early hours of the morning, to the soft blue of a bedroom light reflecting off of him above Jimin, underneath him, smiling through kisses and panting moans. This is no different—Hoseok is a competent athlete at anything that doesn’t involve a projectile, and he kicks the motor of the windboard into gear so fluidly that Jimin could pretend he’s been doing it his whole life.

The teenager still seems unimpressed, but everyone else claps obligingly when Hoseok manages not to capsize. At least not immediately, and the smile splits his face that means he’s found his balance, and Jimin is losing their bet.

It’s not a bet he’d wanted to win. A whispered promise, for after the first banquet, that would get him off of an assignment’s arm and back into Hoseok’s bed, where he belongs. Hoseok shrieks when he shifts gear, and the windboard sends him flying off the lip of a wave in a jump he just barely manages to land.

One jump seems to be enough for him. Jimin can almost taste the lurch of it in his gut, aches to reach out and beg me next, but knows it would never be allowed. He has a job, anyway. There are enough people here that someone could sneak up on the security detail with a weapon, and Jimin has been trained to put his body in front of any shot first, and see if he’s alive to go on the offensive second.

Hoseok is laughing, with ocean spray in his hair. The teenager blushes when Hoseok embraces her, losing her mask of indifference, and Jimin burrows deeper into his cushion.

It’s as peaceful as these things get. Hoseok has charmed a teen and the cheering crowd at the elevated market stand, and he’s just swept into a bow when Jimin hears—something out of place.

The creak of a too-subtle footstep. The elevated heartbeat in unfamiliar veins. The brush of skin against metal.

Jimin moves before he thinks. No one else has noticed, but he’s been trained for this, he’s done this before. When he was fifteen, when he was twenty, every morning when they run their drills. The muscles in his thighs burn as he launches himself forward, he feels water splash against his calves as he leaps, he hears the familiar pitched whir of a blaster at the moment he plows into Hoseok, arms around his familiar waist, breath held burning in his chest.

The blast goes off the second after the two of them hit the water. The cold shocks the air out of Jimin’s chest, squeezing tight in on him like a fist, and Hoseok scrambles to get to the surface. Their feet kick in unison, both of them heavy in their clothes and struggling to find up, but Jimin manages to break into the air with his hand fisted in the back of Hoseok’s shirt, pulling him up to breathe and retch and breathe again.

Under the water, sound had been muffled. Jimin gasps in frozen breaths to the sound of screams and bone cracking under the weight of one of Hoseok’s guards.

“Fuck,” Hoseok says, and clings onto Jimin hard enough to bruise his waist until the raft drifts up next to them. Someone is already holding out a blanket, the scene dispersing, the single second of terror too brief to linger. Hoseok climbs up into waiting arms and Jimin takes the moment of perfect cold, of feeling strangled by the weight of it, to take in the stranger—now unconscious, face-down, on the walkway. The blaster has already been collected, and Jimin watches a guard wrap and store it with less care than he might give a perfectly ripe fruit.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok says, for what might be the third or fourth time. “Come on, come on, it’s freezing in there.”

Jimin feels heavy. He feels like he might sink forever if he let himself, the adrenaline flooding out of him, the world pressing back in. He accepts the hands pulling him up only because Hoseok asked, and tucks himself into Hoseok’s side after stripping off his robe, the soaked silk doing more harm than good. Hoseok isn’t any warmer than he is, but the pressure is nice, grounding after the freefall into water that shocked him out of his breath.

“You’re okay?” Jimin checks, and his voice comes out reedy and small.

Hoseok’s head tips against Jimin’s shoulder. Everything gets just a little bit quieter.

“Thanks to you,” Hoseok replies, and that’s enough.

The trip is cut short to get Hoseok back onto the ship in dry clothes; a guard summons a faster boat than the lazy raft they’d been floating on, and the two of them shiver together the whole way back. Even as the rumble of an engine fills up most of Jimin’s energy, he can hear the people left behind already whispering, already spinning the story into legend without even waiting to hear the would-be assassin’s motives.

Jimin doesn’t particularly care to pay attention to that, but he knows the Empress will ask. He knows he’ll have to be there for the interrogation, to listen and watch and tell the guards whether the assassin is lying.

Hoseok doesn’t have to worry about that. Hoseok fusses over Jimin with a towel until his hair looks ridiculous, and then laughs as he brushes it down from its puffy mess, and kisses his nose in thanks once the both of them are bundled up with steaming mugs of tea and a fire snapping nicely in a carefully-controlled pit at the center of a lounge.

“My Jiminie,” Hoseok coos, and the endearment feels for once as genuine as Jimin believed it to be back in Namsan.

The warmth now is almost as overwhelming as the cold. The quiet energy of the Imugi is more sterile than the constant rush of water. Jimin finds himself missing the ocean just outside, the water rising and falling with the orbit of Tammora Six’s moons. He can still hear it, through the walls and the windows and the open bay doors, but it’s not the same as being surrounded.

He tries to summon that feeling again, when he’s walking to the interrogation. Jimin wants to make himself invisible, just one tiny body floating on an ocean that doesn’t care an inch whether he lives or dies. Something to fade into the background.

But he can’t fade, when the assassin glares at him when he enters, and one of the guards curls his lip. Jimin presses into a corner to feel the weight of something behind his back, and focuses in, close, on the assassin’s heartbeat.

Jimin hates this. The violence of it, the way blood is dried in cracked flakes down the front of the assassin’s face and robe, the implicit threat of the knives at the guards’ belts and the three-tiered settings of their blasters. He can barely hear the heartbeat over the screams that start as soon as the assassin refuses to give his name; when he starts talking, Jimin almost doesn’t trust himself to tell the difference between fear and a lie.

It was one of the first things he was trained on, when he stumbled out of that pod and latched onto Hoseok like the vines creeping along the palace’s columns. The doctor locked them in quiet rooms with strangers and punished them with sharp cracks of electricity when they failed to tell truth from lie, when they couldn’t root out a stranger’s tics. Even long after the doctor was gone, killed or imprisoned by the Empress for his failures, Jimin kept the practice at banquets and parties and dinners with the reminder of pain at his neck, crackling down his spine.

It’s what he does, now, without thinking. He knows when Hoseok is lying to an ambassador’s face; he knows when ambassadors are lying to Hoseok. They have a code for it, too, a quick stifled cough that Jimin has perfected when Hoseok needs to know he’s being tricked. Sometimes, Jimin doesn’t bother. Politicians lie like breathing, and so he’s learned how to separate the useful lies from the benign, the affairs from the cover-ups.

“He’s lying,” Jimin says, over and over, as the assassin spits denials as well as any senator. The guards look at him with thinly-veiled revulsion, but they love Hoseok more than they hate Jimin and so the blasters come out, and the smell of burning flesh crawls like a dead thing down Jimin’s throat, and pain mixes in with fear until the heartbeat is as erratic as any liar’s even when the man is silent and still.

When the assassin passes out, Jimin leaves before the guards can order him to wait.

He doesn’t know this part of the ship well, even though it’s mostly quiet. A series of storerooms, a decontamination chamber that leads to the engine, all clinically lit and undecorated. The food stores would be too painful to hide in, even sealed spices burning his tongue, and cleaning supplies even worse, and Jimin can smell it all even from out in the hallway so he picks up his pace, turning blindly until he’s somewhere he doesn’t bother to categorize before collapsing into the nearest cushion, his head braced on his knees, his hair somehow still damp.

“Hey,” someone says, barely a whisper, and Jimin jerks like he has the doctor’s electricity back at his neck.

He’s in a chamber next to the botanic gardens, one lit by soft gold and accented with green. Crystalline glass baubles hang from the ceiling, refracting light so it scatters strangely over the face of that new servant, the one who won’t meet Jimin’s eye, the one who runs each time Jimin tries to get his attention.

Jimin might be curious, if he didn’t feel ready to throw up.

“What do you want,” he mumbles, and presses his forehead back against the heavy wool blend covering his knees. He’s warm enough now that it’s almost uncomfortable, the cozy winter gear ready to be exchanged for his usual silk. The burgundy is still rich, this robe a gift from Hoseok for the colder stops on their tour; he’s only worn it once, and Jimin focuses on the places where he hasn’t worn his shape into the seams so he doesn’t have to listen to the servant’s heartbeat pick up, ready to run or lie or bribe.

“I don’t—” The servant starts, and Jimin is so tired of listening. So tired of being expected to pay attention even in Hoseok’s bed, when he can hear the whispers of the nearest members of the entourage in their own, separate wing.

“I have money,” Jimin offers, hollow. He’s done this before, too.

“I don’t want money.” This sounds certain, and isn’t a lie. Jimin doesn’t know if that’s better or worse. “You look upset.”

Jimin could laugh. His whole body feels like one of the baubles dangling from the ceiling, poised to shatter at one wrong movement. He holds it in, somehow, the weight of whatever choked-down sounds he’s keeping in battering against his ribcage. That isn’t worth a response, and he’s using too much of his energy on listening, and he can feel panic creeping over him as unstoppable as the tides outside the ship.

“Go away.” If the servant doesn’t want money, doesn’t want to press himself hot and threatening over Jimin to make himself feel powerful, than Jimin doesn’t care.

“No.”

It makes him look up. The servant is close, bent on one knee, looking.

This is the first time he’s looked into Jimin’s eyes. Every time Jimin has tried to catch them, lazy curiosity pricking at him when he notices they’re sharing space, the servant has looked away. His eyes are—uneven, differently than Jimin’s are. One of them looks sharper, and there’s a mole on his lower lash line, and Jimin can see into the hollows of his irises, can distinguish the deep brown from the pitch black of his pupils.

Jimin watches the pupil dilate. Watches the servant forcibly repress something, tension straining every inch of him.

“Who are you,” Jimin asks, and forgets for half a heartbeat about the clawing thing in his chest.

“Taehyung. From Onjo.” His jaw is clenched. The words are half breath, though Jimin hears them as clearly as a shout. He can hear this Taehyung’s heartbeat, the way it hasn’t calmed since they started speaking. He can hear the breath in his lungs. He can hear—

The servant touches him. Taehyung touches him, two fingers to the back of Jimin’s hand, and everything goes quiet.

Not quiet. Jimin blinks, and hears—just heartbeat. Just breaths. Not the crush of the tide or the footsteps across the Imugi or the whispering rasp of the air filtration system. Just Taehyung’s heartbeat, and his lungs, and the almost-imperceptible percussion each time he blinks.

What, Jimin thinks, and maybe says. He barely hears it, if it leaves his lips at all.

Taehyung’s eyes flick down, and his fingers draw away, and sound creeps in slowly, tentatively, like it’s waiting for permission as it eases itself back into the space Jimin hadn’t realized was stuffed full to bursting until it was all suddenly gone. He feels, suddenly, like the child he hasn’t been in years, terrified and stumbling into Hoseok for something, for any kind of relief.

It’s cool, all over his skin, like being dipped in a kinder sort of water than this planet’s ocean. Jimin shudders, and almost reaches out again, and looks at the barely-there space between each of Taehyung’s eyelashes like that might make him look up again, like he might have answers spelled out in those dark irises. Instead, Taehyung’s head stays bowed. His breath rattles in his lungs. Jimin hears the hum of the ship around them, but mostly he hears this room, this space between them, Taehyung more important than anything else he might hear.

“How do you stand it?” Taehyung whispers. His voice rasps. His hand trembles, where he’s drawn it close into his chest.

“Stand what?”

There’s a moment of quiet. Taehyung’s tongue runs along his lower lip, leaves behind a sheen of spit. Jimin can smell something sweet on his breath—a strawberry, he realizes, when he opens his mouth to taste. There had been strawberries on Hoseok’s breakfast tray.

“Feeling it.” Barely-there. He flinches at his own words.

Jimin doesn’t get to answer, before Taehyung is shaking himself. His hair loosens in its knot, eyes gone wide and uncertain, and Jimin tries to reach out and just barely catches the sleeve of Taehyung’s robe when his fingers scream, the threads cutting like blades, and Jimin yelps and pulls his hand back and Taehyung vanishes, the door sliding closed and his footsteps frantic, running. Jimin listens to his breaths and knows he could outrun him, catch him, pin him down and bully answers out of him, but—

In the market, everything had been quiet. For one split second, Jimin hadn’t heard everything. And on the observation deck, and here, in this room glowing faintly green.

No one had been able to explain why Hoseok could take the edge off of the worst of Jimin’s pain. No one he knows would be able to tell him what this servant is doing, why he seems to understand things that Jimin has only been guessing at for almost twenty years. He brushes his fingers against his own cheek and feels the individual pores, that screaming sensitivity gone as quickly as it had arrived.

Jimin wanders back to Hoseok in a daze, confusion and fear and some desperate longing all clanging so loudly in his head that he almost manages to forget why he’d been running away.

Chapter Text

♖♜

The next stop on Hoseok’s tour is Crilia, an ice planet that has Hoseok’s servants pulling out a trunk of the softest furs Jimin has ever touched. He can feel the chill as the Imugi docks, seeping into the walls even through thick layers of steel, and it’s early enough in the morning that he can still tuck himself tighter against Hoseok’s chest, both of them bare and warm under the heavy blankets.

Namsan doesn’t ever get as cold as Crilia’s summer months, but Hoseok has plenty of winter clothing from weeks spent in the mountains of the rest of Sansegye; resorts and manors owned by nobles who always made a show of presenting the prince with a fresh cloak. He must have dozens, by now, but Jimin watches the servants pull out only the finest—a cream thing, lined with sable fur, emblazoned with gold. There’s an outfit already planned for under it, of heavy wools and insulating silks, and an equally-soft pair of boots that Hoseok had delighted in trying on during the journey from Tammora Six.

Hoseok’s chest rises and falls, rises and falls. Jimin presses his lips to the dip below his throat, ignores the breathed sound of disgust from one of the servants. There had been no assignment from the queen in Vovin, and so the last few days of travel have been pleasantly intimate.

Pleasant, if Jimin can ignore how much less Hoseok’s touch soothes him than it used to.

One of Hoseok’s cloaks has been left out for him. They dress slowly, this first day one of luxury, and Jimin takes the time to appreciate the heavy drape of the fabric even as the fur brushes too-sharp against his neck. There’s something pleasant about wrapping his face in a silk scarf, the same rich green as the cloak, to shield himself from the wind.

He’s been looking forward to Crilia just for the gloves. A pair Hoseok was gifted just over a year ago, dark and impossibly soft even to Jimin’s sensitive skin. Hoseok had seen Jimin’s face at the touch of them, and surrendered the gift without a second thought.

“Aw,” Hoseok pouts, just before he lets Jimin wrap the shimmering silver scarf over his mouth. “I’ll miss your face, Jimin-ah.”

He leans forward, and pecks a kiss to the silk resting on the tip of Jimin’s nose.

And again Jimin thinks—there are no assignments for him, here. His face is for Hoseok alone. He falls into step, into his place, but the reminder is a glow of warmth even as the snow gathers on the Imugi’s rooftop.

The summer market is the coldest place Jimin has ever been. He can feel his breath freezing as it leaves his lips, can feel the crystals of ice beading in his hair, can feel every touch of his heavy clothing and every prick of snow that falls on him in between the docks and the expansive cave system that houses the capital city. Any respite he might have felt in Hoseok’s bed is stripped away with the wind, and Jimin trembles as he follows in the snow outlines of Hoseok’s footprints.

The caves, at least, take away the wind. They cast everything into shades of blue, even the scarce inches of skin Jimin can see on each of the passers-by, and he thinks about speeding up just for a moment, to catch Hoseok’s eye and smile about it.

Every light is held in an orb of glass; every wall glistens with ice; every word reverberates so thoroughly that the citizens of Nyla speak only in whispers. That, at least, is a kindness to Jimin’s ears, underneath the terrible noise of the tons of ice groaning above their heads. None of the locals seem to hear it, to pay it much mind, but Jimin catches concern etched into Hoseok’s profile when he looks up, the blueness reflecting off the whites of his eyes.

“Wow,” Jimin hears him whisper, and knows that Hoseok means him to. “It’s so big.”

The cave system, half natural and half shaped by its people, stretches across a plot of ice as large as Namsan itself. The path from the docks takes them right to the center, past houses and shops etched into the walls. Hoseok waves into a school of heavily-dressed toddlers that makes everyone in the party smile—Jimin can almost imagine them, their torsos weighted down by so many layers, toppling over when they try to stand.

And the center—the center is like nothing Jimin has ever seen.

The summer market is a wash of color underneath the persistent blue. It’s a single cave, at least a kilometer across in either direction, filled with ice and wood stands draped with furs, with vibrant cloth, with offworld spices and books and technology and everything Jimin can imagine from all the markets he’s seen in the last few weeks. His cheeks sting from the cold, and his whole body itches, and the new rash of input from the market is too much, but there’s something wonderful about it anyway.

At times like this, ready to collapse under the weight of ice and noise and touch, Jimin isn’t sure whether he wants to stay forever or crawl back to the Empress on his knees, ready to beg her to never make him leave the capital again.

They have a day to spend in the market, and already people are starting to fawn over Hoseok. He has a Crilian ambassador attached at his elbow, her face covered everywhere but for her darkly lined eyes. Jimin can see the frozen parts of the air near her mouth where she whispers, and wonders—the homes are insulated and heated, and everywhere are rich furs and weaves and carefully-tended fires, but he thinks the Empress withholding an assignment here might have been, in her own way, a kindness.

Hoseok can’t kiss grandmothers here, but he offers so many people embraces that Jimin can already smell the accumulation of strangers on him. A little girl smears something sticky and hot over a bottom section of his cloak, and her mother drops into a mortified bow, and Hoseok laughs and kisses the girl’s cheek and offers the royal credit stick to pay for a new treat, to make up for the one he’d ruined.

Jimin wanders, as much as he’s allowed. The whispering helps his head, though the echo still throws him off, and even as he watches the crowd and the dangers, he lets himself appreciate the smaller things.

He has a growing collection of trinkets from the different tour stops, and he’s standing by a display of intricate silver jewelry, staffed only by a young woman with frost on her eyelashes, when he hears something familiar.

Or—maybe he smells, or sees, or tastes it on the air.

The servant, Taehyung, is two stalls down, sighing wistfully over a wooden jewelry display. Jimin catches his voice, speaking low to the grandfather whose gloved hands are working skillfully with his whittling knife, and smells the layers and layers of people who must have worn his rented cloak before him.

Jimin has seen these servant cloaks before, but never one so thoroughly worn. Taehyung’s voice is trembling as violently as his body; when he pulls his arm out from under his cloak, gesturing at a pair of earrings, Jimin sees the pale tips of his ungloved fingers.

He pays for his favorite piece of silver, a frostdragon meant to curl up and around his ear, and slips through the crowd.

♜

Taehyung’s hands are numb.

It started with the tip of his nose, seconds after Jeonghwa hooked his arm in hers and dragged him out into the Crilian cold. His ears went next, the ache grown almost unbearable as they made their way to the market. Summer, the locals call it, but Taehyung has nothing but a linen scarf to cover his lips and a rented cloak from the servants’ storeroom, and he’s wasted so much energy on shivering that he’s almost looking forward to the exhaustion that might make him go still.

“Buy something warm,” Jeonghwa offers as parting advice, when Taehyung leaves her watching a troupe of singers. The song is strange and raspy, accompanied by a kind of flute he’s never seen before, and the way it echoes from the ceiling of the caves has Taehyung retreating with nothing more than a smile, his hands tucked under his arms, his credit stick too empty to waste on a hot drink.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever be used to the swell of excitement that builds in any crowd the prince walks through, but Taehyung has to admit it’s useful for navigation. He’s too cold to pay close attention to anything but the ache in his teeth from clenching them, but the prince’s particular brand of crowd-pleasing is an easy enough warning to keep him at the edges of the market, keeping his hands as close to his chest as he can. There’s a tear near the collar of the cloak that lets wind brush against his neck. There are heating systems inside the buildings, but the prince had requested the summer market for its local charm.

Said locals pity him, Taehyung knows. He feels it most when a mother passes close by him, a toddler swaddled in furs and brightly-colored blankets at her breast. There’s a flash of it — sharp, sickening, and Taehyung resists the urge to flee back into the Imugi, where he’d left Jeongguk wound tight with impatience for his own turn off-ship.

They’re both getting spacesick, Taehyung thinks. The fresh air, frigid as it is, might be the only thing keeping him from losing himself to the constant press of too many bodies.

Jeongguk has been snapping more often, hogging Namjoon’s time, and Taehyung is so sick of the crowded bunks of their quarters and the ten-minute shower cycle that he thinks he’d do anything, everything, for the familiar press of a river over his head.

In Nyla’s summer market, passing by stalls of furs and jewelry and cold-weather fruits, Taehyung misses the Tamjingang more than he knows how to speak.

The ice caverns burrow deep into the planet’s core, though, and the reverberation of the market itself is almost enough to make up for the dry freeze of the air, the breath crystalizing on Taehyung’s lips despite his scarf, despite the wax he’d coated them in before wrapping his face. He tastes salt when he licks out, something so close to home, and steps closer to a stall of wooden carvings. His credit stick digs indents into his hand, clenched tight to try to keep himself from trembling, and Taehyung does his best to keep still, to avoid jostling his cloak more than he has to. It’s the only thing stopping him from gripping the totem at his neck, so similar in style to the carver’s jewelry.

There’s one in particular — a set of earrings, stained dark, rippling with delicate curves across each teardrop surface. They remind Taehyung of the river, the way it froths at sharp turns and tumbles over itself down a slope. A single crystal glitters at their tops, set in with brass or something like it, and Taehyung itches to reach out and feel the ridges of the carving underneath his numb fingers.

“Those are beautiful,” He manages, when the grandfather behind the stall turns to him. He dares to reach out, to point, and catches the old man’s pity in the freezing second it takes for the wind to bite into his skin.

The vendor hums. Despite the thickness of the fur and leather of his gloves, he’s whittling down a disk of wood so quickly that Taehyung barely understands what he’s seeing, a maze of lines worked into the grain before he can hope to understand the pattern.

“How much for the pair?” It’s a futile question; Taehyung probably doesn’t have enough credits left to buy a single one. The Twins had never been prosperous, donations given rarely even when Taehyung was young, and what little they’d sent with him and Jeongguk had been all the elders had left over from the barest necessities.

“Twenty-five,” the vendor grumbles, and Taehyung’s heart sinks. Twenty-five thousand, five times more than what he has left. The earrings are worth it, no doubt, but Taehyung’s stomach twists at the thought of spending so much, even if he could.

The grandfather must be able to see the dismay above his face wrap, because he turns back to his carving with a shrug.

Taehyung steps back, ready to give up and make his way through to the crowd of food stalls for something to warm his fingers, before he feels it.

An unmistakable someone, coming toward him. He cuts through the crowd like a hot knife, everything around him quiet even as he churns with everything Taehyung’s been trying to avoid for days. Taehyung closes his eyes, in thrall to the panic under Jimin’s skin that lives there like a second skin, trying so hard to run even as his feet root into the snow.

“I’ll take them,” Jimin says, and slides a credit stick over the display table.

Taehyung’s chest hurts. He wants to say don’t, wants to reach out and pull back that outstretched arm by the sleeve, but all he can do is brace himself against the proximity. They’re almost touching, Jimin’s lavish cloak brushing Taehyung’s near their ankles, their shoulders just a handspan apart. This close, Taehyung can feel the agony of what Jimin can hear, the sting of the cold like needles, the too-thick smells of the stalls and crowds and the ice underneath it all.

The vendor hands the credit stick back, and the earrings in a violet-dyed pouch, and raises his eyebrows at Taehyung like he’s smiling under his high fur collar, like he’s watching a drama unfolding in front of him.

Jimin reaches out, the sight of his gloves sending a sharp ache through Taehyung’s own trembling hands, and takes his elbow. Even through layers and layers, the touch is electric. Taehyung blanks the walk to the cavern’s wall, a curve above them that rains down echoed whispers; when he blinks, Jimin’s face swims into his vision, eyes panic-wide, brows dusted with frost.

“Taehyung-ssi,” he says, quiet. Pleading. His fingers tighten around Taehyung’s arm. The pressure feels like begging, and Taehyung is shivering too hard to fight it. He closes his eyes, lets himself root through everything Jimin is projecting in unstable waves, finds the worst of the pains.

“Please,” Jimin says. It’s barely a whisper, just a press of air as he mouths it, but even with his eyes closed Taehyung knows there’s no way he wouldn’t understand. “Please, make it stop.”

There’s a moment, fleeting and impossible, where Taehyung considers saying no. It’s dangerous, warn the elders in his head, it’s not why you’re here.

But Jimin feels — hopeless, is the word Taehyung can summon first. Underneath everything on his surface, the anxiety always oriented toward his prince, the distance he forces between himself and the world, Jimin feels hopeless.

So Taehyung reaches out with numb hands, and presses his fingers under Jimin’s sleeve. He finds the first sliver of skin, and opens his eyes to the caves’ unending blue, and watches himself through Jimin’s eyes.

The first thing, the most important thing, is the cold. Jimin’s skin hurts, hurts even in the most temperate of climates, with the most finely woven silks. Taehyung reaches, like he’d practiced over and over again each time Namjoon asked, and knows now to brace himself for Jimin’s vicious current, rather than Namjoon’s placid stream. This is a muscle, like any other, he reminds himself. Imagines cupping his palms in the river, instead of submerging himself completely.

Slowly, carefully, Taehyung ebbs sensation away. First the agonizing cold, then the bite of the wind, then the scrape of each shred of cloth. He gives Jimin numbness in his cheeks, his hands, his ears; gives him a warm core in his well-covered chest.

Without being told, Taehyung knows that Jimin needs the rest of himself. He struggles against attempts to soothe his hearing, his sight, his smell, but he lets Taehyung take away the taste of steam and spice and skin. Through his eyes, Taehyung looks vacant, standing with far-away eyes and pale skin and ice gathering in his hair. He looks cold.

And then Taehyung shudders into himself, stepping away from the river, and Jimin blinks. Once. Twice.

“Oh,” he says. The back of one hand presses against his lips, glove against scarf against skin. Taehyung sees the tear slip, sees it freeze on Jimin’s cheek, and sees the way Jimin startles when he notices what he hasn’t noticed.

It must be unbearable, to feel everything. It is unbearable, Taehyung knows every time he steps close enough to Jimin to feel it, and how firmly he knows it only makes Jimin’s relief more pitiful. And it is pity that Taehyung feels, no matter how hard he tries to keep it at bay. Pity for a sentinel made for a guide who can’t help him, who has been waning just slowly enough that Jimin can understand what will happen without his prince to keep him grounded. Pity that Jimin has been feeling himself going mad, and has almost resigned himself to that endless eventually.

“How do you do that?” Jimin whispers, and the spell is broken. Taehyung jerks his hand back, and spins on his heel, and bites down on a scream when Jimin pulls him back by the shoulder.

“Let me go,” he grunts. Teeth clenched, eyes down.

“Sorry.” A panicked whisper. “I’m sorry. Take these.”

A brief moment of fumbling, Jimin’s hand gone from Taehyung’s shoulder, when he could run. But then Jimin’s hand is under his nose, pink and flushed and delicate, offering out a bundle of cloth.

“What?”

“Take them,” Jimin insists. He sounds more confident than Taehyung has ever heard him, even with his prince. “You need them more, now.”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. Taehyung feels him listening to the crowd, the swell of excitement that follows the prince pulling away into a smaller network of caves, and then blinks when the bundle is shoved into his hands.

All he gets is a crinkle of Jimin’s eyes before he turns, vanishing back through the crowd after his master, leaving Taehyung with parted lips and a violet-dyed pouch and a pair of impossibly warm gloves.

♖

The Crilian governor throws Hoseok a party in one of the most lavish capitol buildings in the quadrant, and Jimin, for the first time, can enjoy it. He’s still breathless from the market, from the sudden absence of pain, and since it’s maybe the first time in years he’s moved without wanting to scream at every touch of fabric and wind, the marble support beams and silver-embossed tiles of the banquet hall have him stopping in the doorway to sigh.

“I know,” Hoseok murmurs. He’s watching Jimin, brow just barely creased, but looks away to admire the ornamentation of the hall, the scrolls hung between crystalline glass windows and jewels hung like earrings from the rafters.

The marble is so pure that Jimin almost mistakes it for the snow they’d left outside. The glare from the hanging lights hurts his eyes, but for once the pain is almost singular, almost manageable. He feels more like himself than he has in months, more like a person than he thought was possible, these last few weeks. What Taehyung has left him is better than even Hoseok’s comfort when they were young, when lying underneath him felt like pulling a blanket over his head to hide from the world.

“Keep close?” Hoseok asks, when all Jimin can do is blink into the gathering crowd. There’s no assignment tonight, so he can stay as close to Hoseok as he wants — but what he wants, usually, is much closer than this.

“Of course,” he promises. Jimin brushes his fingers over Hoseok’s, and shivers when the touch feels like almost nothing. Hoseok eyes him for another long moment, before pulling away. The crowd surges up to meet him, the governor himself clasping Hoseok’s arm as he steps out of the shadowed foyer.

Jimin, as always, follows close behind. Jimin, as always, keeps his eyes open and his mind blank, listening through the crowd for something interesting, something the Queen might want or need. He can smell the blasters at the guards’ hips, the pre-burn of the ammunition, each note of perfume and each alcohol-heavy breath.

But tonight, he can eat. Jimin picks off appetizers from silver trays, small tarts with sour fruits he’s never been brave enough to try and steaming soup dumplings that for once don’t scald the inside of his mouth. He can see Hoseok’s confusion, but stronger than the urge to deflect attention is the hunger behind Jimin’s ribs, the hunger he can’t ignore any longer. He’s been eating less and less this whole tour, can wrap his fingers around their opposite wrists with too much room to spare, and so Jimin throws caution away as he licks his fingers, sticky with arctic honey, and blinks away tears.

On the other side of the banquet hall, the governor’s son is talking about a weapons trade. In a private room on the third floor, the mayor of Vovin is fucking one of Hoseok’s courtesans, while his wife eyes one of Onjo’s mine barons. Jimin licks raspberry juice off his lip, and stands politely outside the circle of people surrounding Hoseok, each jostling for royal favor.

“I’m sick of him,” he hears, from just close enough to make him flinch. It’s a hissed whisper, the voice familiar, the speaker just out of Jimin’s line of sight.

“Hyung, he’s just —”

“No, Jeongguk-ah. The way he talks to me, looks at me — I’ve been nothing but polite, and all he does is spit in my face.”

Jimin knows that voice. Kim Namjoon, a scholar from the party picked up at Onjo. On the Imugi’s manifest, he’s listed as Taehyung’s employer, and Hoseok hates him for some reason that he hasn’t bothered to explain to anyone in his entourage. He’s as polite to Namjoon as he can make himself, trained in diplomacy for too long to scorn a guest overtly, but in each of their conversations there have been cruel barbs, curled lips, a careful avoidance of the skinship Hoseok usually throws himself into with abandon.

The crowd shifts, and Jimin steps to the side to avoid a careless elbow to his gut. Kim Namjoon is standing near the wall, a drink half-finished in his hand and a scowl darkening his face. He’s talking to his other attendant, whose hair is just as long as Taehyung’s, who’s wearing the same leather cord around his neck. Whatever totem hangs from it is hidden under his uniform, the drape of the dark cloth almost obscuring the bulk of it.

“And it’s worse that he acts like he doesn’t feel it,” Namjoon continues. His whisper gets quieter, even as his companion glares at him.

“Shut up —”

“You need to let me ask him. He might know something, he might have been told, even if he doesn’t know it. Please, just let me ask.”

Jimin blinks. Steps away from that same elbow again, one of Hoseok’s so-called friends, a second son from a family who might have had a chance at marrying into the dynasty three generations ago. Kim Namjoon shouldn’t be asking his servant for permission to do anything, especially if it’s about Hoseok. Jimin shifts his weight and turns his head to keep Namjoon’s pleading eyes in his sight.

The servant doesn’t answer. There’s a muscle clenching in his jaw, his head tilted down and away from his master.

“Just — talk to Taehyung?” Namjoon touches the servant’s wrist, and the servant jerks away. Snorts, one hand coming up to press against the solid weight of his totem.

“Sure,” he bites back, thick with irritation. “If he ever stops avoiding me.”

Kim Namjoon huffs out a breath, and opens his mouth to reply, and cuts himself off when a courtier approaches, a companion of Hoseok’s from his short time at Namsan’s university. He and Namjoon have taken a liking to each other, Jimin knows, and as they strike up a conversation he watches the servant vanish into the background of the banquet, as silent and obedient as any of his peers.

Jimin swallows his discomfort with a flute of something light and honey-sweet, non-alcoholic in deference to Hoseok’s tastes; he doesn’t want to think of Taehyung, doesn’t like that there’s something between the passengers from Onjo that he doesn’t know, doesn’t need another maybe-threat to have to report back to the Empress. If he tells her about Namjoon’s servants keeping a secret, he’ll have to tell her about Taehyung. If he tells her about Taehyung, Jimin knows better than to think he’ll ever see him again.

He knows, has always known, that his attachment to Hoseok is a double-edged blade. It’s kept him alive, has kept him sane, but it’s also kept him useful. The Empress can trust him, as much as she trusts anyone, only because all she has to do to punish him is send him away. When Jimin failed on a mission, the first time, distracted from the senator he’d been assigned to listen to, she had him locked in the only soundproof room left standing, the one that couldn’t keep Yejun from tearing at her skin until it bled.

It took Jimin, coddled from years of Hoseok’s constant presence, ten hours to start begging. Seventeen to start screaming. Twenty-one to stop, his throat ruined and bloody, every inch of him trembling.

His tolerance, Jimin knows, has gotten better since then. The Empress had him let out after one day, and he almost hadn’t recovered, but he’d been sixteen and desperate to never displease her again so he kept his mouth shut and lowered his eyes when she scoffed at how easy it had been to break him.

I have no use for a spy who would spill my secrets in a day, she told him, and then a different kind of training began. Training to hold his tongue, to lie, to guard the Empire’s secrets through pain and overstimulation and Hoseok’s gaping absence.

But he’s never been trained for relief. Jimin shadows Hoseok for the rest of the evening, paying as close attention as he always has, but can’t help the way he shudders each time he swallows a bite of food. He can’t help but think that he’d tell Taehyung anything, everything, just for a chance to have a single breath of peace.

Hoseok leaves the banquet early, at least by his standards. He begs leave of Vovin’s governor before the last of the guests have filtered out, presses a kiss to her cheek and a blessing against the back of her hand, and clambers into the shuttle she hails to take them back to the ship with Jimin settling still and silent at his side. Hoseok waves away his companions’ concern with the excuse that the cold has left him sore and desperate for bed, and laughs along with them when a particularly brave lady offers her own humble quarters for the prince’s use.

Sooner than Jimin would like, they’re alone. Sooner than Jimin would like, Hoseok has been stripped of his gloves and cloak and heavy wool layers, and he’s pushing Jimin down on the bed with a frown and concerned fingers in his hair.

“You should wash your face,” Jimin protests, a half-hearted attempt to distract Hoseok from his inquisition. All he gets are those upset dimples creasing further, the back of one hand pressed to his forehead, like Jimin has come down with a fever instead of an inexplicable appetite.

“You were eating,” Hoseok — accuses. It’s an accusation, one that he might not even intend, and Jimin curls away from the touch like he can’t ever remember needing before.

“I was hungry.” It’s feeble, the rush of adrenaline from the banquet fading away, nausea creeping into his too-full stomach as his taste buds reawaken, as his fingers itch more and more at the grip he has in his own trousers.

“Hungry,” Hoseok echoes. “You’re never — is something wrong?”

I’m never hungry, Jimin thinks, hollow. He never asks for anything. He smiles, plays shy, flutters his eyelashes. The most he’s ever asked for is for Hoseok to touch him, and even then he’s rarely risked it outside the confines of the royal chambers, and especially never in the Empress’s sight. He’s asked for Hoseok to touch him, to keep him close, but Jimin knows well enough by now that only princes ever really get what they ask for.

“No,” he says. Thinks of Taehyung’s hands, trembling. The silver frostdragon still in one of his inner pockets, waiting to be looped up around the shell of his ear. “It’s so cold here.”

He lets Hoseok make his own assumptions. The frown has creased into concern, the dimples less frustrated and more sympathetic. Hoseok has always been good at pampering him, when he feels the urge, and Jimin almost wants him to think that the cold has broken something in him, that the sheer onslaught of sensation was too much to handle.

“My delicate Jiminie,” Hoseok sighs, and tangles his fingers in Jimin’s hair again. Jimin forces himself not to cringe away, and hates that he has to. He hates the way the touch doesn’t ease anything anymore, hates that Hoseok doesn’t even seem to notice.

“I’m sorry.” Jimin tugs on Hoseok’s sleeve, his second layer untied to expose a silken undershirt. “For distracting you.”

Hoseok hums a little, and unties Jimin’s jeogori.

“My favorite distraction,” he promises. Presses a tingling kiss to Jimin’s lips.

If he keeps his eyes open, Jimin can pretend that everything’s the same. He can pretend that Hoseok’s hands, when they slip under his shirt, don’t feel the same as any other courtier’s. If he keeps his eyes open, Jimin can remember that this is his prince, and not an assignment, and he can ignore that something is terribly, horribly wrong.

♜

Tonight is the one night Taehyung desperately doesn’t want Jeongguk to find him, and so of course he does. There are only so many places to hide on the Imugi, with the ship’s oxygen tightly regulated even while docked and each body in a room logged on the central data system, but Taehyung knows that it’s less the ship’s metrics and more the way he and Jeongguk have shared their beds and secrets for years that gives him away.

At least they’re alone. Taehyung feels him even before the door slides open, the familiar buzz in the back of his head where Jeongguk has always lived, and then he steps into the hanging garden that’s lush and quiet and humid enough to stave off the cold Taehyung can still feel in his cheeks, his nose, his ears.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk says. His arms are wrapped around his own torso, his robe from the Twins passed off as a threadbare sleeping garment when any of the other servants bother asking. Here, surrounded by green, he looks like the Jeongguk who Taehyung remembers from home, from long afternoons spent by the river, from endless prayers and lessons and scoldings.

“I’m not in the mood,” Taehyung grits out. His fingers twitch along the lining of Jimin’s gloves, the fur pale grey and softer than anything he’s ever felt. It’s too hot in the garden to wear them, but they’re cradled in his lap like a child, and more than anything he wants Jeongguk to step back, to take the hand off his shoulder, to not ask the questions that Taehyung doesn’t have any way to stop. He doesn’t know if he can lie to Jeongguk, because he’s never tried.

“You’re never in the mood.” Jeongguk scuffs his heel against the tile, and Taehyung tastes bitterness on the back of his tongue.

He knows Jeongguk hates him, sometimes. He knows that on his worst days in the temple, he would curse anything and everything for keeping him from induction, from making him live with everything he could be pinned down and stifled because of nothing but the elders’ fear and secrecy.

There’s a part of Taehyung that hates him now, for the expectation that Taehyung would match him if he had been inducted.

He thinks of Jimin, slowly dying. Jimin, offering his gloves and the earrings and begging for relief in the same breath. Taehyung knows what they’d been sent here to find, and knows that Jeongguk deserves to be told.

Somehow, though, this doesn’t feel like Taehyung’s secret to share.

“You wouldn’t understand.” Despite what the elders had always thought, Taehyung chooses his words carefully. He’s still roiling from the intensity of Jimin’s touch, still sour from Crilia’s cold, and he wants Jeongguk to leave him alone. “Being on this ship is hard enough, without you sulking everywhere.”

Jeongguk’s temper, always burning just bright enough that Taehyung can feel it in his own chest, sears hot and furious against his ribs.

“Sulking,” he says. Almost a laugh. “You’re hiding from me — from me. And I’m sulking?”

There’s hurt, underneath the anger, and Taehyung turns his cheek away. He can’t stop his own cheeks from heating, can’t stop the tears that have been pressing at his eyes for hours. He slips his fingers inside Jimin’s glove, strokes the impossibly soft fur, imagines water rushing over his head. And then Jeongguk’s anger flares again, pain swallowed up by the fire, and it’s so hot this time that Taehyung pushes himself away.

“Whose are those?” A jerk of his chin down to the gloves. They’re so obviously expensive, dark suede and silver fur and metallic stitching on the seams. Taehyung shoves them under the hem of his jeogori, hating the way Jeongguk looks at them, his eyes tracing the lump they make in the cloth and then darting back up to Taehyung’s face. He wishes he didn’t know Jeongguk as well as he does, that he doesn’t know the bile on the back of his tongue is betrayal, sharp and acrid.

“None of your business,” Taehyung snaps. His stomach lurches. He knows what Jeongguk thinks.

“So this is why you’re never around?” And now Taehyung wants him to stop, wants to take back every barb, because he doesn’t think he can bear to hear it. “You’ve found a courtier who likes you, and when you say it’s hard to be here, you just mean you’d rather be warming some Imperial’s bed?”

Something has Jeongguk angrier than usual. Something is wrong, but — Taehyung can’t help but think of Jimin, supposedly gifted by his prince to different ambassadors and governors on every planet, and any sympathy for Jeongguk sticks in his throat. He spends his nights in the emptiest parts of the ships, kept awake by the dreams and nightmares of the servants’ dorm crowding out any room for his own thoughts, and he thought Jeongguk knew that. He thought Jeongguk’s jealousy was getting better.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He’s still clutching the gloves, the earrings cradled inside of one. Jeongguk steps closer, and Taehyung steps back, and in the dim glow of the garden’s lamps Jeongguk almost looks like a stranger.

“Sure,” Jeongguk scoffs. His hair is down, twisted to hang over his shoulder; some of it covers his face when he turns, gestures grandly for Taehyung to pass. “Sorry if I’m keeping you from an appointment.”

Running, Taehyung knows, would make him a coward. But he looks at the mocking twist of Jeongguk’s lips and feels nothing but exhaustion, his whole body aching and desperate for sleep and darkness and peace. Running makes him a coward, but Taehyung never claimed to be anything else, so he pushes past Jeongguk on the tiled walkway and opens the door, the near-silent slide not nearly enough to cover the sound of Jeongguk spitting into the garden soil.

“Namjoon wants to talk,” he says, instead of a goodbye. “If you can tear yourself away from your new friend.”

The door closes, an automatic mercy, and Taehyung runs.

♖

As always, Jimin waits for Hoseok to fall asleep before slipping out. It takes longer, tonight, Hoseok attentive in a way he hasn’t been for weeks. When they’re spent, he asks Jimin to read to him, offering out the library’s half-finished mystery anthology and pleading for a story.

“I miss your voice,” he says, like he hasn’t been coaxing Jimin’s voice out of him for the last hour. Is this good, do you like that, say my name, Jimin-ah, over and over until Jimin’s throat feels hoarse and his whole body is tingling, bordering on overstimulated pain. He reads, though, because he doesn’t know how to tell Hoseok no, and loses himself in it until he blinks and looks up and Hoseok is asleep with his face pressed into the pillow, and Jimin’s mouth is drier than a desert planet.

He stops in the washroom to drink from the tap and duck his head under the stream, getting his hair just wet enough to rinse away the drying sweat on the back of his neck. He looks at Hoseok when he leaves, the dip of his bare spine, the almost artful way he’s sprawled, graceful even in his sleep. Jimin’s chest hurts. His eyes burn when he looks away.

In the palace, Jimin rarely had any reason to leave Hoseok’s rooms at night. The parlor opened into a courtyard, all of Hoseok’s favorite flowers and fruits planted and tended to, and on the nights when Jimin could bear the smells he’d liked to sit under the ginkgo tree in the corner, next to a stacked-stone fountain and a waist-high statue of one of Hoseok’s ancestors. Other nights he’d retreat to Hoseok’s rarely-used study, or even his own offset bedroom, with its small cot and modest wardrobe. When he needed to be alone, or as close to alone as he ever got in the palace, Jimin always knew where he could go.

On the Imugi, though, nowhere is truly safe. Jimin wanders for longer than he’d like, avoiding voices and footsteps, until he’s somewhere around the half-dozen gardens, a level above the greenhouses where the ship’s fresh food is grown. He can hear the water in the pipes, the drip of the sprinkler system, the sharp patter of water hitting leaves. If he concentrates, it’s almost like being out in a rainstorm.

If he closes his eyes and concentrates, Jimin doesn’t have to listen to anything else, and that’s when he runs into Taehyung.

Jimin feels the collision, someone’s shoulder knocking hard against his, and opens his eyes just quickly enough to watch Taehyung stagger into the wall. He doesn’t fall, one hand catching on the lip of a mirrored window, but he still pauses, back hunched, unbound hair falling to cover his face.

“Sorry,” Taehyung says, tight and clipped. Jimin can hear the catch in his breath, the pound of his heart against the inside of his ribs. He can hear his own pulse, spiking with excitement.

“Taehyung-ssi,” Jimin offers. Careful, quiet. Humiliation burns on his cheeks, when he remembers his desperation in the market. “Are you all right?”

Another catch in Taehyung’s breath. His head turns, his hair falling back enough that Jimin can see one red-rimmed eye, a few strands clinging to a damp smear down his cheek. The glare he pins Jimin with is well-deserved, for a question like that, and Jimin steps back with the force of it. He wants to reach out, to offer Taehyung the same comfort he’d offer Hoseok. He wants to be useful, to give Taehyung back some measure of what he’d given Jimin just a few hours ago.

“I’m fine.” Taehyung’s voice is still tight, his breathing still jagged. “Please let me pass.”

Jimin doesn’t hesitate. He presses his back to the wall, gives Taehyung enough space and more to pass him without touching. He closes his eyes, but can’t help but hear the way Taehyung’s hair and clothes shift, the gap between half-stifled breaths, the skin-sound of a palm wiping his cheek.

And even with the space given, Taehyung doesn’t move. Jimin wants to touch him so badly that it hurts, so badly that it feels like the air around him sizzles with it. Taehyung burns hotter in front of him than any of the thousands of stars he can see from the observation deck; Jimin can’t help but want to orbit him, to follow and sit and obey like the pet Hoseok’s attendants always whisper that he is.

“Taehyung-ssi,” Jimin tries again. He matches his breaths to Taehyung’s; holds his breath when Taehyung tries to swallow down a sob.

And finally, instead of leaving, Taehyung straightens. He waves his identification blindly over the nearest door pad, and Jimin follows him inside the bonsai nursery as quietly as he can, still hovering, still unsure if he’s allowed.

Jimin has learned a lot about people in his tenure as the Empress’s eyes and ears. He’s learned a lot about bodies, the way strangers position themselves around nobility and commoners alike, the way people put their best face forward to Hoseok and then slink behind his back to gossip with their own delegation. Jimin knows what people look like when they’re lying, and looks at Taehyung, collapsed onto an ornate wrought-iron bench, and knows that something tonight has gone wrong.

Instead of prying, asking questions where he knows he isn’t wanted, Jimin sits. Not on the bench, but at Taehyung’s feet; the position is easy, natural, and Jimin tries not to think about how when he sits in front of Hoseok like this, more often than not he ends up leaning forward to set his head in Hoseok’s lap. His whole body hurts from keeping himself upright, instead of swaying forward like the branches of a willow tree.

“You can leave,” Taehyung says. The words scratch against his throat, everything about him gone dull. It could be a dismissal, but —

“I don’t have anywhere to be.” Jimin keeps his eyes down, his hands in his lap. This proximity is agonizing. Taehyung laughs, cold, and it hurts like a slap.

“Not with your prince?”

Something curdles in Jimin’s stomach. He doesn’t want to think about Hoseok right now. He doesn’t want Taehyung to speak of him, to speak of things he doesn’t understand, but in some ways he thinks Taehyung might understand more than he wants Jimin to know. There’s honesty in the crumpled way Taehyung is sitting, but there’s so much caution in the way he always keeps himself angled away from Jimin, ready to run.

“He’s your prince too,” Jimin points out, measured, instead of letting his temper get the better of him. Taehyung laughs again, that same cold thing.

“Not in any way that matters.”

In the silence that follows, Jimin listens to the room. He closes his eyes, listens to the minute shift of leaves, imagines that he can hear the dozens of trees around him breathing in, out, more peaceful than Jimin could ever dream of becoming. There’s moisture clinging to his skin, to the silk of his sleep robe, to his eyelashes where they rest against his cheek. Taehyung isn’t crying any longer.

“If you’re going to ask for something,” Taehyung finally says, his jaw clenched, his mouth barely open. “Just get it over with.”

And something about that makes Jimin sick. Something about it reminds him of clenched fists in strange bedsheets, of his own eyes pressed shut, of the chime of his transponder’s sent message signal late into the Imugi’s simulated night. He opens his eyes to look, and finds Taehyung looking, eyes dark, at Jimin, on his knees. His trembling hands. They’re both staring now, both quiet, and Jimin knows that asking, that reaching out his hands, will shatter something he doesn’t know if he can fix.

Someone is walking in the hallway. Jimin knows the footsteps, by now — Taehyung’s fellow servant, the one Kim Namjoon deferred to at the banquet. Talk to Taehyung, he had asked this servant. Jeongguk. Taehyung can’t hear, through the door and the trees and the careful way Jeongguk is stepping, but Jimin listens as far as he can, until Jeongguk takes the path to the courtiers’ chambers instead of the servants’ hall.

“No,” Jimin finally replies. He looks down first, examines the cracks in his own nail beds. Everything is back now, every sense, and even though it’s been hours since the banquet his stomach still feels too full. He can taste Hoseok on the back of his tongue, can taste Taehyung on the tip of it. “I’m sorry for asking, today.”

He’s not, not really, but he’s sorry for putting that look on Taehyung’s face. Jimin knows what it is to be used.

“I don’t know how you stand it.” An echo, from days before. Stand what. Jimin knows, now, at least the question. He doesn’t know the answer anymore.

Taehyung’s hand shifts. There’s dark suede, just barely exposed under his sleeve. One of his hands is clutching the gloves, nails leaving indents under where fur peeks out at the wrists. There’s nothing Jimin can say to him that wouldn’t sound like a lie, when he remembers the sick desperation that had him shoving the gloves at Taehyung. He’d been delirious with it, and Taehyung had looked so cold.

“How did you know?” He asks, instead of trying to answer that echoed question. Taehyung breathes in, sharp.

“I don’t know,” Taehyung tells him. His nails dig in a little harder.

They don’t talk, after that. Jimin unfolds himself from the ground once his legs hurt too much to keep kneeling, and Taehyung follows silently as he leaves the bonsai nursery. They walk like that, not quite together, until the path splits off and Jimin steps into the keyed wing that houses the royal quarters. He turns to look, before the door slides shut, and catches Taehyung watching him.

He knows that Hoseok will wake up if Jimin leaves the bed cold for much longer. He knows that tomorrow is another day planned for the heated Crilian capital building, he knows that in the evening after that he might be catatonic in the quietest room he can find. He knows that Taehyung could take everything away, if Jimin can find him to ask.

He also knows that Taehyung was lying, and the door slides shut, and Taehyung’s trembling lips haunt Jimin all the way back into Hoseok’s arms.

♜

When they finally leave Crilia, Taehyung drinks. The cold has settled into the Imugi’s foundations, after three days docked on an ice flat, and it’s made everyone frigid and irritable and quick to snap over the smallest mistakes, and when the engines roar to life and the planet fades into a speck of white on unfathomable black, the entire ship seems to breathe a sigh of relief.

That sigh is immediately followed by Jeonghwa’s stash of Namsan soju, which she offers after dragging Taehyung down to one of the lower-level dining rooms where servants sometimes take their meals, a few of her friends and friendlier acquaintances crowding in with their own bottles until the room is hot and crowded with emotions and Taehyung wants to leave desperately but not desperately enough that he’ll risk seeing Jeongguk in the sleeping quarters.

Maybe that’s why he drinks. Maybe he’s trying to convince himself of something when he knocks back one shot, swallows down when it tries to come back up, and then picks up another.

“It tastes terrible, right?” Someone next to him jokes, and Taehyung spits out an undignified noise, gack or something close to it. The stranger laughs, and presses a bottle into his hands. “Try this. Jeonghwa’s taste is awful.”

Slowly, Taehyung sips. Whatever alcohol this is, it’s sweeter, heavier. The aftertaste on his tongue reminds him of honey, and the smile he gets after offering the bottle back is just as sweet.

“What is that?” Taehyung’s throat burns from the first two shots, but he can already feel it starting to sink into him, his sense of the whole room blurring from excruciating sharpness of each occupant to a hazy mess of contentment and relief.

“Spinner’s wine,” the man tells him. He’s slightly older, handsome, practically radiating interest. “I picked it up on Daegon, a few planets back.”

Taehyung feels too sick for arousal, Jeongguk’s words lingering like a bruise from a slap, but he’s desperate for conversation from anyone he can get who doesn’t know him, who doesn’t lace every word with vicious weight.

The servant’s name is Wooshik, and Taehyung’s never met him before because he’s the personal companion of a courtier, one much more highly-ranked than Namjoon. His salary must be higher, too, because he doesn’t hesitate to share his wine, and Taehyung drinks until he’s listing sideways on the cushion he’s found and Wooshik offers one shoulder to keep him upright. They’re talking, he knows vaguely, about Taehyung’s home on Onjo and Wooshik’s family back in the capital, and it’s nice to just feel a single person for once. The alcohol is doing wonders for his ability to tolerate the room full of people, and Taehyung wonders why he doesn’t do this more often even as the walls tilt around him, as Wooshik wraps an arm around his waist.

“Are you all right, Taehyung-ssi?” He hears it double, in Wooshik’s voice and Jimin’s. His head hurts. Taehyung tries to speak, only manages some soft incomprehensible thing. He jostles a little, Wooshik’s shoulder shrugging, and swallows down vomit. “I think you’ve had too much.”

Taehyung can’t feel desire anymore, only concern, and so he lets Wooshik haul him to his feet, although he doesn’t think he could resist anything right now if he tried.

Wooshik gets Taehyung’s bunk assignment from Jeonghwa, and Taehyung’s head spins for the journey back through the winding hallways.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and gets an affectionate laugh.

“Ah, don’t worry about it. You told me you don’t drink often, I should have cut you off.”

The last time Taehyung drank was back with the Twins, after one of Jeongguk’s infrequent trips to Tamjin. He brought back a bottle of something truly vile, absinthe or close to it, and Taehyung had three sips before deciding he’d had enough. Jeongguk, though, had finished a third of the bottle, and Taehyung had been the one to hold him while he vomited into a hastily-dug pit behind the temple, to tend to him and make his excuses for the hours-long hangover that followed.

The closer they get to Taehyung’s quarters, the more sick he feels at the thought of crawling back into his bunk. He wants Jeongguk — he wants Namjoon — he wants someone, anyone, to hold him still and feel nothing and let him rest.

“Wait,” he says, and stops as abruptly as he can without throwing up. “Don’t — want hyung.”

Somehow, Wooshik deciphers what Taehyung is asking, even as Taehyung isn’t sure what he’s asking for himself. He closes his eyes at one elevator and opens them again at Namjoon’s door, Wooshik’s arm the only thing keeping him upright as Namjoon braces himself in the doorway and stares.

“Taehyung?” He asks, and Wooshik murmurs some sort of explanation, and Taehyung feels his face burning red even as he stumbles over to let Namjoon catch him, stumbling under his weight.

He barely remembers to thank his new friend before Namjoon judiciously shuts the door, and Taehyung slumps back against the wall and shakes off Namjoon’s hand and relishes, however briefly, in feeling no one but himself.

And then he opens his eyes and sees Jeongguk.

Jeongguk, perched on the end of Namjoon’s bed, glaring. He looks angry, but Taehyung blinks at him and sighs and reaches out, blind through the alcohol, to feel the guilt he was hoping he’d find. He wonders if Jeongguk is thinking of that night with the Twins too, is thinking of Taehyung brushing out his hair while he moaned and bringing him water and covering his chores.

“Come here,” Namjoon sighs, and hauls Taehyung up by under his arms. “What were you thinking, Taehyung-ah?”

He’s hardly one to talk, especially when alcohol on the Imugi is free for the prince’s party and not at all difficult to come by, but Taehyung is too bleary to make any coherent argument about it. He puts up token resistance to being laid down on the bed, Jeongguk stiff and uncomfortable by his legs, but gives up when his head hits the pillow, satin-covered and luxurious.

“Wasn’t thinking,” he mumbles, and kicks sharp at whatever soft part of Jeongguk he can find when he hears him scoff. “Hate it here.”

Taehyung buries his face in the pillow that smells almost like Namjoon but mostly like expensive hair product, and lets it fill him up. He hates the claustrophobia, the constant pressure of too many people, the way the Imugi has changed the three of them into something unrecognizable.

Namjoon sighs. A hand makes its way into Taehyung’s hair, stroking steady like he always used to, when Taehyung would rest his head in his lap and calm him down, soothing Namjoon’s strained senses. He misses that, too; the way he used to be needed without urgency, without any implication that Namjoon was his to calm.

Now, Namjoon has someone else, and Taehyung hardly needs to be a guide to tell that his time with Hoseok, however prickly it might be, is stabilizing him. This touch isn’t taking from Taehyung, it’s just to comfort him, and somehow that feels almost worse.

“It’s different,” Namjoon acknowledges. And then, carefully — “I didn’t think we’d find anything so quickly.”

It’s such a clumsy segue, and such a clueless one, that Taehyung laughs. His head throbs, and Jeongguk’s low-simmering anger throbs with it.

“The prince,” Namjoon insists. “You still haven’t sensed anything from him?”

Taehyung groans. He can’t stop thinking about that first moment in Tamjin, the prince airy and stupid and beaming to the delight of the crowd. Jimin, following at his heels, knocking Taehyung over like a tidal wave. If he lifts his face from the pillow he might throw up, and he considers it just for the possibility of rolling around in their twin disgust.

“Not from him,” he mumbles, and assumes Namjoon won’t hear it. Assumes, because he’s spent time with the prince, that he’s been letting his senses dull.

“What?”

Taehyung could curse himself, but he’s so tired. His hands wiggle under the pillow, his whole body aching as he tries to get comfortable without particularly moving. Jeongguk’s hand is gripped too-tight around his ankle now, both of them alert enough that Taehyung can taste their tension.

“Who?” Jeongguk demands. “Who are you sensing? Another guide?”

“I wish.” It’s half derisive, half desperate. Seonmul is pressing hard into Taehyung’s chest, the mattress firm enough that the carving might bruise him nicely. Namjoon’s hand has stopped the gentle shift through his hair, instead actively resisting the urge to clench. Taehyung almost wishes he would. Taehyung almost wishes either of them would get angry faster, would start screaming just so he’d have an excuse to scream back.

“Taehyung-ah.” Namjoon’s voice is careful, gentle.

“No,” Taehyung groans. He doesn’t want to break a promise, even a promise he’d never made out loud. If he had wanted to tell them about Jimin, he would have done it before any of them boarded the ship in the first place.

But he knows well enough that now neither of them will let it go, will stop hounding him, will let him keep a secret so important to their mission. The Twins would want him to tell, Taehyung thinks, but Bo is hanging around Jeongguk’s neck and not Jimin’s, and his head is spinning and he’s so dizzy and he wants them to leave him alone just as badly as he wants them to be furious.

“Who is it,” Jeongguk hisses, and now that fury is there, bursting as his grip tightens, Taehyung regrets needling it. “Your nobleman?”

Taehyung aims another kick, and Jeongguk catches his foot before it makes contact.

“He’s not noble,” Taehyung answers, and tries to pull his foot back, and bites down on the panic that comes when Jeongguk doesn’t let him go.

He’s never been afraid of Jeongguk before. He’s never been afraid with any of the elders, with Namjoon, with the Twins. Fear, for Taehyung, has always lived in the heart of Tamjin, in the whir of a blaster, in the sweaty press of summer crowds. But something of this reminds him — his father’s hand bruising on his arm as they ran, his mother fallen dead on top of him, both their eyes staring sightless, his sister wailing in her crib. The look on his uncle’s face, when he aimed the blaster at Taehyung’s heart.

“Let me go,” Taehyung spits, and twists his foot away even as his stomach lurches.

“Tell me who it is,” Jeongguk insists, and grabs again, and this time Taehyung forgets everything except the pain, the smell of his own flesh burning, the sound of the door closing after his uncle nestled the blaster into his father’s lifeless hand.

“Jimin,” Taehyung gasps. “Jimin, it’s Jimin, let me go — "

And then he rolls over, and leans his head over the side of the bed, and vomits all over Namjoon’s slippers.

♜

Taehyung spends the rest of the trip through hyperspace hiding after that first day spent in Namjoon’s bed, struck dumb with his hangover. He works what he has to, the prince’s luxury gatherings and dinners and dancing nights, with Jeongguk and Jimin and Namjoon weaving around each other until Taehyung is dizzy. He sticks to Jeonghwa’s heels, and makes a space for himself in her small circle of friends, and lets Wooshik take him to the gardens and observation deck even as it makes him feel like an ugly sort of coward.

He may be a coward, for avoiding his problems instead of facing them, but any resolve he’d had crumbled the first time he saw Jeongguk and Jimin in the same room, Jeongguk glaring vicious from the shadows as Jimin knelt behind his master’s cushion.

And Jeongguk keeps following him. Not when he’s with Jeonghwa or Wooshik, but when Taehyung slips off alone to try and find some sort of emptiness, it’s never long before he feels Jeongguk, suspicious and sad, shadowing his turns. They used to trust each other, Taehyung thinks, and wonders if they ever will again.

And Jimin — Taehyung doesn’t trust Jimin, but he can’t stop noticing him.

The last days on Crilia, Jimin kept away, but after three days in hyperspace he comes looking for Taehyung. It’s easy enough to get away from him, when Jimin feels less like the gentle patter of Namjoon’s rain and more like a monsoon heading in his direction, and he thinks Jimin stops following him when he hears Taehyung start to run.

Taehyung runs, but he doesn’t stop looking. He can’t, not when the bruises under Jimin’s eyes are getting worse by the day, when Taehyung can feel hunger gnawing at him more severe than anything Jimin might be able to sense, when even the prince has clearly noticed something wrong. He keeps Jimin closer, these days; keeps a hand on his knee or brushing the back of his neck. Like he knows his touch could help, if he were anything close to what Jimin needed.

“Talk to us,” Namjoon pleads, the day before they dock on Obara. He’s the only one Taehyung can’t really avoid, when the pad mounted next to his bunk lights up with a summons.

“What’s there to say?” Taehyung scuffs his toe against the polished shine of the floor, leaves a mark of grease from his last shift in the kitchen. “I knew Jeongguk would be angry, so I didn’t say anything.”

Namjoon has his elbows braced on his cluttered desk, two fingers massaging at his nose bridge. He can’t even argue that, not when Jeongguk’s jealousy has lived between them for years, but Taehyung knows he wants to. They’re here for more important things than jealousy, after all, and Namjoon hadn’t hesitated before telling them about the prince.

“I just don’t understand,” Namjoon sighs. “He’s the prince’s companion, and the prince is a guide — but not his guide.”

He’s mine, is what goes unspoken, and Taehyung shivers. It’s still strange for him too, when he’d spent so many years reconciling himself to never belonging with anyone. Namjoon, at least, had always had more of a chance; guides are rare, but one like the prince, who matches Namjoon’s power, could go a lifetime thinking of themselves as nothing more than unusually perceptive. Not like Taehyung. And no sentinel, he knows, could live like Jimin for long without a guide, even a weak one.

“He’s strong,” Taehyung says, and hears the echo again. He’s mine. The elders frowned whenever they were reminded of Taehyung’s strength, whenever he spent long hours praying at Seonmul’s feet. “And maybe, when they made him, they didn’t know.”

“About the prince?” Namjoon huffs out a breath, runs a hand through his hair. Taehyung shrugs one shoulder, feels the corner of the wall where he’s leaning dig into his spine.

“About any of it.”

Taehyung wonders which came first. Was it Jimin’s induction, however an imperial scientist managed to coax it out of him? Or was it his companionship, his life at the prince’s side, his place as whipping boy or pet or whatever it is that Jimin’s official title might be.

“If you can find out...” Namjoon trails off, careful. He’s looking at Taehyung with his head tilted, his brows furrowed in the way everyone who knows him understands. “Does he trust you?”

And Taehyung thinks. He still hasn’t worn the earrings, but he sleeps with the gloves and the pouch under his pillow. He’s avoided Jimin, but only because Jimin is letting him. And in the bonsai nursery, tears drying sticky on his cheeks, Jimin had knelt like Taehyung was as important as the prince he was sworn to serve.

“I don’t know,” he answers, as honest as he can. “But he does need me.”

He doesn’t think about the legends, about the stories of Seonmul’s youth. Wandering faceless and nameless in cities, slowly fading, losing any sense of self. He doesn’t think about the way the Imugi is crushing him, without anywhere he can be alone, be himself, feel himself. Jimin needs him, Taehyung knows, but he thinks that if he lets Jimin need him, he might be forced to need Jimin in turn.

“You can use that,” Namjoon says gently, and Taehyung is only grateful that he doesn’t say we.

It echoes, as the Imugi docks the next day, the whole ship rumbling as they enter Obara’s atmosphere. After half a week in motion, Taehyung is once again relieved to be back on any world at all, and it’s even better that the capital of the planet is near its equator, a warm and humid jungle tangled around the observation deck. It’s spring, on this planet, and the violet leaves of the trees are second only to the vivid gold of their flowers, the scent overpowering even secondhand, when Taehyung helps load the planet’s gifts to the Empire into the cargo hold.

Taehyung is so dazzled by the crates of unfamiliar fruits and vases with brilliant bouquets weighing down his arms that he almost forgets to run, when the monsoon turns toward him. Almost.

He bows his exit to the stewardess, claims he’s been summoned by Namjoon, and takes off blindly, walking as briskly as he dares. It’s no use, though; Jimin is getting closer, and even when Taehyung runs he doesn’t stop, and then they’re near the kitchens and Taehyung can see Jeongguk through the door to the dishroom, and before Jeongguk can do anything but widen his eyes and open his mouth, Jimin is there.

“I’m sorry,” Jimin says, which is all he ever seems to say. He looks awful, pale, bruised. “I’m sorry, Taehyung-ssi — please.”

“Stop,” Taehyung says. There’s a storage room behind them, stocked with spices and baking staples, and he doesn’t miss the surge of nausea from Jimin when Taehyung crowds him into it, Jeongguk’s anger and curiosity hovering close enough that he must be able to hear them.

“I can’t.” He knows Jimin wants to reach out, to take the relief Taehyung is denying him, but either he’s used to being denied or his self control is better than it seems. “I can’t do this, not tonight, not like this.”

He’s begging, Taehyung realizes. He’s begging, and this — this must be his job for the prince, his instructions to hang off of someone’s arm and look pretty, for reasons Taehyung can only guess at, and poorly.

“Please, I can —” And Jimin swallows, grits his teeth, stares resolutely at the floor. “If you don’t want money, I can let you — anything you want.”

The prince’s whore, Taehyung has heard Jimin called. He feels sick.

“Stop,” he says again, weak, tremulous.

“What can I give you?” Jimin is disgusted with himself, Taehyung can feel it, can only feel it. Jeongguk might as well be on another planet for how far away he feels, in the face of Jimin’s overwhelming presence.

You can use that, Namjoon reminds him. He feels physically battered, his whole body weighed down with Jimin’s desperation.

“Anything?” Taehyung asks, hollow. Jimin bites his lip, and Taehyung feels the pain like it’s his own.

“Anything.”

He knows what Jimin thinks he’ll ask for. He doesn’t blame him, really, because he’s given Jimin fewer reasons to trust him than to fear him. It almost makes him laugh, when he thinks of the both of them, terribly afraid, locked in a dance that neither of them will either finish or step away from.

“I have questions.” Taehyung licks his lips, finds his voice. “You — find me, before we leave the planet, and tell me the truth.”

Jimin’s anger feels different than his humiliation. It surges up into his throat, shows in the sharp way he looks up, narrows his eyes, flattens his lips. But Taehyung keeps his chin tilted up, ignores the way he’s been lying to Jimin either by omission or to his face since they met, and reminds himself — the Twins have asked one thing of him, and Taehyung will give it to them if he can.

Jimin nods, a single jerk of his chin. His hands are locked behind his back, like if he doesn’t keep them there he won’t be able to stop himself from finding any bit of Taehyung’s skin he can reach.

This time, Taehyung is the one to step closer. Jimin has to look up to meet his eyes, and before he can move his hands Taehyung has already found his neck, the pads of his fingers resting against Jimin’s pulse. Part of him feels sick at what he knows he’s about to jump into; part of him is drunk on it, ready to unfold a part of himself he’d never had the occasion to learn. It’s intoxicating, the way Taehyung can slip under Jimin’s skin like no one else’s.

It’s so easy. On Crilia Taehyung had been cold and panicked and confused, but here, with strange pollen still lingering on his sleeves, Taehyung can focus. It’s almost like falling asleep, like dreaming, when he submerges himself in Jimin like a river and bends the current to his will.

Again, he follows Jimin’s requests. Taste, dulled to Taehyung’s own level. Eyes still sharp, but not excruciating. Nose dulled just enough that the spices in the storage closet don’t burn.

It’s so easy. Taehyung plays with Jimin’s nerves like handfuls of water, drinks down the screaming sensitivity. He really is drunk on it, he thinks. It would be so easy to take it farther. To take everything away, to leave Jimin in darkness and silence and numbness. Even as he thinks it, he gets caught up again, the current so easy to get lost in, the wrongness of Jimin’s senses so alluring to fix. He plays more, adjusts more, and then —

Jimin wrenches himself away with a gasp, and Taehyung snaps his eyes open and heaves, coming up for air. Jimin is staring at him, anger or fear or both in his eyes, but gratitude rushing underneath that so clearly that Taehyung almost apologizes.

“Oh,” Taehyung breathes out. “Sorry.”

Jimin takes a step back. Another, another, until his back hits the wall.

“I’ll find you,” he says. He still looks exhausted, still looks like a human-shaped bruise, but there’s something in his posture or his eyes or the twist of his lips that makes him look more alive.

Taehyung blinks, and braces himself against a shelf, and Jimin vanishes through the door.

Slowly, slowly, Taehyung collapses. Back against the shelves, knees up to his chest, hands tangled in his hair. He can’t focus his eyes, can’t quite get himself to move. Even when he hears Jeongguk — hears, not feels, because all he can feel right now is his own confusion and emptiness and heartbeat.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk says. Warm hands on Taehyung’s cheeks, checking him over. “Did he hurt you?”

Did he? Taehyung thinks he might have hurt Jimin, or at least wanted to. All he manages is a shake of his head. When his eyes finally focus, he keeps his gaze on the sacks of flour that line the entire bottom row of shelving, instead of looking into Jeongguk’s eyes and risking not knowing him when he does.

“I didn’t know,” he finally manages, when Jeongguk doesn’t stop asking questions that don’t make sense. “I didn’t — it was so easy.”

And for once, he doesn’t know how that makes Jeongguk feel. For once, Taehyung doesn’t want to.

♖

Jimin spends the first hour of the welcome reception on Obara holding back tears, and the second holding his tongue. He’s been assigned tonight to a captain in the planet’s small but impressive army; Obara is a single-continent planetoid, known for both the massive wealth of its underseas lithium mines and the innovative ways its military has used that wealth of lithium. In fact, with a population of only sixteen million, Jimin had read to Hoseok in one of their dark hyperspace evenings, weapons on Obara outnumber sentients by a factor of seven.

Right now, though, Jimin isn’t thinking about the blasters strapped to every hip in the room but the servants’. He isn’t thinking about Hoseok’s safety, like he should be in a room so dense with weapons-trained officers. He’s barely thinking about the food, which he isn’t letting himself eat lest he once again draw Hoseok’s attention.

No, Jimin isn’t thinking about any of that. He’s thinking about Captain Liu’s arm around his waist, the fingers sneaking under his layers to brush against bare skin, the lecherous grin Liu had given him when Jimin met him at his quarters with a bow and a note of the prince’s high esteem.

“And what about you, Jimin-ssi?” Liu asks, and Jimin snaps back into the conversation. “You must have seen so much of the Empire, as the prince’s companion.”

Jimin puts on his ditziest smile, moves his head just enough that the jewels dangling from his ears catch enough light to glisten.

“Oh, sometimes,” he says. Laughs, airy. “His highness is beloved in the capital, and so seeing other worlds is always a special occasion, especially ones as lovely as this.”

A stock answer, but a true one. This must be the first time since he was a child that Jimin has been able to enjoy the flower arrangements, with his nose dulled and his eyes softened. He reaches out to touch a brilliant pink petal, and the captain and his friends laugh, and the fingers against his skin stroke more insistently. The touch doesn’t burn, doesn’t scald his sensitive nerves. It feels more like Hoseok — back when he could calm Jimin down with nothing but a single tap to his nose — than it has any right to.

Jimin isn’t thinking about Taehyung, he tells himself. Tries to convince himself, really, when every second and every breath and every blink of his eyes reminds Jimin of him.

On Crilia, with no assignment, it was different. Jimin could enjoy that, to some extent. But here, with the Empress guiding his attention and forcing him into awareness, it feels like he’s cheating. This should be agonizing, should be humiliating. When it hurt to be grazed with the pad of a finger, letting his assignments use him as they liked felt fair. Jimin was taking from them, so it was only right that they get some unknowing revenge for it.

And using Taehyung — it feels wrong. It makes Jimin feel dirty, the way he’d practically gotten on his knees and opened his mouth.

The servants call him a whore, but Jimin’s never felt like one as viciously as he does tonight.

His task tonight is to listen to Obara’s general, who’s as close to a military dictator as the crown will allow. Jimin leans his head on Liu’s shoulder and swallows down a grimace, half of his attention solidly placed on the aging, balding man who’s currently discussing mining rights and labor recruitment with one of the ambassadors brought along for the tour. Much of the interesting talk won’t begin until important figures have already made the rounds enough that they have time to slip behind closed doors, but at least Jimin has something to pay attention to that isn’t the way Liu’s fingers are dipping lower, his leers more obvious the drunker he gets.

Hoseok is dancing, the general’s wife laughing as he dips her in an attempt at joining the folk dance that takes over the open floor in waves. Kim Namjoon is in the corner with an archivist, taking down notes with a slim datapad and cheerfully sharing his own research.

Jimin tries to ignore the servant in the shadows behind him. It’s rare that personal servants work at these banquets, but Obara is so utilitarian, so sparsely furnished, that even Hoseok’s highly-esteemed companions have turned their own personal servants over to the estate’s staff, set to shadowing their masters and refilling drinks and clearing away half-finished plates. And Namjoon’s servant, Taehyung’s partner, keeps cutting glares over at Jimin that he can’t stop noticing, even though he’s far enough away that his finer details are blurred.

Part of this is unnerving. Jimin feels like he’s reaching with a phantom limb, constantly caught off guard by what he can’t see and taste and smell.

He can hear, though. He can hear just as well as he could before he found Taehyung in the cargo hold, and that’s why he flinches when Jeongguk starts to whisper.

“I know you can hear me.”

From what Jimin can see, Jeongguk’s lips are barely moving. He’s looking, though, jaw set, fists clenched. Glaring at Jimin like he’d be leaping for his throat would it not get him arrested, or more likely just fired.

Stop, Jimin wants to say, but Liu is telling a story with the other officers clustered around them, something about an interplanetary military exploit authorized by the Empress herself. Jimin can’t interrupt, not without drawing the wrong kind of attention. Jimin can’t do anything but cling to his assignment’s sleeve and tolerate his wandering hands and listen to Jeongguk’s vicious whisper.

“I hope you know what you’re doing to him.” He doesn’t have to tell Jimin who him means. “Every time you come crawling back, you hurt him. Can you even understand what you put him through, just to make yourself feel better?”

Just get it over with, Jimin remembers. Taehyung’s whole body, tense and afraid.

“You make me sick,” Jeongguk spits. “You make him sick.”

Liu’s hand makes its way to Jimin’s thigh. The general is angling himself toward the door with a policy adviser. Hoseok smiles, glistens, throws his head back and laughs. Jimin’s head is spinning, his breaths tight and shallow.

“You’d ask him to put himself through that for this? To sell yourself to whoever offers the right price? Please. If you had any compassion at all, you’d listen to him. You’d stay away, like he clearly wishes you would.”

Jimin’s fingernails are digging into his palms so hard he hopes they bleed. It feels right, when Liu’s touch doesn’t burn. His hands are soft on Jimin’s leg, instead of agonizingly rough. He isn’t aggressive, just entitled, but were it any other night — had Jimin stayed away, had more control — it would hurt like he deserves.

He heard Taehyung running, and chose to follow him. He saw Taehyung panic, a cornered animal, and pressed for more. Taehyung had been the one to reach out, to press his hand to Jimin’s neck, but Jimin had begged him to.

It had been overwhelming. More than in the market, more than on the observation deck. Jimin had felt helpless, had been helpless. For the first time, he understands how much Taehyung holds back, how easy it would be for him to strip Jimin down to nothing. To ignore Jimin’s protests and struggles and attempts to push him away, and leave him nothing more than a shell, a once-was useless thing.

And in the moment, Jimin had almost needed it. Taehyung could have hurt him, and Jimin had wanted him to. He didn’t care that he was hurting Taehyung in turn.

“Leave Taehyung alone,” Jeongguk says, carefully enunciated. “You’ve done enough.”

Jimin swallows. The general vanishes, his heavy footsteps tracing back into a private salon, two more following in the minutes that pass.

“Captain,” Jimin whispers, lips brushing Liu’s ear. The hand on his thigh, close enough to his hip to be obscene, tightens. “Didn’t you promise to show me your rooms?”

He knows Jeongguk is watching him as he leaves. Hoseok catches his eye and smiles, barely distinguishable from the thousand other smiles of the evening.

On Liu’s insistence, Jimin follows him through the service passageways, and lets himself be pressed up against the walls and kissed. Liu seems to like the thrill of it, the break from military protocol that Jimin’s companionship offers him, and so Jimin leans into him and flatters him and asks vapid little questions about the history of the passageways, the architecture of the manor. Liu takes him right past the general’s salon, and Jimin gets not only conversation from that but the near-silent stroke of a brush, the indent of a wax seal, the skin-on-skin sound of a handshake.

It’s worth the extra time and effort, until they reach the back of the manor, where the main service staircase waits. It’s worth it, until Jimin is pressed against a wall with two hands up his shirt and a mouth on his neck, and three servants hauling garbage round the corner, to the exit just to Jimin’s left.

Taehyung meets Jimin’s eyes over Liu’s shoulder, and the bottom drops out of Jimin’s stomach.

You make him sick. Taehyung looks it, now, his face pinched, his pulse jumping. The other two servants snort, whisper vulgar things to themselves as Liu pulls Jimin up the stairs, but Taehyung stays silent. Jimin hears him push out a breath, run a hand through his hair. He loses snippets of the general’s conversation in listening for something, anything, that Taehyung might say.

Taehyung doesn’t, though. Jimin settles back on Liu’s bed with his legs spread, his mouth open, and braces himself for touch that almost doesn’t hurt, and listens to what he’s supposed to like an obedient tool.

You make him sick, Jimin hears, over and over, an inescapable reminder.

He doesn’t blame Jeongguk, or Taehyung for it. He makes himself sick, too.

Jimin muffles his breaths in Liu’s pillow, and writes his report to the Empress in his head, and counts his breaths and his moans and his heartbeats until he’s too exhausted to think.

♜

When Jimin keeps his promise, Taehyung is almost pleasantly surprised.

It’s been four days of work, four days of being half-assimilated into the manor staff on Obara, and Taehyung’s whole body hurts. He doesn’t know what’s in half the crates he’s been lugging to and from transport hummers, and he doesn’t want to; nearly everyone on the planetoid carries a weapon of some kind, and even lingering on the thought of a blaster for too long makes Taehyung queasy.

There aren’t any days off, and Taehyung takes to crawling into his bunk as soon as he can after shifts and sleeping straight through to the next one, leaving Namjoon’s calls — as few and far-between as they are — to Jeongguk, who’s been assigned with his partner to the less strenuous labor of waiting on the nobility’s every need. At least it keeps him far away from the prince, Taehyung rationalizes. Far away from Jimin, whose horrified eyes he keeps dreaming of, no matter what he tries to think of in the scant moments he has before flinging himself down and collapsing into sleep.

So Taehyung is grateful, when the Imugi gathers her staff and her prince back up and sets off for yet another planet, even if she’s weighed down with more weapons than she docked with. He’s grateful when he gets a rare day off in the darkness of hyperspace, and sleeps a rare thirteen hours until Jeonghwa stops by and pokes him awake just to make sure he’s still alive.

“Those hauls were killer,” she agrees, as Taehyung rubs the thick layer of crust out of his eyes and gulps down an entire canteen of water. She holds up her hands to show off a new layer of blisters, and drags him down to the mess hall for breakfast — lunch, for her — and Taehyung almost feels normal.

Jeongguk isn’t in the mess hall. Jeongguk has been taking his meals with Namjoon, and won’t speak to Taehyung beyond the most cursory greetings, and Taehyung wonders if he’d have laughed at the thought of that a month ago, on the trek to Tamjin that felt, in retrospect, so much more peaceful than anything Taehyung has felt since. Back then, Taehyung cowered if a stranger in town looked at him the wrong way; here, bumping shoulders with Jeonghwa and her friends and his coworkers, Taehyung feels less like a disciple of the Twins than he has since he was a child.

“I hear this next stop is a desert planet,” someone muses. There’s a scattered sound of general agreement, muffled by everyone’s desire to finish their meal portion, even the servants’ kitchen gifted some of the spices from each tour stop.

“Right — the princess has business there,” another voice chimes in. “Maybe we’ll get another day off to see the sights.”

“Sure,” Jeonghwa says. “And I bet your face’ll burn so bad you have to peel the blisters off before you sleep.”

Whoever she’s teasing laughs. Taehyung stares down at his tray, chopsticks discarded, stomach sinking. A desert planet. Hot and dry and covered in the sensory hell that must be sand, waiting to swallow Jimin up like a giant shifting maw.

But before the desert planet is hyperspace, the rare windows showing nothing but endless black, the occasional galaxy, the asteroid fields they pass through in the blink of an eye. Taehyung parks himself in a corner of the observation deck, after everyone else has gone to sleep, and watches the pinprick spots of light until he feels dizzy with a sense of overwhelming smallness.

According to the flight path each passenger can track on their datapad, the Imugi is scheduled to pass by a supernova tonight. They aren’t rare — Taehyung has even seen them before, handing out drinks and food at informal gatherings between planets — but there’s something about them that he loves. They linger in the view for an hour at least, the space around them lit up with the star’s dying convulsions. And the colors — they aren’t anything Taehyung ever could have imagined on Onjo, with the Twins, his world narrowed down to the blue murk of the river and the endless green of the forest and the cold, impersonal marble of the statues themselves.

Jimin finds him watching the supernova, nose practically pressed to the observation window.

Taehyung feels him from a hallway away, the wave of stress and exhaustion and hunger seeping into him so slowly that he only really notices when his stomach starts to ache from phantom cramps, when he starts feeling pressure behind his eyes that makes him blink away from the sprawl of the supernova.

“Jimin,” he says, when the wave gets close enough to be unbearable.

Jimin doesn’t answer. Instead he sits, far enough away that Taehyung can’t reach out to touch him, to make this easier for himself by making it easier for Jimin. If he concentrates, he can see the stars through Jimin’s eyes, the burn of the light, the fragmented borders of each individual color that swallows up the beauty of it. Taehyung wants to reach out, to show Jimin what it should look like. To show Jimin what the world could be, if he had Taehyung with him always.

“I said I’d find you,” Jimin finally says. Heavy, resigned. “Here I am.”

He’s so tired. Taehyung can feel his face aching from it, can feel points of bruising at his hips, his wrists, even his neck under the high collar of his robe. He remembers Jimin’s eyes over the officer’s shoulder; wide, terrified, anticipating pain. Taehyung hadn’t been expecting to see him, had rounded the corner unprepared, the jumble of too many bodies close together obscuring how close Jimin had been. And then everything hit him — fear and shame and concentration and disgust, all that and more mixed together and churning his stomach.

Taehyung hasn’t seen him since, but he knows the last days have been just as bad as that night — or worse. There are whispers among the servants, always, and Taehyung couldn’t stop listening to them if he tried.

“You’re tired,” he says, and feels almost predatory. “We don’t have to do this right now.”

“We do,” Jimin says, as firm as Taehyung thinks he’s capable of.

Jimin settles in, getting as comfortable as he can on his cushion, eyes still locked on the spacescape. Taehyung looks at him, the shape of him. The bump on his nose, the terrifying sharpness of his jaw. There are freckles dotted on his cheeks. Taehyung wants to touch them, and flushes when he thinks it, and takes the time to be grateful for the way Jimin can’t feel him the way another guide could.

Another guide — like the prince, Taehyung remembers, and any flush of embarrassment that might have risen twists into nausea low in his stomach.

“Okay.” Taehyung breathes. In, out. Everything Jimin is feeling batters against him, and so he pictures the river swallowing him up, pulling him down. “Okay. How long have you been like this?”

Jimin is looking at his own hands. He doesn’t want to answer, but both of them know he has to.

“I don’t really remember,” Jimin says, and then it all comes spilling out.

For all his reluctance, as soon as he starts Jimin seems almost eager to talk. And as soon as he starts, Taehyung wants him to stop. It’s confirmation of everything the Twins have assumed, and everything he’d feared in the nightmares he never spoke to anyone about, and it’s obvious as Jimin’s voice gets raw and shaky that it’s been the subject of his own nightmares since childhood.

Childhood. He was so young, Taehyung thinks, and digs the indent of Seonmul back into his palm, the wood warm with the heat of his own skin.

Us, Jimin keeps saying, and Taehyung makes himself ask.

“The four of us. We all passed some kind of test, so we all got taken. Bought, I guess.” Sharp anger twists in Jimin’s stomach, and Taehyung feels it like a knife. He may as well be inside Jimin’s skin, at this point; he can barely imagine how it might feel if they could touch.

“And where are they now?”

He knows as soon as the words leave his lips that he’s made a mistake. Jimin shutters himself, straightens his spine, clenches his jaw on fury and grief and shame that gives Taehyung the answer he’d been dreading even before Jimin opens his mouth.

“Dead.”

Three sentinels, or potential sentinels, killed. This induction is like nothing Taehyung has ever heard of — it sounds like torture, like it would curse anyone with madness, and he wonders even as he hates himself for it whether that madness has been growing inside of Jimin since the day the Empire saw something of Bo in him.

“I’m sorry,” Taehyung says. He means it. He can still smell his parents’ burning flesh.

“They all did it themselves.” Jimin stares out at the supernova, the white-hot dying core of it. “They couldn’t stand it, none of them could, not —”

Not like me, Taehyung hears, and wonders if Jimin can feel himself going mad.

Namjoon will be proud. Taehyung has something to show for his preoccupation with Jimin, has a scrap of an answer that might bring him closer to going home. It feels worse than he anticipated, even as some sort of hope bubbles in his chest that the Empire has abandoned their effort to make sentinels without knowing the truth of the Twins.

“And you don’t know why?” Taehyung ventures. He doesn’t know what Jimin knows; Jimin doesn’t know what he knows. He’s trying to find a balance between giving away the truth and letting Jimin close enough to trust.

Jimin’s eyes go narrow. His fingers, laced together in his lap, twitch in agitation.

“No,” he finally says. Taehyung waits, but no elaboration comes. Jimin keeps looking at him, jaw tilted up, the barest flicker of pride spreading in both of their chests like a bird taking flight.

Taehyung understands now that this question comes with a price, and that he’ll have to make the offer. He can imagine Jeongguk ordering him to refuse, Namjoon telling him to tread cautiously, but neither of them are here; neither of them know Jimin the way Taehyung does, both shallow and deep with none of the vast expanse in between.

“I’ll answer anything,” Taehyung finally offers, “If you’ll tell me how you lived.”

The satisfaction that settles over Jimin is grim. He still looks calculating, on top of all that exhaustion and wariness, and Taehyung can only imagine how he might look a few pounds healthier, a few hours more spent under the sun. He wonders how the prince doesn’t see it, Jimin withering more after each stop on the tour.

For a moment, they sit in silence. Taehyung turns back to the window, the expanse of blackness that makes his stomach swoop like he’s falling. He’s still not used to the reality of space travel; there’s a part of him that wants to believe that the galaxy swirling outside the Imugi doesn’t truly exist.

“That necklace,” Jimin finally says, and Taehyung’s whole chest floods with something cold enough to burn. “The one you always wear. What is it?”

And Taehyung, coward that he is, almost runs. It’s an old instinct, one beaten into him by the elders as soon as he was well enough to understand. If a stranger ever asked him about the twins, he was to run and never look back. If a stranger asked about his family, about his name, about the totem around his neck — he’d never been approached, during his rare excursions to the city, but the instinct is burned into him as deeply as the blaster scar on his stomach.

If it weren’t for the supernova in front of him, swallowing up the blackness and shifting with every moment, with every lightyear, Taehyung might have caved to that instinct. But he blinks and the dying star is burned behind his eyelids, and Jimin is buzzing under his skin like the engine of the ship itself, and he made a promise.

Slowly, carefully, Taehyung fishes Seonmul out from under his robe. The leather cord is new, replaced just before he and Jeongguk left the Twins, because their old ones had been around their neck for fifteen years or more and always seemed moments away from snapping, from sending Bo and Seonmul tumbling down the river in the path their sacred texts had taken when the Empire came to Onjo. So the cord is new, still slightly stiff, but Seonmul is well-worn and soft at each edge, the features of her face almost indistinguishable.

“Is she your god?” Jimin asks. He doesn’t have to lean forward to see her, cradled in Taehyung’s palm.

That’s a question that Taehyung has to think about. He’s not used to talking to strangers about this, and it feels wrong, but he still takes the time to think it through, his thumb stroking along the front of her robe, tracing the so-familiar curves.

“Sort of,” he finally answers. “She’s — like me. We call them the Twins.”

“Like you?” Jimin’s head cocks, his brows furrowed. Taehyung breathes in, and imagines kneeling at the feet of those great statues in the forest.

“Bo is the sentinel. Seonmul —” He nods down at her, watches Jimin look closer. “She’s the guide. The first guide. The order I’m in, we follow the Twins. I carry Seonmul, and sentinels carry Bo.”

“Your companions,” Jimin says. “Who do they carry?”

Namjoon doesn’t have a totem to wear, but he keeps a statuette in his rooms wherever he goes. Jeongguk by all rights shouldn’t wear a totem, but the elders hadn’t been able to berate him into keeping it off.

“The sentinel,” Taehyung answers. Careful.

The terms don’t mean anything to Jimin, he knows, and he braces himself for a follow-up that never comes. Jimin just nods, and settles back on his hands, and closes his eyes. His chin tips up toward the ceiling, shows off his jaw and the long skinny line of his neck, and Taehyung thinks of wolf pups playing in the forest, rolling to show their bellies in submission.

“I lived because of Hoseok,” Jimin admits, and the freedom of it soars in Taehyung’s chest even as he balks at the way Jimin speaks the prince’s name.

Taehyung gives him time, gives him space, gives himself a long moment to stare at the stars and regret ever leaving home.

“When he touches me — touched me — it helped. It was enough, when we were young. It was enough until I met you.”

Fear creeps in slowly. Jimin’s eyes are still resolutely closed, his skin screaming at each shift in the air. It makes Taehyung want to stop breathing, to spare him even an ounce of the pain he can feel like a ghost along his own neck, his cheeks, his lips.

He doesn’t know what Jimin wants him to say. There’s a star dying in front of him; there’s a stranger dying to his right. Jimin isn’t asking for Taehyung to save him. He isn’t asking for anything. He’s trying to accept it, Taehyung thinks; the reality that he might not live much longer than this royal tour. Jimin might even be planning to ask the prince himself to finish the job.

“I can keep helping,” he offers, even though it’s the last thing Jeongguk would tell him to say. Even Namjoon won’t like it, but he doesn’t know how to stop himself. “When we dock — you can always come find me.”

Jimin recoils. Something twists in Taehyung’s stomach, something he names disgust even as bile sours at the back of his throat. It hits him hard, and he can’t stop himself from jerking to look at Jimin. The hurt on his face must be more prominent than he thought; Jimin flushes, caught staring, and crosses his arms over his chest.

“That’s very kind,” Jimin forces out. It sounds stiff, and obvious rejection, and Taehyung feels his own cheeks stinging with a blush, his humiliation deeper than Jimin’s, closer to his chest. It hurts more to know that the offer is worth less than Jimin’s pride, when just sitting here makes him want to scream with the obvious pain and overstimulation stinging at Jimin’s every nerve. When Jimin is the one who found him before Obara, had refused to let Taehyung avoid him.

A part of Taehyung wants to accept it, to see how long it takes Jimin to break again under the heat of a desert sun, but that’s too cruel to think about for more than a few sadistic moments.

The supernova is vanishing from the far corner of the observation window. They have a few minutes left, maybe, before the molten core of it vanishes, the Imugi passing its solar system entirely. Jimin still can’t see it for what it is, too busy picking out the individual flecks to see the way the black space around it shudders with the star’s last heaving gasps, and all of a sudden Taehyung can’t stand it anymore.

He reaches out, leaning those scant few inches past where he can comfortably stretch, and presses his fingers to Jimin’s wrist, and shows him the way the stars should look.

Later that night, as the Imugi creeps through space and Taehyung picks his way through the quarters to climb into his own bed, he can still feel the lit candle of Jimin’s wonder, burning as bright as that far-off supernova in the hollow of his chest.

♖

Jimin is dreading the party’s stop on Zamag, even with all of Hoseok’s assurances that very little of their time will be spent in the outside heat, and that dread only grows as they dress for their first outing. Hoseok is in rippling silver, a barely-there weave designed to reflect the sun even as it drapes elegantly over his neck, his wrists, the backs of his hands. There’s a chain connected to his rings, another hanging around the smallest point of his waist, yet more adorning where his wrapped leggings tuck seamlessly into the high rise of pale suede boots. It’s an unfamiliar style, packed and prepared specifically for this stop, and Hoseok seems delighted with the way it makes him look like an exotic insect, ever-changing and reflective even in the low light of his quarters.

Jimin, on the other hand, has opted for plain white. He’s lucky, he thinks as he dresses, that he’d chosen the cut he had at their last meeting with the palace tailor; his neck is still bruised in the shape of Shin’s hand, purple fading to green fading to yellow, and the high collar of his robe sheathes him up to his jaw, seamless and elegant.

“Beautiful,” Hoseok calls him, and Jimin feels sick at the obvious way he perks up with Jimin’s bruises hidden, hands fluttering to adjust the fall of Jimin’s hair, plucking at the narrow taper of his sleeves. “Here, here — it matches your white.”

He fixes a single pearl to Jimin’s ear, dangling from a silver chain that threads through the hole in his lobe. He has that self-satisfied air to him that he always gets when he dresses Jimin in some of his finery, more than they both know he deserves, and Jimin forces himself to ignore the way it’s starting to unsettle him.

“Just a few minutes at the port,” Jimin repeats, a line fed to him earlier in the morning. Something to fortify himself with, when he can already feel the way the desert heat is baking the Imugi’s outer shell.

Hoseok kisses his forehead. Squeezes his hand. The touch only chafes, even as he peers into Jimin’s eyes, looking for something Jimin is trying his hardest to hide.

“Of course,” Hoseok promises. He’s one of the two people on this ship with the power to keep any promise at all, Jimin reminds himself, and so he forces himself to squeeze back, to offer a smile, to take the last bite of hotteok that Hoseok holds to his lips. He chews, swallows what might as well be sandpaper against the tender skin of his throat, and Hoseok relaxes just a fraction of an inch.

Before the port is the wait at the ship’s royal entrance. The Imugi needs time to vent its recycled air, to adjust its oxygen levels to the slight differences of each habitable planet, to slowly acclimate everyone on board to the new ecosystem and gravitational pull.

Jimin waits in the shadows, as far from the double-locked doors as he can get himself, and listens as Hoseok chats happily with his so-called friends. Kim Namjoon is hovering on the sidelines, his shabby head covering already pulled up like he knows he’ll forget as soon as the doors open, and Jimin doesn’t miss the way Hoseok looks toward him just a few too many times to be accidental. It’s something he’d ask Taehyung about, if he had any right to. If he wasn’t still shuddering under the shame of that conversation, that offer.

But it’s not shame that keeps him rooted, when he hears the familiar footsteps. Hidden in the elegant columns of this foyer are servants’ passages, and Jimin is standing just at the mouth of one. He has enough warning, enough echo whispering out of the hall, that he could push back through the throng to Hoseok’s side, where he’ll have to fit himself anyway once the landing protocols have been completed.

But Jimin counts himself a coward as much as a guard, so he stays where he is. He lets Taehyung approach, with disgust and shame and hope all tugging for space in his chest, and closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look.

Maybe he expects Taehyung to stop, to watch and wait and gloat as the doors open and Jimin has to face the hot bluster of desert wind. Maybe Taehyung is here for Namjoon, and he’ll brush past Jimin without a second glance, offended or vindictive or something else entirely.

But Taehyung doesn’t pass him, and Taehyung doesn’t stop.

To keep himself sane, Jimin wants to lie and say he doesn’t feel the air shift until it’s too late. Until Taehyung’s hand is already too close to pull away from, reaching for the only exposed skin Jimin has to offer; his cheek, where he’s lucky enough to have been spared the worst of Liu’s bruising attention. Even when he flinches back, too aware of Taehyung breathing in his space, the foyer already too crowded as it is, he has to choose to let his back hit the wall.

“Stop,” he tells Taehyung, but he’s leaning his cheek into the touch. He’s gasping like he’s been drowned, lungs finally clear, eyes unclouded. Taehyung takes everything too much away, even though Jimin hadn’t asked for it, even though Jimin had turned him down.

“I don’t deserve it,” he manages, when he can finally bear to tear himself away. Taehyung’s arms are crossed, now, his jaw set, looking down at Jimin like he’s daring him to try to spit this terrible gift back in his face.

“I don’t care,” Taehyung says.

It’s quiet, quieter than Jimin thinks he understood before Onjo. He shivers whenever he thinks it — that this is what everyone else has, the muffled layer of sounds and smells that don’t cut to the bone. It makes him weak, but Jimin wants nothing more than to sit down heavy with his head in his hands and let Taehyung take away everything else.

Maybe one day he’ll ask. Or maybe one day Taehyung will vanish into the crowded capital, and Jimin will never see him again, and he’ll have to find some way to end it all himself.

“Go,” Taehyung finally says. He breaks his stubborn stance on a sigh, and casts a long look over at where Namjoon has finally pulled Hoseok into another argument. When he turns to vanish back into the hallway, Jimin barely has enough presence of mind to catch his sleeve.

They’re running out of time. He can hear the gears of the first airlock starting to creak, can feel the first touches of desert heat, but not so viciously that any of it hurts. Taehyung’s eyes are dark and wide, his lashes blurring into a whole much lovelier than when Jimin has to pick them each apart. He’s suppressing something with his mouth, a smile or a grimace, and Jimin forces himself to speak before he has to see what might come of it.

“Thank you.”

Taehyung’s lips, still pressed into something undecided, smooth out. He blinks, meets Jimin’s eyes, nods sharp and decisive.

And then the doors are open, and the crowd smooths into its ordered lines, and Jimin follows Hoseok out into the desert sun, and does not burn.

♜

Five and a half weeks after Taehyung leaves home, the Imugi docks at the capital.

It doesn’t come a moment too soon. Even with the days-long stretches in different ports, catching an afternoon or evening off to slip through some foreign marketplace, Taehyung feels so claustrophobic that he has to bite down a scream every time he wakes up on the bunk above Jeongguk, their friendship still frosted over with distrust. He still has to force himself to not beg for a shuttle back to Onjo, to the Twins, to the only place he had ever wanted to know as intimately as he now knows the prince’s ship.

Five and a half weeks, and Taehyung still hasn’t gotten used to Jimin.

After Zamag, they settle into a routine. Taehyung finds Jimin before outings, whether the climate is hot or cold or too alien to categorize, and makes the next hours bearable. Jimin accepts it, as much as he hates to, and then spends their days in hyperspace avoiding Taehyung much more easily than Taehyung ever avoided him.

They don’t talk. Not really.

Once, during their longest stretch in hyperspace, Taehyung finds Jimin in the bowels of the ship, curled into a ball near the water filtration systems. He hadn’t been looking for him, until he passed through a special-access door on a cleaning rotation and was practically smacked in the face with Jimin’s panic, his pain, his tears.

“Leave me alone,” Jimin moans. His hands are clasped to his ears, his knees tucked against his chest, his eyes shut so hard that they must hurt.

It would be cruel to leave him like this. There’s no excuse not to reach his hand out, to clasp his fingers around Jimin’s too-thin wrist, to take away the episode of horrible overstimulation. No excuse, but for the way Jimin’s stomach churns in revulsion when Taehyung crouches close.

“Let me help you.” There’s no way Jimin can’t hear it, even with as quietly as Taehyung whispers.

Jimin’s eyes slit open. Dark, angry, glittering with tears.

Taehyung can feel how much he hurts. His eyes are prickling, not with tears but with pain; his ears are ringing with the echo from the pipes, the thousands of tons of water flowing through the filtration system crashing over his head so much crueler than the Tamjingang ever could. Jimin is trembling, and Taehyung wants to let him stop.

“Don’t,” Jimin growls. “Don’t you dare touch me.”

Jimin’s hatred catches like a cherry pit in Taehyung’s throat. He rocks back on his heels, almost topples with the sudden force, looks down at Jimin’s desperate hands so he doesn’t have to look him in the eye.

Not helping him feels like a betrayal of everything Taehyung has ever been taught. He fumbles for Seonmul around his neck, breathing in the hot-metal smell of the industrial corners of the ships. Underneath that is something floral that always follows Jimin around, a perfume or oil that he’s treated to as the prince’s companion. He wonders if Jimin even registers it anymore, as anything other than one more thoughtless pain.

He looks up again, and sees Jimin watching his hand where it disappears through the neckline of his robe. Taehyung uncurls his hands before he can think about it, letting Seonmul rest against his palm. Jimin looks at her, and Taehyung itches to carve him a likeness of Bo, her form straighter than Seonmul’s, her brow sharper. Jimin should know, should understand what he is. Jimin should understand how awful it is for Taehyung to be rejected like this when he knows that he’s the only person in all the Empire who can take Jimin’s pain away.

“I’m sorry,” Taehyung finally says. Jimin breathes out, relief cold in his chest, as he closes his eyes again. He must expect Taehyung to listen to him. Must expect Taehyung to live with their shared pain, docile and detached.

He moves quickly enough that Jimin can’t stop him. Fingers around wrists, eyes clenched in concentration, dipping his fingers into a tsunami to understand which sense had sent Jimin spiraling this time.

Through Jimin, Taehyung hears his own heartbeat, the uncomfortable sound of air filling his own lungs. He hears the scream of the oxygen system, the earth-shaking rumble of the water filtration, the movement of every body from here to the prince’s quarters.

For Taehyung, the Imugi is a prison of too many bodies crowded into a finite space. For Jimin, the Imugi is a torture chamber of sounds and smells and sensation. They’re more alike than Jimin knows, or Jeongguk, or even Namjoon. Taehyung grits his teeth against the resistance Jimin puts up, a tiger clawing at the net Taehyung casts over him, and pushes in deeper.

This time, Jimin isn’t on guard duty. This time, Jimin doesn’t need to stay on alert. Taehyung lets himself go, much more than he should, and gives Jimin his own hearing. The low hum of water, the barely-there vibration of the ship itself. He gives Jimin his own smell, his own taste, his own sensitivity to touch.

When Jimin opens his eyes again, Taehyung doesn’t look away. He examines the way Jimin can see each of his pores, each fiber of his irises, and then slowly takes it away.

Taehyung gets lost, starts to drown, and only comes back to himself when Jimin reaches out with both hands and shoves.

“What are you doing,” Jimin says. He’s breathing hard, eyes darting around their dark corner, hands back to fluttering around his ears like he’s waiting to need to cover them again. “What — how —”

Taehyung can hear the betrayal; he’d be able to even if he couldn’t feel it heavy in his gut. The guilt is entirely his own, twining with that betrayal like two serpents writhing inside him, sending bile up against the back of his tongue. Jimin can’t fight him, when he reaches in like that. Jimin can’t protect himself.

Jimin suddenly looks very small. Gone is the vicious cut of his glare; he looks ready to cry, nose red and eyes starting to swell. He presses one hand to his own chest, and hunches into the pressure. Taehyung almost overbalances in his crouch, and stands to stop from collapsing. His heart pounds in his chest, beating violent against his ribs, and Jimin can’t hear it.

He’s already apologized, but it’s not enough. Taehyung steps back, and the movement catches Jimin’s attention.

The relief is fading. So is the fear, and the misery, and the pain. Taehyung can’t feel anyone but Jimin, and even then it’s more like an aftertaste, the lingering of copper after biting his tongue until it bleeds. He wants to collapse on the floor next to Jimin, to explain how they soothe each other, to explain that now when he goes back to the servants’ quarters he’ll be able to sleep, to think, to bask in the luxury of solitude in a way that’s been impossible his whole life.

But even Taehyung can hear approaching footsteps now, the chatter of a pair of hydraulic engineers, and Jimin startles at it, unused to not hearing bodies coming from entire hallways away.

Taehyung steps back, and back, and Jimin watches him leave.

He doesn’t reject Taehyung at the next port, but he doesn’t welcome him either. He never reaches out. Taehyung is always the one making contact now, against Jimin’s wrist or palm or forearm. Port after port, banquet after banquet. Jimin collects bruising around his wrists and bite marks around his neck, and they don’t talk. Taehyung doesn’t teach him about the Twins, and Jimin doesn’t explain his nights spent hanging off of strangers’ arms, and Taehyung resigns himself to wondering.

And then the Imugi turns toward home, and the prince’s party comes alive with chatter about the capital, and Taehyung tosses and turns on their last night in hyperspace until he gives up and crawls out of bed, past the observation deck crowded with people suddenly desperate to appreciate their last glimpse of the stars, and lingers by the empty cavern of the main botanic garden.

Jimin isn’t here. Taehyung hadn’t really expected him to be, but it’s disappointing all the same.

Namsan, he’s heard, is a land-locked city. Sansegye itself is mostly mountains, three continents separated by less ocean than the sea that wraps around fully half of Onjo. The forests are dense, according to Namjoon, but slightly colder than Taehyung is used to. There are plants in the Imugi’s botanic garden native to Onjo, but none of the wilder ones that he’s spent long summers plucking berries from, collecting herbs and roots and vegetables the temple would use to supplement their meager market hauls.

The temple might be empty, by now. Taehyung hadn’t heard any of the elders’ plans for after he and Jeongguk left, but they left everything so empty. The livestock sold, the larders emptied, the pathways covered over with moss.

Here is where Jeongguk finds him: cross-legged under a magnolia tree, its flowers losing their petals and scattering around him. No one is allowed off the paved paths, but everyone’s eyes tonight are turned toward the stars, and Taehyung can’t make himself care about rules for a garden he’ll never see again.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk says, and Taehyung tips his head back against the tree’s trunk and looks at him.

Jeongguk’s skin has paled, after nearly two months living aboard a ship. So has Taehyung’s, but in the warm light of the lanterns lining the walkways, Jeongguk looks strange and withered.

They’ve barely spoken, in the last few weeks. When they have, about nothing more significant than Namjoon’s summons and chore rotations, it’s been uncomfortable. Taehyung doesn’t know what Jeongguk wants from him, and Jeongguk hasn’t been willing to share.

Jeongguk takes a moment to get comfortable. He sits on the path, still no more than a meter away, and rubs his fingers along the moss that covers one of the larger stones that border it. It pulls back the image of a frog in his hands, unwillingly deposited on Taehyung’s shoulders. The lilting melody of the rhymes he’d hummed to himself, rhymes Taehyung half-remembers singing over a cradle as a boy.

Jeongguk is one of two people on this ship who knows who Taehyung is, where he comes from. Taehyung aches to pull him close, to share the space he used to be so comfortable in, but he doesn’t think he knows how.

“I miss home,” Jeongguk finally says. He looks up from the moss, eyes large and shining and young. He’s projecting a little, his open sincerity like a flat, undisturbed forest pond. “I miss us, hyung.”

Bo is hanging, unhidden, against his chest. They’d carved their own totems as children, their first versions clumsy and blood-stained from a few unlucky movements of their knives. These are more refined, made maybe eight years ago, and Jeongguk’s totem is just as worn as Taehyung’s own.

“I do too.” Taehyung sighs. He rubs a magnolia petal between two fingers, the scent bursting over his hand, and tries to see Jeongguk in front of him, instead of who he wishes it were.

He’s not sure what Jeongguk wants him to say. He’s not sure what he wants Jeongguk to say.

“Look.” Jeongguk takes a heavy breath and sets his shoulders. “I know we disagree about Jimin. And I disagree with Namjoon about the prince. But we were sent to do this together, hyung, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I think — we aren’t helping anything by being angry at each other.”

Taehyung isn’t angry. He’s tired, and sick of double-speak and secrets, but he’s not angry at Jeongguk for the jealousy he’s had years to learn and accept. He might as well be angry at the river for flowing.

“I understand.” He sets his shoulders too, reflects Jeongguk’s determination back at him. “And I agree, Jeongguk-ah. But you can’t ask me to stop seeing him, just like you can’t talk Namjoon out of seeing the prince. We can’t.”

Jeongguk, too, has had years to accept them. He knows the Twins as well as Taehyung does, and better than Namjoon. He knows, as much as he pretends not to, that Taehyung could no more sever his connection to Jimin than he could cut off his own hand.

Bitterness ripples that placid pond, but Jeongguk swallows it down.

“We’re landing tomorrow,” he says. “And I can’t do it alone.”

Taehyung closes his eyes, and pictures a city with the population of their entire moon and more. Jeongguk could get lost there, could be just another citizen of the Empire, but Taehyung won’t let him.

He reaches out before he can overthink it. He’s still Jeongguk’s Taehyung, in most of the ways that matter. Their hands fit together as easily as they always have, their calluses almost the same, his fingers just barely longer.

“You won’t have to,” Taehyung promises. A promise he does intend to keep, this time.

Not twelve hours later, Taehyung follows Namjoon out into the bustle of the capital. He has a pack slung over his shoulders, Namjoon’s trunk balanced on a cart he pushes ahead of him, and he’s thankful for the way it keeps strangers a little farther away from him. There’s a welcome committee of hundreds waiting at the port, one the prince mingles with as easily as if he’d never left, and Taehyung is more grateful than ever for Namjoon’s position as a scholar instead of a courtesan, because it means they get to slip the crowd and take a shuttle back to the palace.

The palace, Taehyung reminds himself, and shares wide eyes with Jeongguk, and swats away the teasing hand that reaches out as if to pinch him out of a dream.

Five and a half weeks of transience, and now Taehyung is afraid that at any moment they’ll be ordered back to the Imugi, back to weeks more of traveling and the pitch-black space between stars and the endless rotation of strange worlds.

But it doesn’t come. He and Jeongguk are left with the luggage at Namjoon’s new house in the outer layer of the palace structure, a modest hanok that’s still more luxurious than anywhere Taehyung has stayed since his childhood, and Namjoon leaves them with a quick apology for his required presence at the prince’s welcome banquet.

And then they’re alone, on a world Taehyung never thought he’d live to see. They’re alone in the Empress’s palace, in Jimin’s home, and Taehyung sits down heavy on the steps to the hanok and braces his head in his hands, and bites back tears that burn at his eyes until he can manage to breathe without shaking.

“Come on,” Jeongguk murmurs. His hand lands gently against Taehyung’s spine, rubs gentle and repetitive. “Come on, hyung. Let’s go inside.”

So Taehyung stands, and pulls himself together, and enters this house with a promise that he’ll never trust this palace enough to call it home.

Chapter Text

A stranger light comes on slowly
A stranger’s heart without a home

— Mazzy Star, “Fade Into You”

♖♜

The first thing Jimin does in the capitol is hold his breath.

After more than three months away, never spending two nights outside the ship in the same bed, he’s afraid that nothing in Namsan will remain familiar. He’s had dreams about it — the gates to the palace locked, strangers barring their windows when he passes, Hoseok spitting at his feet and turning his back.

But the city is the same. It’s like Jimin had never left at all.

The same vendors hawk their wares in the markets, the same food stalls line the streets. Jimin recognizes some of the children, a few months older; a woman Hoseok makes a habit of helping with groceries now has a toddler instead of a babe. The whispers are the same, too, almost comforting even as they spit accusations of pet, whore, leech.

Hoseok laughs with his people as they walk back to the palace from the port, and Jimin can almost convince himself that nothing has changed. That they’ll go back to Hoseok’s quarters with the bedsheets turned down to welcome them, and Hoseok will kiss him without any shred of distrust or concern, and all of Jimin’s senses will lull back into the mockery of low tide he’d once been able to convince himself wasn’t killing him.

The second thing Jimin does in the capitol is report to the Empress.

This route is familiar too. The crimson doors of the throne room, staring up at them as he waits for his summons; the servants’ hall, his shoulders scraping the support beams. The Empress in her study, refusing to give him even a scrap of her attention until Jimin is almost trembling from anticipation and fear and shame.

Finally, finally, she looks up.

“Jimin,” she says. She’s difficult to read, with her perfect intonation and poise, especially as Jimin fixes his gaze on the layer of powder on her left cheekbone.

He bows. The Empress accepts it, fingers tapping impatiently on her desk as she waits for him to rise.

Jimin knows better than to expect praise, but his stomach still sinks when she gestures him forward, turning her attention immediately back down to her notebook. He’s learned that she dislikes keeping records on datapads; everything he sent her during the tour is meticulously copied in her own hand and then wiped. If a spy wants Jimin’s intel, he has to get his hands on either the Empress’s private files or Jimin himself.

“Sit,” she commands. Jimin does, hands settled in his lap, and lets himself inspect the grain of her desk, the ancient inkstone, the portrait of the royal family angled just far away from him that Hoseok’s face is obscured. “Your reports were generally adequate, but I have questions.”

Jimin knew she would; he’s prepared for nearly everything that she throws at him, with just a few questions leaving her with pursed lips and disappointment in the cut of her voice that never stops terrifying him. He’s known her to have ordered executions before, as rare as a public one might be, and he doesn’t doubt that his own disappearance would cause barely a ripple in the vast lake she calls her Empire.

The night falls before the interrogation ends; Jimin can hear the screech of crickets under the scratch of her pen, the start of music from a pavilion to the south. His throat rasps, but he doesn’t dare ask for water.

She gets to Onjo, finally. Asks not about Namjoon, not about Jeongguk or Taehyung, but about Senator Kim Seokjin.

“He approached me at the welcome banquet,” Jimin remembers. His tongue feels heavy, numb. “I reported on his conversation with Onjo’s governor, Your Majesty.”

And then a flash of conversation comes back to him — The Twins, Kim Seokjin had hissed. The Twins are gone.

“The governor is now his stepfather,” she says, almost offhandedly. “I signed a letter for the wedding just three weeks ago. I want you to watch the both of them, when the Senate convenes and during the council of governors next month. I have a... personal interest in Onjo’s embassy.”

The delicate phrasing is warning enough. Jimin accepts her promise to arrange a night or two with Seokjin, and bites down on his tongue as subtly as he can until the conversation shifts. And shifts it does, to Tammora Six and a would-be assassin — a much easier topic, and one that Jimin has been rehearsing in his head for weeks.

“Your memory is commendable,” the Empress finally gives him, after each detail of the tour has been rehashed and the night has settled dark and deep. It’s the closest to praise she’ll ever get, and Jimin accepts it with a bowed head and a scream itching at the back of his teeth. He almost sobs when he realizes — there isn’t even relief waiting for him in Hoseok’s arms, when he’s done. “Is there anything else, Jimin?”

She eyes him like she knows something, but the Empress looks at everyone like they’re keeping secrets she has to pry out with her fingernails. Jimin blinks at the high collar of her robe, silver silk embroidered with shimmering lotuses, and shakes his head.

“No, Your Majesty.” He’s never been more grateful that she can’t hear a lie.

“Then you’re dismissed.”

She turns back to her notebook before Jimin has even stood from his seat.

The princess is probably asleep in her bed, her own reports and discussion with the Empress put off until the morning. Jimin could delude himself into thinking that he’s that important, that he’s keeping the Empire spinning, or he could admit that he’s less important than the princess’ beauty sleep. His feet drag when he makes it into the hall, his head throbbing in time with the crickets, with the wind curling through streets and between buildings.

He could look up the residence Namjoon’s been granted. He could let himself in through the servants’ door, and fall on his knees and beg Taehyung for relief.

Jimin laughs, a harsh thing, and picks himself up from where he’s slumped against a column. This isn’t one of Hoseok’s fairy tales. This isn’t a song to be played at banquets or sung to children before bed. Chances are, Hoseok will spurn Namjoon’s company for however long it takes for him to complete his studies, and Jimin won’t ever see Taehyung again without seeking him out, and he’ll die too quickly for it to matter anyway.

He stops in Hoseok’s antechamber to drink long and cool from the water pitcher left out for him. There’s a platter of fruits, too, pears and persimmons and grapes that make Jimin’s stomach snarl and snap, empty after a long day spent in the crowd that follows Hoseok wherever he goes. Instead of risking any of it, Jimin forces down a single mouthful of rice, a sip of broth that might have been hot at sunset, and holds his nose and mouth shut until he’s sure neither of them will come up again.

When he finally makes it to the bedroom, he realizes that Hoseok hadn’t waited up for him. Part of Jimin wants to shake him, wants to give Hoseok any reason at all to hold him or pity him or both. That part of Jimin is shrinking, though, and has been for longer than he wants to admit.

Jimin strips himself down to his smallclothes, and taps off the honey-glow of the floor lights, and fits himself into the bed that suddenly feels too small for them both.

♜

Namsan is loud. Taehyung learns this in fits and starts — the first night he spends in Namjoon’s quaint hanok, he falls asleep as soon as he and Jeongguk are done with the luggage, his head pounding and his chest tight. He wakes up at some unknowable hour in the morning, spends an hour vomiting in the bathroom adjoining the servants’ loft, and crashes back to sleep on the porcelain tile floor without even cleaning his teeth. He chokes on Jeongguk’s concern when he’s shaken awake; he retches on Namjoon’s exhaustion.

He’d looked up the numbers in orbit, but the crush of nine million in the city is inescapable.

“It’s so much,” Namjoon agrees over breakfast, a little queasy himself. Taehyung feels empty, exsanguinated. He manages eight sips of an unfamiliar tea, strange petals settled at the bottom of the stoneware pot, and picks lifelessly at the sliced fruit Jeongguk sets in front of him. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”

Like this is cheerfully vague. Taehyung remembers Tamjin, the festival, the spike Namjoon had from the few thousand — at most — packed into town. Weeks spent in the prince’s company has built up his reserve, and the Imugi raised his tolerance, and now Taehyung is the one drowning, realizing how dull he’d been before Jimin woke him up.

The fragment of a verse comes back to him, remembered from a half-fevered haze from childhood. He’d been bedridden still, the order’s last healer worried about infection from where his escape had torn open the cauterized mess of his side, and the Twins had been mourning the loss of their library to the current of the river. Elder Yeon had recited the verse to him to help him sleep, from Seonmul’s years of aloneness. The world cut through her as a knife.

Taehyung feels that blade in him. He doesn’t know how to pull it out.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk says. He touches Taehyung’s shoulderblade, an almost-grounding pressure, and Taehyung tries to grasp for him, to focus on that concern and frustration as familiar as breathing — but it slips away, intangible as a wisp of smoke.

It’s a miracle Jimin survived here this long. It must have been torture — even worse than the Imugi, where Taehyung so often found him terrified and overwhelmed.

Three hours later, Taehyung reconsiders his definition of torture.

“It’s a garden party,” Namjoon told them, after slipping Taehyung a small package of unfamiliar painkillers. They were enough to get him to stomach breakfast, and to keep himself upright steadily enough to be fit for duty. “You aren’t required as servants, thank the stars, but Jiho mentioned that most of court travels with a retainer or two. It makes them look more popular, or something.”

Now Taehyung learns that retainer is a synonym for coatrack, and that garden parties must have been invented by the Empire’s cruelest tyrant. The garden itself is lovely — a lush courtyard full of early winter blooms, citrus trees dripping heavy with fruit, sprays of miniature white petals everywhere Taehyung seems to try to stand. Almost everyone else seems to know where to step; the courtiers are as delicate as ever, the servants well-practiced, everyone in the machinations of the sprawling palace grounds must have been navigating these gardens since childhood.

But Taehyung hasn’t. Taehyung, and sometimes Jeongguk, catches too many flowers under his heel. He can’t stop himself from swaying with the crowd. He stumbles forward when a strange courtier announces her pregnancy to the princess, and a spray of surprise and jealousy and joy sweeps over him like a current. He takes an instinctive step back when the princess turns away another woman with a frown, and a wave of unspoken gossip passes through the crowd through pointed looks and raised brows.

Let me leave, he begs Namjoon silently, and Namjoon doesn’t hear him.

Instead, Taehyung shadows Namjoon and does his best not to cause a scene. Instead, Jeongguk casts him worried glances from the corner of his eye, until Taehyung is ready to throw down Namjoon’s brand new wool cloak and grind it into the exquisite clover pathway.

The worst part of the party, Taehyung decides, is that it’s not useful. Namjoon isn’t any new member of the court; he’s a scholar, here on retainer from Amnok’s university. He’s a cultural ambassador, on paper, but even the prince himself knows that Namjoon’s work here is to be done through Namsan’s extensive library, the channels of knowledge he’d never have access to from their little moon at the tips of the empire’s far-reaching fingers.

The princess is the heir, Taehyung repeats to himself, just to stay sane when he catches snippets of inane conversation. Namjoon needs her favor. The prince was only for show, for public relations, for a distraction.

It’s true. The princess is nothing like her brother at this event; she makes a cursory stop in, makes the rounds with the attendees who hadn’t been selected for the Imugi’s retinue, and checks in with Namjoon and the handful of other cultural ambassadors.

“I hope you find our great city’s resources worth the trip,” she tells Namjoon, and manages to make it sound entirely sincere.

And then, as exquisitely careful as the prince never seems, she makes an indiscreet and unceremonious exit.

“Thank the stars,” Namjoon breathes, the second her modest tiara and silent handmaid disappear from the crowd. “Let’s get out of here.”

It’s not quite as easy as that. Courtiers’ companions are supposed to be silent, seen and not heard, but now it’s Taehyung who slows them down when they pass by a gathered crowd and Choi Wooshik catches his eye.

And from there it’s a cascade — Wooshik’s master recognizes Namjoon, and then has to introduce him around, and then what feels like everyone else has something to say about the University, or a thinly-veiled allusion to make about Hoseok’s obvious disdain for Onjo’s most esteemed scholar.

“This is what you get for making friends,” Jeongguk hisses at him, and it’s a joke but it makes Taehyung cringe away. The endless throng of bodies and finger foods and delicate choreographed steps around the sprays of white flowers, the silver-leaved saplings that barely reach Taehyung’s knees, all of it is more than he signed up for, more than he thought he was agreeing to. But Namjoon is bearing it graciously, and Jeongguk doesn’t have anything to bear, and so Taehyung sucks in a breath through his teeth and tries to imagine their familiarity wrapping around him, Jeongguk’s exasperation and Namjoon’s preoccupied interest insulating him from the endless crash of twittering strangers.

It doesn’t work. They escape from the garden party, in a direction Taehyung knows only as away, and he nearly swoons onto the steps of the first building the three of them pass.

“Hey!” Namjoon says, startled. It’s his yell, and Jeongguk’s quick reflexes, that save Taehyung’s head from cracking against the heavy wooden pillar of what turns out to be a courthouse. They get a fair few passing glances as Taehyung struggles to right himself, a few friendly or concerned nods, and all Taehyung wants is to crawl inside the pillar he nearly brained himself on and sleep, as peaceful and silent as the tree that died to build it.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk murmurs. “Do you need to go back to the house?”

For that, Taehyung considers slapping him. Instead, he summons the most vicious glare he can manage, and takes no small joy in the way Jeongguk withers back, the sturdy support of his hand on Taehyung’s chest vanishing. Namjoon has the grace to look guilty, even as he shakes his head.

“We have an appointment at the library.” He sounds apologetic, but it’s the best news Taehyung has heard all day. They didn’t have time before the party to go over Namjoon’s apparently extensive itinerary, but now he can hope for a few hours in at least relative silence, surrounded by more ancient history than living courtiers, with more of a purpose than they’ve had since the Imugi left Onjo all those weeks ago.

“That’s perfect,” he says, and hopes — despite Jeongguk’s wince — that he doesn’t sound too desperate.

♖

Jimin feels like he’s drowning, and Namsan is the sea.

Hoseok, at least, is enjoying himself. He started the morning off by snubbing his sister’s welcome reception in the winter gardens, instead calling for a full-spread traditional breakfast. It’s a luxury he hadn’t quite had on the Imugi, with its limited access to fresh meats and certain produce, and one he relishes from bed, Jimin tucked into his side. He feels like a lapdog, allowed to lick sauces off of Hoseok’s fingers as he’s fed bites of food that sear him from tongue to gut. He remembers — being ten, twelve, fifteen. Before he was Hoseok’s whore he was his dog, following so close at his heels that sometimes he ran into him if Hoseok made a sudden stop.

Even that feels like a kind of innocence now, when back then it felt like constant humiliation. Hoseok receives his backlog of mail from a teenaged court runner obviously doing her best to cover up her pimples in front of the prince, and Jimin nearly retches on his own memories. When he was that young, transitioning from terrified child to furious teenager, he didn’t have permission to hide anything from Hoseok. Not his body, not his senses, not his mind.

Princes take care of their things, the Empress had told her son, once, and Hoseok had taken those words to heart. Jimin had been taken care of, Jimin had been pampered and spoiled by him, Jimin had heard every whisper and lewd accusation and laughing speculation until he couldn’t take it anymore and burst.

He takes a sip of tea from Hoseok’s own cup. He stifles a scream at the heat of it, and the nauseating power of the smell of kimchi, and the sound of what feels like every voice on the whole of the planet.

“Ah, it’s good to be home,” Hoseok sighs, and tightens his grip on Jimin’s waist.

Home is the familiar servants who bow as Hoseok sweeps out of his quarters, resplendent in red and gold, the colors of autumn settling over the city like their returning prince. Home is the blessings for grandmothers, the smiles at children, the courtiers and ambassadors who flock to Hoseok’s side and flit away in turns, glittering and useless. Home is the path Hoseok weaves through the city, and the explosion of sensation that forces Jimin out of his own body.

He doesn’t realize he’s stopped guarding Hoseok until they’re in the middle of the market. Jimin comes back to himself with a sick jolt, his stomach turning over itself as Hoseok trades credits for a small paper sack of kiwi fruits. He doesn’t remember how they got there. He doesn’t think he could pick out the whirr of a blaster over the cacophony if he tried. He feels like his ears should be bleeding.

Hoseok doesn’t even spare him a glance. Jimin remembers the last time they walked the city together, back before the tour. The way Hoseok’s way of not looking felt itself like a presence, a comfort, keeping the world the way it was supposed to be.

Today, Hoseok’s turned back feels like abandonment. Failure of a test Jimin doesn’t know why he can’t stop giving, when he knows what the answers will be.

He wonders — whether it’s Hoseok who’s changed, after these long months spinning around his empire, or if it’s Jimin himself.

It’s a question he doesn’t get the answer to. Jimin is sick with paranoia for the rest of the walk, trying and failing to pick threats out of the crowd. He can see every speck of dust in the air, and none of the people. He can smell breakfast on the breath of every stranger they pass, as strong or stronger than the burnt-metal of dormant blasters.

He doesn’t even realize where they are until Hoseok stops under a familiar grove of trees, tall with smooth bark, still green and full of foliage even this late into the fall.

“The library?” Jimin asks. A stupid question, when the building is dead in front of them.

“Mm,” Hoseok replies. Evasive, strangely so. Jimin cranes around, trying to look at Hoseok’s face without uprooting his feet from the ground, and gets only Hoseok’s cheekbone, turned away. The two of them are alone now, the morning too early for the familiar crowds of students and grandmothers and young families; the courtyard rings with unfamiliar silence as Hoseok leads him up the stairs to the first floor entrance.

The Namsan central library was a grand building when it was built. It remains grand, despite the near-millennium of repairs that means hardly a scrap of original structure remains. Jimin read a history of the building, once — he reads anything Yoongi gives him, even when it’s dry enough to put him to sleep. He might have been seventeen or close to it when Yoongi gave him that; it was around the second year Yoongi had worked here, moving up slowly from an aide to a research assistant.

He’d started looking at Jimin more around those years. Back then it felt like a miracle. In retrospect, watching Hoseok pull open the glass-backed panel doors, Jimin names it something closer to pity.

Despite the sinking in Jimin’s stomach as they enter the enclosed foyer, the library feels as serene as it always has. It’s empty, too, a rare enough occurrence that Jimin can’t help but relax into the silence, the stillness, the ambient air muffled by stacks and shelves and endless sheafs of real paper. Compared to the libraries that pepper the university campus across the city, which are mainly digital and always echoing with noise, this building is an oasis.

The only person Jimin can sense in the building has a familiar heartbeat, familiar breaths. He’s in a study upstairs, but must have been waiting for the silent alert from the door — as Jimin breathes in the smell of ink and paper and dust, Yoongi picks his way from his private office to the back staircase. Hoseok’s slippered foot taps nervously against the wood floors, as Jimin steps out of his own shoes and into his own slippers, which he and Hoseok keep stored in a low shelving unit against the far wall, one reserved for employees, high-level members, and visiting royalty.

Yoongi starts speaking before the door even opens.

“Ah, I’m sorry I’m late — oh. Hoseok?” He blinks at the two of them, and Jimin blinks back in confusion. Hoseok only rocks back on his heels and beams, flinging himself in for a hug that Yoongi seems entirely unprepared for.

“Hyung!” Hoseok crows. “Ah, I missed you too much — I’ll never go away again.”

“I missed you too,” Yoongi says, but he’s clearly distracted. He keeps looking toward the door, then squinting back at Hoseok, who’s putting in a great deal of effort to appear like he hasn’t noticed. “Sorry, I was expecting an appointment.”

Hoseok waves him off. He hooks their elbows together and practically walks Yoongi into the library proper. Jimin thinks about not following them, for a moment, because something about the stretch of Hoseok’s smile is just on the wrong side of self-satisfied, but the lure is too great. There’s no place Jimin isn’t supposed to follow Hoseok, and there’s no point trying to break the habit now.

Hoseok fills up the library’s quiet effortlessly. Jimin stops listening to him as they move farther away, instead deciding to slip through the stacks and listen to the building breathe, so that he doesn’t have to hear Hoseok’s recounting of every stop on their trip. He doesn’t know why they’re here, but nothing Hoseok says is going to tell him that, so there’s no point in trying, not when the library is full of the kind of peace Jimin has been dreaming about for months now.

Somewhere in the poetry stacks, Jimin goes still. He’s selected a volume at random, a thin, careworn translation of a pre-empire collection. The print edition is only ninety years old, practically new compared to some of the books in the restricted shelves, but Jimin’s still careful. He’s so busy picking through the first pages, a foreword and a sparse landscape poem, that he doesn’t realize that the stillness in the air has changed — not until Hoseok’s voice, dim and dimming in the distance, snuffs out.

That’s when Jimin notices the weight of a familiar presence, like a pitch-dark stormcloud blotting out the sun. It’s heavy on the edge of his awareness, slinking through the stacks, smoothing the paper under the pads of his fingers, trickling the sounds of the city outside to barely a whisper.

I was expecting an appointment, Yoongi had said when he greeted them, and Jimin knows without a doubt who the appointment was with.

Before he can do anything more than gently close his book, a knock raps sharp against the door of the library foyer, and all of Jimin’s senses flood back to him so suddenly that he almost stumbles backward into a shelf.

“Ah, Seok-ah,” Yoongi says, and it’s like Jimin had never stopped hearing him at all. “I’m sorry, I was trying to tell you — I have an appointment with one of the new cultural ambassadors this morning. We’ve been authorized to work on a paper together.”

Jimin can practically hear Hoseok’s smile.

“Oh, I don’t mind! I won’t be any bother at all!”

Yoongi pauses. Jimin feels the stir of air, what might be Hoseok shooing him toward the door. Jimin’s close enough that he’d be able to hear what comes next even if he were normal — even if his senses had stayed dulled, that stormcloud still hanging over his head.

He can hear — can taste and smell and feel — the three bodies behind the door. Yoongi can’t, Hoseok can’t, but Jimin knows that there’s a hand lifting up to knock again, even as Yoongi reaches for the ornate brass latch to pull the double doors open.

“Min Yoongi-ssi?” Kim Namjoon asks, his robe shifting as he drops his hand. Jimin could stay rooted to the floor, keep himself out of sight, but he can’t help himself. He takes a few silent, careful steps to the side; from here, he can see the back of Yoongi’s head, the set of Hoseok’s jaw. He can see Kim Namjoon in profile, as he steps forward and bows.

“Scholar Kim Namjoon,” Yoongi greets, and offers a bow of his own. “It’s good to see you here, after so long.”

That catches Hoseok’s attention, and not in a good way. Jimin is fascinated against his own will by the intensity of Hoseok’s dislike. He’s never known Hoseok to be petty or vindictive, but here he is, trying to distract Yoongi from an official appointment like a jealous lover.

And oh, that turns something slow and nauseous in Jimin’s stomach. He’s known Hoseok to take other partners, but never for long. A few fleeting nights, maybe, or a quick pull aside while Jimin manages an assignment’s affections. But now that he’s named this in his head he can’t ignore it, can’t unsee the way Hoseok’s pulse jumps at his throat when Kim Namjoon turns to him, bites his lip quick and subtle when Yoongi’s attention shifts back to him.

“Your highness,” Namjoon greets. “I wasn’t aware you’d be supervising my studies here in the capitol.”

Yoongi is visibly taken aback at the chill in Namjoon’s voice, the way the introductions grind to a frigid halt, Hoseok’s answering smile vicious and victorious. The two bodies behind Namjoon, still out of sight, shift audibly.

“Well. Shall I show you the study we’ve prepared for you?”

When Yoongi turns, Jimin presses himself up against the shelf to his back. He doesn’t need to watch the procession — he can imagine Hoseok’s disdain well enough as he gestures Namjoon to follow Yoongi, can picture his absolute lack of acknowledgement of Namjoon’s attendants. Hoseok cuts the two of them off, to shadow Namjoon upstairs as Yoongi promises him a proper tour later, after they’ve gotten him set up, but within seconds all four of them are halfway up the stairs or more.

All four of them are out of sight when Jimin peels himself away from the shelf to follow.

♜

Taehyung starts looking for Jimin the second he sees the prince hovering behind Namjoon’s library contact.

He can feel him, and he can’t see him, and even Jeongguk’s downturned lips and Namjoon’s posturing can’t stop him from craning his neck, trying fruitlessly to see around the endless stacks. He’s never been in a library this big — back on Onjo, the biggest library that housed real books was in the governor’s manor, but he’d never been allowed in as a child.

Those are priceless, Taehyung remembers. He’s forgotten his father’s voice. In his head, it just sounds like his own.

At least in here it’s quiet. The three of them passed through a market to get here, and only the looming deadline of their appointment had drawn Namjoon and Jeongguk away from the stalls bursting with the last harvest of the late summer. There had been hundreds, thousands of people crammed into the mile-long market plaza. There had been no room for Taehyung to breathe.

But even though this library is on the outskirts of the palace district, Taehyung can still feel what seems like everyone he’s ever met. Every person crammed onto this city-planet, every stranger in this new, ancient world.

Min Yoongi is perplexed but eager. The prince, second son of the Jung dynasty, is practically oozing a slick satisfaction that has Taehyung scowling at his back as they file up the ornate wooden stairs. He hasn’t had much interaction with the prince, but every second he spends in his company only reminds him more of the whites of Jimin’s eyes. The desperation he’d always looked at Taehyung with during the tour, even by those last weeks when he’d refused to let himself ask for what Taehyung had started giving freely.

And then, as Taehyung reaches the last handful of steps, he feels it.

It’s like the Tamjingang lapping at his heels. A tsunami cresting above a city. Taehyung can’t see him, can barely stop himself from turning around and flinging himself down the stairs again, but he knows — Jimin is following them up, and he’s so overwhelming that his presence nearly shuts the entire city up, and Taehyung sucks in air through his teeth and tries so hard to restrain himself that he’s sure Jeongguk notices how stiff he is, how he barely sees the hall Min Yoongi leads them down, until he blinks and suddenly there’s a small office, crowded with people he can’t stop feeling even with Jimin at his back.

“My friends — attendants,” Namjoon is introducing them. “I know it’s not customary, but Taehyung and Jeongguk have been integral to some of my research — I have some audio files for you, actually, that I didn’t want to risk sending from home.”

There’s a low desk in the center of the room, open on either end to matching sets of cushions. Yoongi folds himself down onto one just to make space in the room, with Jeongguk and Taehyung hovering just inside the door. There are books in here too, shelved behind protective glass; there’s a small window that lets in the soft sound of wind through the yellow-tinged ginkgo leaves behind the building. Taehyung looks out into the late morning so he doesn’t turn around. So he stops listening for footsteps behind him.

“I’ll look forward to it,” Yoongi assures him. “I figured I’d give you a few minutes to set up — oh. Hi, Jimin-ah.”

Taehyung wasn’t breathing easily before, and he stops now. Yoongi looks fond, the kindest way anyone has looked at Jimin since Taehyung met him. He won’t turn around, but he can feel him now. A dam waiting to burst, not two feet away. Close enough to touch.

“Hello, Yoongi-hyung,” Jimin says, quiet and formal. Taehyung guesses that he’s sketched out a bow, because Yoongi waves it off with a smile.

Beside Taehyung, Jeongguk’s face has settled into a frown. Namjoon is looking pointedly at the books on the opposite wall from the prince. Yoongi glances between the three of them, and his face pinches when he gets to the prince, whose eyebrows raise.

“Namjoon-ssi, have you met Jimin?”

Four weeks, they spent on the Imugi, and it’s Min Yoongi now who makes the introduction.

“Not formally,” Namjoon says. Coughs a little into his sleeve. Bows, not deeply, but a respectful acknowledgement at least. “It’s good to see you again, Jimin-ssi.”

The prince, Taehyung notices, looks more displeased at that than ever.

And then it’s their turn, by unspoken rules of etiquette. Jeongguk capitulates quickly under Namjoon’s stare, turns and cuts an even shorter bow. “Jimin-ssi.”

Taehyung barely has to turn halfway around. Jimin is close, Jimin is practically at his elbow, Jimin is staring at him with wide eyes and a tight mouth and something naked on his face. Taehyung hasn’t seen him in four days, almost five — not since before the last tour stop before the days-long jump back to Namsan, and even that had been fleeting. A touch outside the laundry wing, the sound of churning water even Taehyung could hear overwhelming the softness of Jimin’s gasp.

He hasn’t seen Jimin since they docked. Since he realized what the city was going to do to him.

Taehyung forgets to bow. He forgets who’s watching, and what that means. He hurts, all over and inside of him in a way he never knew existed, so he reaches out an arm and meets Jimin’s eyes and hopes desperately that whatever Jimin can see in his face spells out please.

In some huge, horrible act of mercy, Jimin sees him. Jimin reaches out and clasps his forearm, like brothers or cousins or childhood friends, and in a sharp moment of vertigo, the city vanishes. The vendors, the children, the courtiers all vanish. The prince and Min Yoongi. Namjoon. Jeongguk. It’s just Jimin, who’s confused and exhausted and sad, who’s in pain that Taehyung can’t stop himself from soothing. In a second or less he finds the levels Jimin always asked him for, involuntary. Jimin has taken his pain away in a gesture that lasts two more seconds, three, so Taehyung returns the favor and tries his best to blink away the tears he can feel behind his eyes before anyone else notices.

“Jimin-ah,” he says, as warm and smooth as he can manage. “It’s good to see you.”

Jimin, somehow, has pulled on a smile. Taehyung knows it’s for their audience, yet wants so badly to believe that it’s real.

“Good to see you,” he returns, quiet and earnest, and out of the corner of his eye Taehyung sees the prince’s mouth pucker up like he’s sucked on a lime.

Yoongi, at least, seems pleased by this. He gestures at Namjoon to sit down, and fixes the prince with a look even Taehyung, dulled and finally alone, can’t decipher. The tension in the room is still obvious, but Taehyung doesn’t feel like he’s choking on it any longer. It’s stunning to realize — Jeongguk can’t tell how annoyed the prince is, and Namjoon hasn’t noticed how glad Yoongi is to see Jimin safe, and yet all of them are trading subtle looks and raised eyebrows like they could have hidden anything from Taehyung just seconds earlier.

“Well, I didn’t really intend for our meeting to be this crowded, but — Namjoon-ssi, I’d love to hear about your trip.” Yoongi has pulled himself back into professionalism, forcefully ignoring everyone’s eyebrows as Namjoon settles himself on the opposite side of the desk, cross-legged and slightly more comfortable now that the prince’s attention has been pulled firmly to Taehyung and Jimin, who settles back behind Taehyung’s elbow like he’d never stepped forward to greet him at all.

That also leaves him between Taehyung and Jeongguk. Jeongguk, whose eyes are wide as he looks Taehyung over. It’s almost impossible for Taehyung to hide his relief — he’s only now realizing that his shoulders have been hiked up nearly to his ears for hours. That his palms hurt where his nails had cut into them, that he hasn’t been breathing fully or deeply for twelve hours or more.

He manages a trembling smile in Jeongguk’s direction, and in return gets a flush across Jeongguk’s nose, his gaze dropped, shoulders slumped. Taehyung can’t feel him, which hasn’t yet stopped feeling wrong in a way he can’t settle, but if he had to guess, he’d think Jeongguk is ashamed.

Whatever the prince sees between the three of them, he isn’t happy about it. He’s so much worse at keeping it off his face that Taehyung has to assume he’s never needed to do it much.

At least Namjoon and Yoongi are talking, an easy back-and-forth that Taehyung misses having with him. He’d known about Namjoon’s library contact, of course, but it’s altogether different hearing him speak with a scholar at his level, rather than getting secondhand university lectures in Namjoon’s tiny permanent room back at the inn in Tamjin, or on the banks of the Tamjingang, close enough to the temple that Taehyung could practically see it through the trees. Everything here is dark wood and old brass, rich red paint and clay and polished stone.

“So,” the prince interrupts, and takes the seat next to Yoongi like he belongs there. Elbows braced on the table, one delicate wrist hanging in the air as he leans forward. “Namjoon. I never thought to ask — what are you in our city to research, anyway.”

“Hoseok.” Min Yoongi sounds entirely reproachful, and Taehyung watches Jeongguk’s lips turn up at the corners, viciously satisfied. The prince blinks, all wide-eyed innocence.

“What? The tour was so busy, Yoongi-yah, I hardly had time to talk academics with every passenger we picked up.”

“It’s no trouble at all, really,” Namjoon grates out through his teeth. His back is to the door, but Taehyung knows tension in him like he knows it in Jeongguk. He knows tension in Jimin, too, emerging under the relief and the curiosity and a pervasive shame that crawls down the back of his neck. “I’m a cultural anthropologist, your highness. I study folk religions, mostly from pre-Imperial incorporation. Their art, their history, how they survive or don’t in our present galaxy. Of course, Yoongi-ssi and I have been sharing research for a few years now in music, and he invited me here to do some hands-on work with your archive’s collection of folk songs.”

That’s a pitch Taehyung has heard over and over again, and not a small amount of times were in frantic rehearsals back home. The words sound nearly effortless by now.

There had been a time, for a good portion of their young adulthood, when Taehyung had been bitterly jealous of him. Namjoon was born and raised in Tamjin’s middle class; he had parents to placate every time he vanished out into the woods for hours on end, parents who are still alive — they moved to Amnok while Namjoon was in university, during the years he spent commuting from moon to planet when he needed the peace and guidance of the Twins. To Taehyung and Jeongguk, who have been orphaned nearly since they can remember, it was difficult to swallow.

But Namjoon chose to move home, once he could get his secondary degree via correspondence. He chose a shabby inn in Tamjin’s city center, teaching remotely. He chose to ask the two of them to come, when he had the opportunity to see the world outside their moon and its planet. Taehyung hasn’t resented him in a long, long time.

The prince, at least, looks placated by the answer. Not pleased by any stretch of the imagination, but it at least shuts him up for long enough that Yoongi can bring up Namjoon’s masters thesis, and Namjoon can twist around for a brief second to shoo Taehyung and Jeongguk toward the door.

“Oh, of course,” Yoongi says, interrupting himself. “Jimin-ah, could you show Namjoon-ssi’s friends around the library? Just while I get his access set up in the network.”

Taehyung catches the glare Jeongguk casts over at Jimin, the way Jimin blinks slow and curious at Hoseok. He can feel — Jimin is resigned to Jeongguk’s dislike, but underneath that somewhere there’s a hesitance. The memory of a recoil, that feels almost like the snatching away of a hand from a hot stove.

The prince huffs out permission that Jimin wasn’t actually waiting for as the three of them slip out of the room, crowding the narrow hallway between them as Taehyung pulls the sliding panel door closed behind them. He can hear Yoongi from behind it, Namjoon’s voice low as he answers some question. Jimin is looking away from Jeongguk, down into the library stacks that remind Taehyung so terribly of the empty shelves back home, in the temple he might never see again.

“Sorry,” Jimin says. It’s so quiet Taehyung barely hears him, until he clears his throat and speaks again, slightly louder. “Hoseok isn’t normally like this.”

Jeongguk scoffs. He’s the one still moving, leading them down from the railed hallway and back into the library proper, Jimin trailing just enough that he’s a half-step behind Taehyung. Like the first time Taehyung saw him, shadowing his prince. Like he’s never walked beside anyone at all.

“He’s made that pretty clear to Namjoon,” Taehyung replies. He’s going down the wooden stairs carefully — somehow, the absence of the city is almost as distracting as its presence had been. Jeongguk is already at the bottom, glancing back every few seconds. Taehyung wishes he could feel him, suddenly; he wants to know if Jeongguk is only worked up about the prince and Jimin, or if he’s sick with longing too. If he sees these shelves, carefully tended and curated, and remembers wanting.

“I guess he has.” Taehyung feels Jimin’s confusion in his own stomach.

They’re down the stairs now, in a central hub of reading desks and mounted screens. Jeongguk taps through one, pulling up what looks like the schematics and the catalogue and the lending system.

“We don’t get system access, do we.” He says it flat, like he’s crushed all hope before letting it grow. “Since we’re just staff.”

“Actually,” Jimin starts, slightly more confident. “Since you have travel visas already, it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll talk to Yoongi —”

“Please.” And even though he can’t feel Jeongguk under his ribs like he always used to be able to, Taehyung knows him well enough to reach out a hand that Jeongguk immediately bats away. “I don’t need help from the court whore. If I want anything in this city, I’ll get it myself.”

Taehyung’s chest floods with cold. Taehyung’s tongue curls with shame. Jimin, behind him, takes a single step back.

“Jeongguk,” Taehyung says. Jeongguk’s eyes flick to him, and for a second they soften. But he’s always had a pit of jealousy that Taehyung could never touch. Jeongguk has always wanted more than Taehyung ever did, and even as Taehyung stands in front of him with Jimin’s bile creeping up his throat, he knows that whatever they might have said to each other before landing — the promises they made to each other, the pact holding them together — won’t extend to Jimin. Not now. Maybe not ever, Taehyung thinks, and now the bile is entirely his own.

“No need for a tour,” Jeongguk spits. “We can take care of ourselves, Jimin-ssi.”

That’s not true, Taehyung wants to tell him. But Jeongguk is watching him, and Taehyung can feel Jimin’s attention drawn away, to a door opening upstairs, delicate footsteps on the walkway.

“I’ll see you soon, Yoongi-hyung!” Hoseok trills as he descends. “After all, I still need to return all those books you sent us off with.”

That, clearly, is meant for Namjoon’s benefit. At the bottom of the stairs, where Jimin is still frozen, the prince leans in. Pecks a kiss to Jimin’s cheek. Laces his fingers with Jimin’s own to pull him forward, always one step ahead, past where Jeongguk is waiting for Taehyung with that dark gleam in his eye. The farther away Jimin gets, the more Taehyung can feel it — Jeongguk’s satisfaction, dark and smug. Look, Taehyung can almost hear him say. He’s not yours. He never will be.

The door clatters behind the prince and his sentinel, and Taehyung thinks about the way Jimin followed him. Limp, obedient, unthinking.

“Come on, hyung,” Jeongguk says. “Let’s stick together. Remember?”

“Yeah,” Taehyung rasps. “Yeah, I remember.”

The city, as cavernous and overwhelming as Crilia’s ice caves, is already creeping back in.

♖

Hoseok doesn’t speak to Jimin again until evening. Their day, much as he might have tried to avoid it, is entirely packed — from the library, Hoseok drags Jimin to lunch with a handful of his closer friends, and then back out into the city for an afternoon concert, and then to a welcome reception for the few hundred freshman senators settling in for their first session. And at each event, during each walk or tram ride to their next destination, Hoseok doesn’t even give Jimin a backwards glance.

It should sting. And it does, of course, but that almost fades into the background as Jimin follows him on autopilot. As he strains himself to pick through the noises of the crowds, still quiet enough by the evening that his head doesn’t feel like it’s about to split like the skin of an overripe mango.

Hoseok links arms with his father, the prince consort semi-retired and loathe to leave the inner palace, on their way into the reception, and Jimin takes in a deep breath. He fortifies himself against the endless pricks of a political event, with Taehyung’s now-familiar influence wrapped around him like the echo of a hug. Like a pair of gloves slipped over freezing hands.

It should sting. The smell of the ballroom hits Jimin in the face as the princes’ entrance is announced; it’s not as bad as it could be, but the onslaught of information still makes Jimin want to scream.

Three months ago, Hoseok would have soothed him before the event. Three months ago, it would have worked when he tried.

Today, Jimin keeps to the edges of the room like he’s been trained to, the room already full of royal guards. He stays close enough to Hoseok that he could sprint through the crowd and take a blaster shot for him if he had to. He stays far enough away that he doesn’t have to think about how by now, Hoseok has usually tossed a wink or an exaggerated eye roll his way.

Three months ago, Jimin didn’t have Taehyung. And Taehyung didn’t have him.

That’s what lingers in his mind instead of Hoseok’s negligence. Taehyung’s face, his eyes wide, his whole body begging Jimin to reach out and touch. The naked desperation of his arm thrust out.

Jimin-ah, he’d said. Warm, for anyone who couldn’t hear the pounding of his heart in his chest.

And then, when Jimin had touched him, he’d nearly collapsed.

You hurt him. That’s what Kim Namjoon’s other attendant had hissed in his ear. But for the first time, Jimin lets himself think — maybe that’s not the truth. He hadn’t known what Taehyung was reaching out for, but he laid himself open. He didn’t resist the way Taehyung adjusted him, and he’d done his best to imagine soothing whatever put the shadows under Taehyung’s eyes, the panic into his pulse. And it worked. It worked.

“Jimin-ssi!” Someone says, and Jimin blinks himself back to the ballroom and sees — the senator from Onjo. Kim Seokjin.

“Senator,” he responds back, hopefully as relaxed as he should be.

It’s rare enough that anyone but former assignments notices him at events like these, and rarer still for anyone to approach him. The Empress had promised him a night with Seokjin, he remembers as they exchange pleasantries. Kim Seokjin might be a kind man, a decent man, even, but he’s still a senator. He’s still as susceptible as anyone to a royal reward, an obvious power play in the form of a night of pleasant, decorative company.

“Not working this afternoon?” Seokjin asks, casual as anything, and that’s enough to solidify Jimin’s opinion of him.

“Not like that,” he answers. He smiles tight and unamused — fitting, considering the tension creeping back into his shoulders as the room gets louder. He’s not on assignment, not really, but the instinct for overhearing gets the better of him more often than not. Not too far away, Hoseok is kissing a senator they met on tour on her cheek. Just past that, a junior senator is asking his senior the best way to win alliances in the foreign trade committee.

Seokjin, mercifully, lets him go with little else. Jimin fades back into nothingness, into the glitter of the ballroom and the sparkle of jewelry, into the silent nothing and no one he’s always expected to become, whether he’s on a stranger’s arm or not.

And then it’s over, and Hoseok joins his mother for a private dinner in her apartments, and Jimin stands guard outside the door to their dining room and pretends it doesn’t hurt more in less time than it used to when Taehyung soothed him. It reminds him of the Empress and her training, standing outside that white padded room with displeasure creasing her mouth every time Jimin failed to meet her impossible standards.

He taps out a report to her from the reception before he joins Hoseok in bed that night. It’s habit by now, but even Jimin has to admit that he can feel something slipping — can feel that endearing himself even a little more to the Empress, to Hoseok, might make a difference in how long he has to live.

That’s what he’s been avoiding remembering. That when Nara and Seohee and Yejun outlived their usefulness, they had died. Horribly and painfully, and there’s a part of Jimin that never wants to know if the stories he’d been told — that all their deaths were entirely self-inflicted — had more than a shred of truth to them.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok calls from the bedroom, sharp and insistent. “Come on.”

Jimin sends the report. He powers down his tablet and leaves it on a low table in the sitting room, the tray of dinner Hoseok had summoned for him entirely ignored. If he eats now, he might throw it up on Hoseok the second he reaches out a hand to touch.

Hoseok is waiting, like the prince he is, in a silk robe on top of his covers. Jimin stops dead in the doorway, pinned by Hoseok’s hooded stare; his skin crawls as Hoseok looks him up and down, inspecting him like he never used to even after assignments that left Jimin visibly marked, bruised, fucked.

“Come here,” Hoseok insists, and Jimin wouldn’t know how to refuse if he tried.

So he doesn’t try. He pads over to the bed, staring Hoseok down, refusing to bow his neck or strip off his clothes. He does kneel, when Hoseok tugs his lips into frustrated displeasure and jerks his chin toward the ground.

“What’s gotten into you lately?” It’s almost a whispered question, as Hoseok reaches out to cup Jimin’s cheek. They’re practically eye-to-eye, Hoseok cross-legged up on the slightly elevated bed, Jimin breathing through the familiar pressure on his knees. “You never used to be like this.”

Like this. Refusing to lean his head into Hoseok’s hand. Looking at him as he touches, the hand on his skin no longer lighting up with electric waves of relief.

I don’t need you anymore, Jimin imagines himself saying, and feels so nauseous at the idea that he does have to close his eyes then.

“How do you even know those people, hm?” Hoseok is still talking. He gets up on his own knees, pulls Jimin in closer, hands wandering down to slip under the collar of Jimin’s jeogori, trying to tug it down and away as his nose presses up against Jimin’s jaw. “You’re not supposed to wander, Jimin-ah — come on, come to bed.”

He fists his delicate hand in Jimin’s shirt and pulls.

Jimin thinks about following, about saying yes like he’s said yes to everything Hoseok’s ever asked of him, and all of a sudden he can’t stand it anymore. All of a sudden, the thought of rolling over and showing his belly and pretending Hoseok’s touch doesn’t feel the same as everyone else’s fills him up with self-loathing, a hot, ugly oil slick burning up his insides.

“No,” he says. As if in a dream. And Hoseok stills, and his hand goes slack, and that’s all Jimin needs to reach out with both hands and push him carefully away.

“What?”

The worst part is, Hoseok doesn’t even sound angry. The mask of upset has slipped from his face, and when Jimin looks up at him, he only sees hurt. He sees his friend, the person who kept him alive for nearly twenty years, wondering why Jimin is pushing him away.

“I can’t do this,” Jimin tells him. “I can’t tonight, hyung. Don’t make me.”

Hoseok’s mouth gapes open. His hands have fallen limp into his lap, his perfect royal posture crumpled into himself. Jimin almost wants him to reach out again just so he can feel it one more time, the intoxicating wrongness of denying Hoseok something he wants. But he doesn’t — he sits there, confused and oddly obedient, while Jimin tries to shove down on the anger and shame and sadness burning in his chest.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok says. Quiet, careful. “Have I done something wrong?”

Jimin can’t look at him and answer that. Hoseok is bathed in the gold glow of the floor lights, diffused and soft; his robe gapes open to show the smooth skin of his chest, pale from months on tour instead of in Namsan’s summer sun; he’s always been beautiful, but sometimes Jimin can’t help but look at him and stop breathing with the thought that this is the person he’s supposed to walk behind for the rest of his life. And that’s always been something he knows to be true — that it will be the rest of his life, and not Hoseok’s, because Hoseok has always been destined to outlive him.

“No,” Jimin rasps out. He looks away, swallows against his dry throat. He wants to scream, and instead only blinks when Hoseok lifts a hand, reaches out, and then pulls away.

“Then why are you so angry?”

Jimin’s eyes snap back up. It’s not a question of if. Hoseok, somehow, already knows.

And it’s the certainty in Hoseok’s eyes that propels him up — that shoves Jimin backwards as surely as his hands on Hoseok’s chest, tripping up and toward the door with heat stinging in his eyes.

“Jimin!” Hoseok is calling after him. Jimin can hear his pulse, high and panicked. Jimin can feel the shifting of the air as he stands, as he almost follows. He can feel the silence as he slams the slider closed behind him, as Hoseok chooses not to follow.

That’s a promise as good as any that if Jimin stays here, sleeps on a cushion or a duvet in the sitting room, Hoseok will let him be. A servant will wake Jimin up in the morning and he’ll crawl back to Hoseok’s room to change and wash off the stench of today, and then he’ll go back to being nothing but a festering, resentful shadow, and Hoseok will know. The royal quarters have often seemed claustrophobic, pressing in on him at the center of a city Jimin knows better than he knows himself, and he can feel that pressure in his chest, his head, the very tips of his fingers as he makes his way to Hoseok’s foyer. As he crams on shoes, and wraps a cloak around himself that was Hoseok’s for longer than it’ll ever be his.

And then, without looking back at the door he knows Hoseok is still standing motionless behind, Jimin leaves.

♖

The city is cold. Not quiet — never quiet, with millions of people and businesses and things to do at every hour of the day — but cold. Hoseok only rarely comes out this late, and even after the cold of a handful of tour planets, Jimin finds himself taken aback at the frigid wind blowing down off the mountain peaks and through the city streets.

No one who sees him gives him a second look. The palace is always busy in some way or another, and in between staff and resident members of court Jimin spots several parties of staggeringly drunk senators, likely just wandering home from the reception’s myriad afterparties. Kim Seokjin isn’t one of them, and the others have little reason to recognize him, so Jimin only skirts around those groups instead of pausing to hide. He doesn’t know where he’s going, only a vague sense of out that so far is taking him toward one of the clustered hanok villages on the outskirts of the palace. This one borders a park that, as far as Jimin knows, doesn’t actually end in the city — it stretches up and through the foothills and the mountains themselves, until just past the Jangsan peak, where it transitions into private estates and resorts.

He doesn’t make it to the forest, though. There’s a guarded gate that separates the neighborhood from the more secure inner palace, one that Jimin breezes through without a second glance. He won’t have trouble getting in later, either; a tap of his credit stick can get him anywhere in the city that Hoseok can go.

But as Jimin follows the stone wall, ancient at its base where it’s held for hundreds of years or more, he realizes that someone is following him.

It’s hard to tell at first, because without Hoseok to guard he’s focused more on ignoring the city’s onslaught of sensory noise than on scanning his surroundings. But soon enough it becomes obvious — erratic patterns of air as they try sticking to the shadows, the occasional too-loud breath as they try to time them with the gusts of wind that howl down the narrow neighborhood walkways. Jimin is almost certain he knows who it is by the time his pursuer gets comfortable, as he lets him get comfortable. For a block, another, and then —

Jimin stops dead, spins around, and has Jeon Jeongguk pressed up against the stone wall with a forearm to his throat before Jeongguk even has time to register he’s been caught.

“What are you doing?” Jimin hisses, and gets a knee to his gut in response. It makes him wheeze, his diaphragm caught in the blow, but he’s been trained for worse hits than that. He lets Jeongguk tire himself out fighting, as he realizes that Jimin’s strength is far past his own. That Jimin’s strength is, and always has been, just on the wrong end of too much to be natural.

It’s what the Empress had been most excited for, after all. That whatever she and her doctor had done to the four of them, it had made them just slightly faster, stronger, and more durable than her best-trained soldiers.

“Fuck you,” Jeongguk spits. The lighting in these neighborhoods is all low to the ground, embedded sparsely in walkways; the glow from below that lights his jaw is too similar to the bedroom Jimin just left. “Fuck you, let me go!”

“Why were you following me?” Jimin grits out instead. “What are you doing here?”

Jeongguk thrashes again; Jimin presses harder.

“None of your business,” Jeongguk says. And then — pointed, angry, ugly: “Whore.”

And Jimin laughs in his face. It feels like it tears his throat on the way out, hanging in the inches between them as Jeongguk’s eyes go wide.

“You think you’re the first person to call me that?”

It comes out so raw that Jimin almost doesn’t believe it’s his own voice. He’s never heard himself sound like this — the closest he can remember is after an endurance training, where his throat was sore from screaming, but even then he’d been begging, crying, trying to accept Hoseok’s comfort. Now he just sounds cruel.

“I —” He cuts off whatever Jeongguk might be trying to say.

“No,” Jimin says, trembling with what he knows, now, is anger. “I don’t care what you want to call me. Welcome to court — everyone knows what I am. You’re not special. Why are you following me.”

Jeongguk gasps. Jimin waits for an answer, and then realizes — his arm, braced over Jeongguk’s collarbone, is pressing too hard.

He steps back, and Jeongguk collapses against the wall. He catches himself halfway down, crouching, coughing, his hand pressed to his throat. Jimin is still trembling. His knees ache, though he’s knelt for Hoseok for longer before. All he can do is watch as Jeongguk pulls himself together, standing up and bracing himself up against the wall, glaring at Jimin through bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes.

“I wasn’t going to,” Jeongguk finally says. “Fuck, I was just looking for a way over the wall.”

It doesn’t sound very convincing, but Jimin doesn’t know what of that is Jeongguk’s obvious seething anger, and what is the way his voice rasps as he finishes regaining his breath.

“You’d trip a dozen alarms before you got to the top,” Jimin tells him. “If you’re going to snoop around, don’t wait until your curfew locks you out.”

He doesn’t really care what Jeongguk might have been looking for. Or — he does, but he can’t make himself try to find out. Jeongguk scuffs his foot against the cobblestones, side-eying a way out of Jimin’s space. Jimin steps forward again, not quite a threat, and Jeongguk presses himself back up against the wall.

“You lied to me,” Jimin says, when it’s clear Jeongguk isn’t going to crack.

“Oh yeah?” Jeongguk keeps looking down a street to the south. Where he might have come from, Jimin figures. “About what?”

“About Taehyung.”

That, clearly, gets Jeongguk’s attention. He looks back at Jimin, finally back in control of his breathing, though Jimin can see his throat flushed red at the base, where he had pushed. Even with Jimin closing in, even with his exits cut off, there’s something in his eyes that goes hard when Jimin says the name.

“I didn’t —”

Jimin presses forward. He lets his body be a threat. The Empress has never let him carry a weapon, wary most likely of Jimin turning it on himself without her permission, but he doesn’t need one now. Jeongguk grits his teeth and looks again to the street that runs south, fingers tapping an anxious rhythm against the stone behind him.

“You told me I was hurting him.” It clogs Jimin’s throat — the shame that piled up on the tour every time Taehyung reached out for him. The memory of Jeongguk’s voice hissing in his ear stopping him from asking, overlapping with the Empress’s training and Hoseok’s cloying concern and the knowledge that somehow, if anyone found out what Taehyung could do for him, it would end with both of them silenced, permanently, in the name of the empire.

“That wasn’t a lie,” Jeongguk says, and — these are cues Jimin knows. The jump in his pulse. The slight twitch of his head. The flick of his eyes to the north, not the south. Jimin hadn’t been listening for a lie in the ballroom on Obara, too preoccupied with keeping his head straight in between groping hands and listening through newly-dulled senses for any secret to hold onto. But now he can see it, plain as day. And he laughs, breathless and cruel.

“That’s not what I saw today.” Jeongguk’s lip curls. Jimin doesn’t care. “Tell me the truth, Jeongguk-ssi. I was helping.”

Jeongguk spits between Jimin’s feet.

“You don’t deserve him.” His hand comes up, wrapping around the leather cord of his necklace. “Fine, you were helping. But he was never this bad before he met you.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Jimin has softened, but Jeongguk’s voice is only getting more brittle as he laughs, a sharp, unhappy thing.

“You don’t know anything, do you,” he says, and takes a step forward. Jimin mirrors him, stepping back. He isn’t worried. He could see any swing coming before Jeongguk’s hand managed to make a fist; he could stop Jeongguk from running before he even took a step. “I don’t know how they made you, but it’s wrong. You make me sick. And you’re the one he goes to when he needs help, when I should have —”

And then he stops. Jimin stops with him, more curious now than angry. Taehyung has almost-said so many things, but never quite as blatant as this.

“You should have...” Jimin trails off. He thinks — there has always been something underneath Jeongguk’s anger. “You should have what? Been like me?”

Jeongguk’s silence rings like a bell in between them. It won’t even matter if he tries to lie. But he tips his chin up, looking down at Jimin even further.

“Yes,” he spits out. “I should.”

Jimin laughs. It’s almost incredulous, as the weight of the city presses in on him, as he can barely stop himself from screaming every second of every day from the torture of it.

“You don’t want this.” And then, because Jeongguk still looks so fucking sure of himself, he leans in close, to put his lips by Jeongguk’s ear. “Why do you think I’m their whore, hm?”

And then, before Jeongguk can do anything more than suck in a sharp breath, Jimin leaves. He turns around entirely, the forest forgotten, and walks as fast as he can until he passes through the gate to the palace, a single tap of his cache against the sensor sliding them open. He can still hear Jeongguk, blocks away by now, breathing heavy as he starts to make his way south.

When the gate closes behind him, wrought iron and brass slamming together with a vibration Jimin feels down to his bones, he runs.

♜

Over the next days, Taehyung begins to understand what exactly it is that Namjoon signed up for as an ambassador. When Namjoon received the invitation, the formal sign-off from the governor, he’d spent untold evenings in between teaching classes and grading papers waxing to the two of them about what Namsan would give him. Hours of uninterrupted archival research, he’d said, more than once. Taehyung remembers it vividly — at least one of those instances, he’d been bribed to the outskirts of the city with the promise of street food, and he’d had his mouth stuffed too full of kkwabaeggi to answer.

Those fabled hours of archival research are, disappointingly, few and far between. Their second day on Namsan, Namjoon wakes the two of them up at dawn to make it to the main library with enough time to get his office established, before he’s summoned to a formal ambassadorial initiation conference, and then whisked off alone to tour the university on the other side of the city.

The day after that is just as busy. Taehyung gets the library, the work, the quiet in snatches that feel like an ungodly tease. Until he feels like his head is going to burst from the noise and the people, until Namjoon catches him by the elbow as he sways in the aftermath of the most recent luncheon or consultation or ceremony.

“Jeongguk-ah,” Namjoon says, though he’s looking at Taehyung as if trying to pin him in place. “Can I leave you here while I take Taehyungie to the library?”

Taehyung knows, vaguely, that Jeongguk has been nosing around the city. He vanishes sometimes, before or after meals, during events that leave Taehyung at Namjoon’s reluctant beck and call. Taehyung isn’t sure what he’s looking for, but mostly because he can’t make himself crawl out of bed when they’re home for long enough to pay attention to their whispered conversations.

The hanok is nice, but it’s not home. It’s barely even a refuge, when it’s surrounded in a peaceful little neighborhood by dozens of other residents, from other newcomers to established city employees with children to a particularly effusive group of young musicians occupying a house much too small for the size of their cohort. There have been hours, in the ebb and flow of the city, that make the hanok feel more like a prison than the Imugi, one that he walked into willingly.

“Please,” he says, and grasps Namjoon’s wrist, and barely waits for Jeongguk to agree.

Whatever it is that Namjoon might have had scheduled for the rest of the afternoon, he doesn’t go. He silences the ping of an alert from the tablet in his bag, and under the din of the city Taehyung can feel just how excited he is at the prospect of ignoring a summons in favor of what he actually came to the city to pursue. It’s long past overdue, Taehyung thinks, but he’ll take anything he can get.

And the library, as always, is blissfully peaceful. Taehyung isn’t sure what it is — he feels superstitious, thinking of the layers and layers of fine paper as buffers from the world, but it’s the closest explanation to the feeling he gets every time he even approaches on the eucalyptus-lined path, as he watches the ginkgos sway in surrounding courtyards, every day growing closer to shuddering off their leaves.

The building is just busy enough that no librarian meets them at the door, but in truth they no longer need it. Namjoon has a key — old-fashioned and heavy — that unlocks the panel door to the staircase that leads them up and into the lofted hallway, open to the stacks down below, and another that lets them into his office, and Taehyung takes his familiar seat at Namjoon’s side and leans his head on his shoulder, just so he doesn’t have to hold it up any longer.

“You can sleep, if you want,” Namjoon says, barely more than a whisper. “I know you haven’t been.”

How he knows, Taehyung isn’t sure. The servants’ quarters in Namjoon’s hanok are on the opposite side of the open center courtyard from the house proper, to the point where he can’t hear anything Namjoon does at the front. But Namjoon has known Taehyung for nearly as long as Jeongguk, and so maybe he doesn’t need to be able to see the way Taehyung shifts restless in bed, overwhelmed and exhausted.

“Thanks,” he says, instead of arguing. Closes his eyes, not to sleep exactly, but to doze as Namjoon pieces through research. He has several books stacked carefully on his desk, ancient ones from part of the library Yoongi had to escort them through, and as Taehyung drifts he listens to the quiet flip of pages, the scratch of Namjoon’s pen as he takes notes.

He drifts until he feels curiosity poking outside the door, and sits up in just enough time to hear the gentle rap that announces Min Yoongi’s presence.

“Namjoon-ssi!” He says, exclaimed but still quiet. “I didn’t expect you this afternoon.”

He doesn’t sound unhappy. Taehyung likes Yoongi more than most everyone he’s met in the last few months, and the solace of the library is only part of it.

“Taehyung and I decided to play hooky,” Namjoon explains with a smile. “I have to say, I’m much happier here.”

That gets him a laugh from Yoongi, and the door slides shut as Namjoon gestures for him to join them on the opposite side of the desk.

“The politics is no fun. I’ve never sponsored an ambassador before, or else I would have warned you about all the hoops.”

“Never?” Namjoon carefully marks his place in his book, sets it aside, settles his elbows on the desk. “I’m flattered, Yoongi-ssi.”

Taehyung isn’t exactly a research assistant, but he has his own stack of notes that he shifts through as Namjoon and Yoongi talk. They’ve got a comfortable rapport already, especially now that the prince isn’t hanging around with a chip the size of the mountain range on his shoulder, and it’s just nice to hear the two of them talk — Namjoon, open and inquisitive, Yoongi meeting him at every step. Namjoon’s talking now about his submission process for the ambassadorship, about how he was warned, as a scholar from such a recently incorporated system, that his acceptance was a near impossibility.

“Actually —” Yoongi cuts himself off, and Taehyung lifts his head at the spike of uncertainty from across the table. Yoongi’s lips press together as he looks between the two of them; Taehyung, suddenly at attention, presses his knee to Namjoon’s underneath the table.

The door is closed. Taehyung can feel the faint murmur of the library patrons, the occupants of the few other offices in this section of the building, but nothing that disrupts the clarity of Yoongi’s concern, his interest, his caution.

“I noticed, Namjoon-ssi, that you haven’t presented any research on your home moon.”

That has Namjoon sitting up straight, flaring with alarm.

“Sorry, I don’t — I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Amnok’s monasteries, I thought you knew.”

Yoongi shakes his head. Taehyung is ready to grab Namjoon’s arm, to get them out as soon as possible, but Yoongi isn’t projecting anything that makes him think he needs to.

“Not that your research isn’t entirely fascinating, but... I hope you’ll forgive me if I say that part of the reason I sponsored you was because of an interest in Onjo in particular.”

“Scholar Min,” Namjoon says, low and cold, dipping back into rigid formality. “Please tell me plainly — why.”

Yoongi looks between the two of them. Taehyung’s heart is racing, almost drowning out the other bodies in the building, almost shutting down his awareness of the city beyond. Yoongi hesitates, but Taehyung feels his moment of commitment before he even opens his mouth again.

“Many years ago, the library was willed the research of a former expert in the psychological field. I was just an aide in the archives, so I was tasked with cataloguing and filing all his papers. It was — there was a file, in his home, that had been destroyed. Burnt, most of it, but the remains had been preserved and stored. From what I gathered, it was an experiment log of sorts. Authorized by someone very powerful in the palace.”

Yoongi speaks quickly, quietly, carefully. Taehyung has to lean forward to hear him, the three of them with their heads bowed together as if in conspiracy.

“The log mentioned a partially recovered instructional text from Onjo,” Yoongi says, and Taehyung swallows down on the retch that shoves sudden, acidic bile into his throat.

In the interminable days between when Taehyung’s family was massacred and when he woke up fully in the arms of the Twins, the Empire had taken Onjo. Not by force — Amnok had already agreed to incorporation, and the resistance Taehyung’s father put up as Onjo’s governor never would have changed that — but by politics. And the Twins, who had been dying by inches and miles for a generation, made the decision that no far-reaching empire would ever claim Bo and Seonmul for their own, and drowned the temple’s entire library in the Tamjingang.

Except Taehyung listens as Min Yoongi explains the passage in detail, and realizes — one page, just one page, had survived. Had made its way into someone’s hand who traded it to the empire for something, money or power or a ticket off their desolate little moon, and to this imperial scholar.

“Who was it,” Taehyung hears himself say, as if from a great distance. Yoongi looks at him like he’d forgotten Taehyung was there, eyes wide, mouth screwed up in confusion.

“Sorry?”

“The experiment,” Taehyung clarifies. Even as he asks, he knows what the answer will be. “Who was it on?”

Yoongi knows he knows. That much is certain too, as he softens, as he looks down at the table and traces a finger along the grain of the dark wood.

“Ah,” he says. “That.”

“Oh,” Namjoon says, as he comes to the conclusion that makes Taehyung almost as nauseous as the fact of a sacred text making its way to Namsan. “Jimin.”

Yoongi nods.

“Not just him.” Taehyung blinks hard, trying to drive away tears that threaten. “He said — there were others too, right?”

“I thought so,” Yoongi says. He shrugs, looks up from the table to meet Taehyung’s eye. “Like I said, the file was nearly all gone. There were a few fragments, and a lot of ash, just enough to piece together. The text from Onjo was religious. When I invited you here, I thought — well. Maybe you’d know of a way to help him.”

Taehyung presses his palms to his eyes. He almost wishes Jeongguk were here, so that he could turn to him and say look, I told you. He wants to say something, but he thinks if he opens his mouth he might scream.

“Taehyung,” Namjoon says. “Can I —?”

Can I tell him. Taehyung rocks his head, not a no but a soothing motion, trying to work the anger and frustration and sadness out of his throat.

“Fine,” he pushes out, teeth gritted, jaw locked. And he listens as Namjoon sketches out the most basic of their history. Taehyung and Jeongguk, Seonmul and Bo. The drowning of the texts. The forgotten temple, the reason Taehyung and Jeongguk had been sent from their home. The mission, that Taehyung can admit to himself now was just a pretense for the elders to force them back into the world.

You’re wasting your life here, Sister Moon had told him once, not too long ago. She was the youngest of them, just past seventy years old when they set off for the Imugi. She was the one who taught Taehyung most of what he knows now.

There had been something like an extinction event for the Twins. Nearly fifty years ago, they’d stopped finding guides and sentinels in the city, in the scattered mining villages. The sentinels who came to them for induction died, either during the ceremony or in the weeks after. The most bitter of the elders blamed the corrupting influence of imperial trade. Sister Moon had just shaken her head when Taehyung asked what she thought, as one of the last to join before Taehyung and Jeongguk and Namjoon wound their separate ways to the temple.

Maybe it was time, she told him. Maybe we aren’t needed any longer.

He blinks back into the conversation with Namjoon’s hand bracing against the back of his neck.

“But this order,” Yoongi is asking. “Is it only spiritual? Because Jimin...”

He trails off. Taehyung makes a noise low in his throat, encouraging. He needs to know what Yoongi knows, before he lets Namjoon tell him the truth of the Twins, past the fact of their mythology.

“He can do things,” Yoongi finally admits. “See and hear more than what’s normal. He’s stronger, and faster. I’ve known Hoseok since we were kids, back in primary school. And then one day, Jimin was just there, following behind him, and he’s saved Hoseok’s life so many times. The results of the experiment were all ash, but I know Jimin. And I know it hurts him.”

Taehyung nods. His throat hurts, dry and ragged like he has been screaming.

“I almost messaged you about this before you even left Onjo, because I wasn’t sure Jimin would survive the tour.”

Taehyung laughs. It comes out of him like a sob, and it takes Yoongi back enough that he leans away, Namjoon’s hand rubbing against Taehyung’s back.

“Taehyung-ah,” Namjoon says. He sounds so sad. Like for the first time he understands why Taehyung is different now, like something in the conversation has shown him the difference between himself and Jimin. Taehyung doesn’t know how a Namsan psychologist managed to find and induce four sentinels, but from the scraps Jimin had shared, he knows the process was more like torture. And the results — the results were inhumane.

“I tried to tell you,” he says, but he doesn’t know how true that is, if Namjoon is this devastated now.

“I don’t understand,” Yoongi says. He doesn’t ask, not really, but Taehyung seizes the chance at a distraction. He takes in a deep, rattling breath, and tries to remember the silence Jimin had given him just a few days ago, complete and perfect and overwhelming.

Some of the elders, as their numbers dwindled, gave into moments of fear in the face of oblivion. Brother Yeon recited the epic to them in snippets, though more of the poem now is lost than will ever be known again. Sister Shin gave him prayers to Seonmul. And Sister Choi, on her deathbed, had given him a vow.

I am hers, she’d whispered. And she is mine.

He doesn’t know if it’s a true vow, or something from her memory that he’s mythologized in the decade since her passing. But Taehyung thinks of it now, as he prepares to tell Yoongi the truth and holds onto it.

Namjoon understands. Namjoon, like Taehyung, has found what’s his, even if he resents Hoseok as much as Taehyung is desperate for Jimin.

“I can help him,” Taehyung says. And as he says it, he makes himself a promise he was too scared on the journey to even think to himself. Because even if the imperial scholar or some high-ranking royal official had bastardized and poisoned the process, Jimin is his. Jimin is theirs, Jimin was reborn of the Twins even if he’s never heard their names.

I will help him, Taehyung promises. And maybe, even if the Twins die with him, that will be enough.

♖

When Jimin gets summoned by the Empress three days before the biannual Governors’ Ball, it’s almost a relief. It’s been less than a week since they disembarked from the tour, but he’s used to seeing her at least every five or six days; in recent years, when the senate is in session and the political and social machines of Namsan are alive and churning, he’s spent more time on assignments’ arms than shadowing Hoseok. This ball, it seems, will be no different.

“I want you with Kim Seokjin,” she says, brusque and pointed, which Jimin knows means that Seokjin has already received notice. He’s never asked what that notice entails, what the formal phrasing of being offered the prince’s pet might be. “Keep an ear out, of course, but I’d like to make sure that Senator Kim is entirely trustworthy.”

Jimin has done his research by now. Onjo and Amnok aren’t the most recent incorporations of the Empire, with over fifteen years of peaceful citizenship behind them, but before formal annexation, Onjo had been threatening to secede from Amnok — and reject incorporation — through military action if necessary. The mining barons had been wooed not long after the secessionist governor died, and the meager rebellion crumbled fast, but he knows that the Empress never leaves a stone unturned. Kim Seokjin is young, true, but not young enough to have been uninvolved as a young teenager or unbiased by his social connections; and, therefore, not free of suspicion.

Jimin is used to this role. He, as the Empress is so fond of reminding him, is good at the jobs she gives him. Jimin has been the end of political careers before, and depending on what he learns from Kim Seokjin at the end of the week, he might add another to his list.

It’s not up to him whether or not Seokjin deserves it. It doesn’t matter that Seokjin was nicer to him than anyone else on the tour.

“Of course, Empress,” he murmurs. Looks not at her eyes but at the lines around her mouth, her face worn into perpetual severity. He doesn’t know that he’s ever seen her smile more than the pursed, mirthless little thing he’s seen whenever he unearths something particularly nasty. But he’s also never seen her like Hoseok has — as a mother instead of monarch, behind closed, private doors. The only true privacy in the empire itself, Jimin thinks on his worse days.

He makes his way back to Hoseok, who’s still in a briefing with palace staff about charitable donations to pursue during the upcoming legislative session. It’s been ongoing for an hour now, because Hoseok is indecisive and the staff have to get through every charity that’s submitted a request to the prince for funding. They get three opportunities a year, and Jimin has fallen asleep during most of these particular briefings in the past.

“Alright,” Hoseok says, after an interminable age that Jimin spends trying not to go cross-eyed with boredom. “So we’re in agreement?”

The officials, of course, defer to him. Hoseok leads Jimin from the office and winds his way back toward the inner palace, through the halls of bureaucracy, accepting bows and greetings at every intersection.

“An assignment?” He asks Jimin, when they hit an empty pathway lined with camphor trees and zodiac statues.

“Yes,” he answers. Quiet. Respectful.

They haven’t talked. Jimin arrived back in Hoseok’s rooms in the dead of night after he fled, and couldn’t decide whether or not to crawl into his bed and his sleeping arms, and so he’d perched for hours on a comfortable but wrong sofa in the sitting room, not-sleeping until he heard their morning breakfast delivery from half the palace away and shook Hoseok awake. Jimin watched Hoseok take in his red-rimmed eyes and his rumpled clothing and his trembling hands, and he’d let Hoseok come to his own conclusions and went to wash his face before the servants let themselves in.

And so nothing changed. Jimin doesn’t pull away when Hoseok reaches for him, though since then he’s gotten nothing more than a kiss on the cheek and their hands wrapped around each other in the dark, working off a day of Hoseok’s tension, his breath heavy against Jimin’s neck, his ear, his jaw.

Hoseok makes a low noise of acknowledgement. And then he keeps moving, not even stopping to look back as Jimin picks up speed to keep just behind him, closer since they’re alone, a half-step to his left.

Three days later, with Hoseok still reluctant to even look him in the eye, Jimin preps himself for his assignment.

He knows Hoseok doesn’t like watching this part. The part where Jimin collects a new tailored set of traditional robes, and traces dark liner around his eyes, and smudges gloss onto his lips in his own tiny closet of a washroom. The part where he cleans himself out and stretches himself open. The part where he molds himself to fit on someone else’s arm, closer to them than Hoseok likes to let him get in public, the object of envy and scorn and disgust and desire.

You’re rather proficient at this, Jimin remembers the Empress telling him. He hopes so — otherwise, none of this would be worth it.

By the time Jimin is washed and styled and dressed, Hoseok is already gone.

It doesn’t matter. Jimin pushes that all away as he leaves the royal residences, ready to meet Kim Seokjin at the gated entrance to the inner palace. There are people all around him as he goes, civilians and government workers and servants and legislators all crowding the footpaths.

Instead of lingering on Hoseok’s absence, Jimin takes stock of himself: he feels awful. He feels scraped over with sandpaper, all jagged edges and torn concentration. They haven’t been back to the library since Kim Namjoon’s first day on Namsan; Jimin is an exposed nerve, desperate for anything in the world to smooth him over.

He’s so desperate and distracted that by the time Kim Seokjin arrives through the gate, Jimin nearly cries when the first thing he does is ask —

“Jimin-ssi, are you all right?”

Seokjin actually sounds concerned. It shocks Jimin into schooling himself, into ironing out his expression and pasting on an empty smile as he bows deep and without hesitation.

“Senator Kim, I apologize. I’m pleased to be escorting you tonight.”

Seokjin doesn’t look like he believes him at all. He’s dressed to the nines, all gauzy whites and pale blues, cheeks chapped pink from the cold; Jimin himself is an accessory, grey and silver, meant to reflect affection and deflect attention. They’re not overdressed compared to passers-by, just a city block away from the ball itself, but the longer Seokjin stands and looks at him instead of rushing them forward, the more exposed Jimin feels.

For a moment they stare at each other. Jimin’s doing his best not to appear rude, not to come across even more badly than he already has, and Seokjin just looks confused. Until finally, finally, Seokjin shakes his head and sketches a short bow of his own, and steps up to Jimin’s side.

“Don’t apologize,” he says. “That was so rude of me, Jimin-ssi, I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive me.”

He says it half like a joke, but not a cruel one. Like he’s certain he should be forgiven, but still earnest enough that Jimin just smiles beatifically and loops his arm through Seokjin’s.

“Nothing to forgive,” he promises. He ignores how Seokjin’s heart rate jumps when Jimin touches him. He ignores the badly-concealed wince, and the way Seokjin glances at him from the corner of his eye. It shouldn’t throw him off — Jimin has work to do, and he’d hoped Kim Seokjin would be a kinder assignment than most, but he’s good enough to work around whatever he’s been given. He has to be.

“I’m so glad you’re with me tonight,” Seokjin says, tossing Jimin a beautiful smile and a wink that almost manages to disguise the discomfort in his eye. “I know we don’t know each other well, Jimin-ssi, but I’m hopeless at these sort of events.”

“Ah, but you’re a politician? I thought it came with the territory.”

They’re close enough to the crowd gathering for the ball, hosted in Jimin’s personal favorite outdoor pavilion, that he can see that Seokjin isn’t joking. He’s sweating under his robes, Jimin can smell it; his palm, resting on Jimin’s wrist as they walk together, is damp and clammy.

“I’m from a moon, you know. Population eighteen million. We’ve got our industry, sure, and Amnok’s closing in on a billion now, but — well. Let’s just say this has all been a little more than I’m used to.” Seokjin smiles again, more reflexive than anything else, and Jimin nods sagely as he navigates them through the growing crowd. He knows just how to avoid the reporters and cameras lingering by the entrances, and pulls Seokjin through to the covered outer square with hardly a hiccup.

“Are we meeting a retinue here, Senator?” He blinks pretty eyes up the few inches between them, and takes at least some gratitude in the way Seokjin flushes, pulse jumping again.

They’re early, but the pavilion is already crowded. The networking, the endless schemes of politics and power, has already begun; Jimin is already listening and memorizing and trying not to let the insignificant buzz of every fucking sound in the city drown out the truths the Empress has trained him to hear.

“Only my governor, but — he’s not a particularly punctual man.”

Jimin remembers Onjo’s governor. A middle-aged man, nondescript, carefully groomed. Practically identical to dozens of other planets’ governors, exceptional only because of the strangeness of Onjo itself. The strangeness of its residents, Jimin thinks, and then stops himself. If he lets himself follow that thought, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stand another second of existence.

There’s a traditional band playing across the floor, far enough away that Jimin isn’t sure whether or not Seokjin can hear them. Whether or not he’s supposed to be able to. But his skin feels as though it’s about to flake off, itchy and too-tight and blistering with humiliation and overstimulation, and Seokjin is a first-time senator who doesn’t know how to lead Jimin through a ball like a scripted play, and so he takes a deep breath and gives Seokjin another smile, one he hopes comes across as excited.

“I love this song,” he simpers, like he hasn’t heard it a thousand times before at identical events. There’s always couples swaying together at these balls, even before the official dances begin, after the Empress’s speech. “Senator, come on, let’s dance.”

And Seokjin, gracefully obliging, leads Jimin out to the floor.

♖

It’s difficult, Jimin learns, to have an assignment who actually wants to talk to him.

He’s used to being a pretty decoration, for the rare mark who doesn’t want him in their bed; he’s used to being a toy for wandering hands. What he’s not used to is the way Kim Seokjin leans in and asks his opinion on nearly everyone they speak to after the conversations conclude, and the way he hums thoughtfully at Jimin’s notes, and the way he asks Jimin for advice and then proceeds to take it. Assignments have spoken to him before, of course, but Seokjin is the first Jimin can remember who doesn’t mention Hoseok, even obliquely. He treats Jimin like a political expert instead of a tool.

“He’s the chair of the oversight committee,” Jimin whispers, as an aging senator ambles closer to them. Seokjin nods, squeezes Jimin’s arm, and swallows an impressive mouthful of mandu.

The ball is almost bearable, but even Seokjin’s kindness has its pitfalls. It’s more difficult to hone in on particular conversations when Seokjin is murmuring in his ear about the petty fundraising squabble he has with a fellow junior senator. It’s almost easy to forget his place when, halfway through a conversation that bores them both to tears, Seokjin rolls his eyes behind someone’s back so dramatically that Jimin knows he’s trying to make him laugh.

He remembers, abruptly, after the oversight committee chair has vanished into the crowd, and Hoseok spins past with a stranger on his arm, dancing neat and pretty and perfect a few yards away.

Seokjin catches Jimin looking, despite his best efforts to hide it, and his whole face softens in what Jimin realizes with disgust is pity.

“Jimin-ssi,” he starts to say, and Jimin is embarrassed enough that he stiffens. He turns away, looking anywhere but at Hoseok — or at Seokjin watching him, noticing what Jimin is too overwhelmed and hurt and exhausted to hide.

“Look,” Jimin says. He gestures through the crowd, careless to whether or not Seokjin can actually see or hear what he’s trying to point out. “Your governor is over here, Senator.”

It’s not a lie; Kim Yeongsoo is by the pavillion’s entrance, chatting amicably with a group of mining lobbyists who Jimin knows, dislikes, and mistrusts entirely. They haven’t been speaking of anything particularly alarming or underhanded, he’s been checking, but it’s interesting enough that Yeongsoo has clearly cultivated himself a particular political network in his years as governor. It seems to be working for him — he’s won four elections now handedly, and outlasted Onjo’s first senator.

And, of course, Kim Yeongsoo knows what it means that Seokjin has Jimin on his arm.

“Seokjin-ah, moving up in the empire?” He clasps Seokjin’s forearm, offers a gleaming white smile, and sends Jimin a pointed nod. Jimin bows back, deep and respectful.

“Ah, I’m doing my best.” Seokjin isn’t visibly tense, but Jimin can hear the slight jump in his pulse as he addresses Yeongsoo. The man who, Jimin remembers, married Seokjin’s mother not a month past, a fact the Empress had made sure to impress upon him. Political dynasties in her empire are like bonsais — for each she cultivates, with careful guidance and trimming at the edges, there are half a dozen more broken up and discarded every decade. The Onjo Kims, while not nearly a dynasty, are to be watched. “It’s a new world for me here, hyungnim.”

Seokjin plays the lobbyists well as his governor introduces him. He collects names and contact details with a care that implies interest, and he makes a few jokes that have the younger members of the group laughing and the elders smiling in either real or well-faked fondness. Across the pavilion, a conversation that Jimin is paying marginally more attention to takes a turn towards the illicit. Near the entrance, a reporter is heckling a serving girl. In the back rooms, where appetizers and drinks are being prepared, a legislative staffer is attempting to bribe or blackmail a companion of the princess.

And, Jimin realizes with a sickening jolt, a block down, Kim Namjoon is heading toward the ball.

Jimin would blank out every conversation in the city to hear them, but he doesn’t even have to. He’s careless, pays more attention to them than on his actual marks, but he’s so overwhelmed right now that he thinks if someone asked, he could hear conversations from the shuttles coming in from orbit above the spaceport.

You don’t think it’s strange that the prince invited you? Jeon Jeongguk is saying.

Of course it’s strange, Namjoon replies. Seokjin’s hand fits itself around Jimin’s waist, the first real contact they’ve had outside of dancing, and Jimin beams up at him as they turn to greet another group of high-ranked senate staffers.

He’s listening for Taehyung. He knows he’s there — of course he does, how could he not — but he hasn’t spoken yet. He’s only listening, pulse skyrocketing the closer they get, the more Namjoon and Jeongguk bicker about Hoseok’s generous invitation, free of charge.

Jimin isn’t selfish enough to think that it was because of him, and the sliver of jealousy in Hoseok’s voice as he asked Jimin how. But he can’t entirely discard the thought, not when Hoseok hasn’t blinked at him all night. Not when that feels more like a petty rejection than simple forgetfulness, when Hoseok has cultivated a reputation for carelessness that Jimin knows better than anyone is spun from thin air.

Hyung, Taehyung finally says, when they’ve reached the crowds near the entrance. Hyung, I shouldn’t be here.

Jimin wants to scream. The Empress is about to speak, the pavilion rustling with anticipation as her entrance is announced. Seokjin pulls him to the front of the crowd, taking his place with the rest of the Senate and their families, all urned toward the royal walkway and dais and thrones, which Hoseok has hardly deigned to grace with his presence until now, detaching himself from the adoring crowd to take the gilded seat next to his sister.

Come to the university with me, then, Jeongguk hisses. Jimin loses Taehyung’s answer in the swell of voices that comes with the ring of the gong, and then the silence that falls, complete and breathless, as the Empress steps out of the shrouded, guarded royal antechamber, and makes her way toward the dais.

The entire room drops. Even the freshest of residents knows this: the universal, immediate sweep into a bow as their Empress graces them with her presence, knees and foreheads to the floor, a tradition so ancient that Jimin almost feels as though he was born with it in his bones.

She scares him, he admits to the silence of the pavilion. As she should, as is right, but — he can hardly breathe when he thinks about trying to listen to Taehyung now, with her in front of him, the weight of her expectations heavy and as threatening as a blade to his throat. It was so easy, he realizes now, when he was off planet. When he was only accountable in his nightly reports, when he could forget the tense downturn of her lips each time he’d forced her hand into punishment.

He doesn’t think about it if he doesn’t have to. The room, somewhere underneath the main floor of the inner palace, that’s kept just for him. He counts the days in between visits, even when he doesn’t try to. Three hundred and eighty-nine. A day in unending fluorescence, surrounded by a mechanic hum even he couldn’t hear over. Stumbling out, blank and so grateful, and pathetic, and Jimin swallows down on vomit and tries to listen to the speech.

He doesn’t succeed. The words wash over him, vague and empty, though the room hangs on, rhapsodic, to every word. She makes a handful of public appearances a year — always at this ball, and to open each senate session, and to make a few key political speeches. But her true skill shines behind closed doors, which only a handful of people at the ball will ever truly experience.

The Empress speaks. Her empire listens. Jimin stands with the rest of the room when she sits; the line forms to greet her, but Seokjin steers him away.

“Jimin-ssi,” he says again, when they’ve retreated near a mostly-abandoned column and a table littered with empty glasses. Jimin doesn’t remember the last time an assignment said his name so often, or so carefully. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

Jimin pulls his arm away from Seokjin’s careful touch.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” he says. He tries to say it as respectfully as he can, to remind Seokjin that he’s a senator and Jimin has less status than a well-bred show dog. It doesn’t work — Seokjin reaches out again, and Jimin can’t knock him away without drawing attention to himself, and that’s something trained so deep into him to avoid that he doesn’t think he could if he tried.

So he switches tactics. He leans into Seokjin’s touch instead, puts on the seductive face he knows works wonders on strangers asking too many questions, and settles both his hands on Seokjin’s waist.

“Sorry I’m distracted.” His voice is breathier, lighter, as he leans in to murmur close to Seokjin’s ear. “Seokjin-ssi, you can’t blame me.”

Seokjin’s face, open in concern, shutters. He’s the one who pulls away now, leaving Jimin blank and outraged and embarrassed again. He’s better than this, he curses himself. This shouldn’t be happening.

“I just —” Seokjin rakes a hand through his hair, looks around. There’s no one close to them, no one to potentially overhear, as he lowers his voice and says. “I thought the prince was helping you.”

It feels like a slap. That Seokjin, who as far as Jimin knows has never met Taehyung in his life, can somehow tell a secret that Jimin has kept perfectly for decades. That somehow, he’s slipped enough that the entire delegation from Onjo can crack him open and read him like a children’s story.

“Helping me?” He spits.

“Or someone — I don’t know. You just seemed so much better at the reception, I thought you’d realized, but — Jimin-ssi, I can feel that you’re in pain.”

Jimin is the one who grabs him this time. Who pulls him back into the shadow of the evening, outside the soft hanging lantern light and the crowds of voices. He can hear Namjoon somewhere in the crowd whisper, oh, shit. He can see, through the crowd, Kim Yeongsoo staring at the servants’ entrance with narrowed eyes and pursed lips.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jimin hisses. “Or how you know it. But I need you to explain. Right now.”

“Hey, okay, listen —”

Jimin has him crowded against a wall. He knows how it will look to anyone watching, so he sells it more — he wraps an arm around Seokjin’s waist and ignores the aborted wince, angles their heads together so it looks just romantic enough.

“The prince is your guide, right?” Guide. Jimin remembers the way it fell from Taehyung’s lips. Seokjin says it with almost the same reverence. “I thought you were extinct, but Yeongsoo mentioned some deal with the crown over the Twins, so it made sense when I met you at the ball. But seriously, you feel sick, Jimin-ssi.”

“But how can you tell?” He hisses it, insistent, and follows Seokjin’s gaze down to where their arms are brushing, skin on skin.

“I’m a little bit of a guide,” Seokjin says. “Or, at least, I could have been a few generations ago. There’s not really any such thing, these days.”

Jimin has entirely lost track of any conversation he was supposed to be keeping up with. He’s lost Hoseok in the crowd. He can almost ignore the steely presence of the Empress at his back, though there’s no way she could see them from here. The word guide is rattling around in his head, settling like a stone in his stomach, filling up his mouth with something sour and sticky.

“Jimin-ssi,” Seokjin says, careful and cautious. “Your guide, your prince — doesn’t he — is he making you do this? In exchange?”

I lived because of Hoseok, he remembers telling Taehyung, one night on the Imugi that felt like a dream even as it happened. And the Empress, smoothing down her son’s hair, telling him firmly: princes take care of their things. Hoseok’s hands soothing him for years, and years, until like a flick of a switch, they hadn’t.

“No,” he manages. Scraped raw. Ignoring how much he wants to say yes.

He needs to leave. Seokjin looks uneasy, discomfited, but Jimin has been tasked with staying with him for the evening, until he’s dismissed, and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to keep the lie from the Empress. They’re still touching, Jimin’s hand on Seokjin’s hip, chafing against the threads of fine cotton.

Seokjin curses softly in the space between them. He drops Jimin’s wrist; Jimin hadn’t even noticed when he’d grabbed it, somewhere in between his body and the atmosphere.

“Look,” Seokjin says. His brow is creased, his voice is thready and uncertain. “I hate things like this. I’m going to get out of here. And — you can go, okay?”

He’s not even afraid. Jimin knows what people look like when they’re scared of him — he remembers Jeongguk’s wide eyes, his hand coming up to press against his throat as he hurried away. He remembers half a dozen interrogations, and would-be assassins, and the rare servant or courtier who saw or heard just a little too much. Seokjin isn’t afraid of him, Jimin thinks. He pities him, and he’s confused by him.

“Sorry.” Jimin closes his eyes. He steps away from Seokjin, gives him more room to breathe. “I’m sorry. I can come with you, if you still want the company.”

Part of him almost hopes that Seokjin will say yes. There’s something comforting in the routine of following an assignment home, in letting his mind drift back to the conversations and arguments he’s supposed to be tracking. Taehyung’s gift to him had been double-edged; when it hurts him, it feels like a justified punishment.

“Jimin-ah,” Seokjin says. He’s never called him that before. “I’m not going to do that to you.”

“But —”

“Get some rest instead, okay? Just walk me out, and anyone can think what they want.”

This time, when Seokjin offers out his arm, Jimin hesitates before taking it. His heart is pounding so hard it hurts, drowning out nothing and everything all at once. There’s an arms deal being brokered in an inn room two city blocks down; there’s nothing Jimin can do to stop himself from losing words of it in between breaths.

The Empress is going to flay him alive for his performance tonight, but even that would be preferable to being locked away. But — as long as Hoseok stays all right, as long as no one pulls a blaster despite the security scans and the palace security patrolling the borders of the pavilion, he’ll at least be spared that.

“Okay,” Jimin breathes. He takes the offered arm, and lets himself be seen sailing through the gala leaning into Seokjin’s shoulder, both their faces fixed in smiles that look well-practiced enough to be real. He catches a glimpse of Hoseok’s back, swathed in white and violet silk, and makes the choice to look away.

Seokjin leaves him near the gate to his hanok village, with a squeeze to his forearm and a lingering glance behind him.

“Come find me sometime, okay?” He says. “There’s a lot of things you should know.”

Jimin doesn’t make any promises. He gives Seokjin a smile, and a kiss on the cheek, and doesn’t tell him that the hours he’s allowed to leave Hoseok’s side are limited to summons from the Empress and whatever he can steal for himself in the dark of night.

“Rest well, Senator,” Jimin tells him, and watches his back until he vanishes into the night.

And then he turns around, takes a deep, shuddering breath, and heads back toward the ball.

♜

The longer Taehyung spends in the city, the less he likes leaving Namjoon alone in it.

It’s not that Namsan feels unsafe in any real sense; there are uniformed guards that walk regular patrols, and they’re close enough to the inner palace that curfews are enforced firmly even on commercial streets. It’s more that — since the noise clamoring inside of him at every second nearly drowns out anyone in his proximity, Taehyung is afraid of losing him.

He’s been losing Jeongguk already. He vanishes, most nights, into parts of the neighborhood he can access without curfew clearance, and Taehyung still can’t get used to not being able to keep track of him even from afar. He’s told Taehyung about the forest reserve just a few miles away from their home, and about the clubs he’s skirted around but never tried to enter, and the untold variety of street food offered by permitted vendors past sundown. He keeps asking Taehyung to follow him out, even after Taehyung has tried to explain why he can’t.

“I get it,” he’d said one night, after he came home unexpectedly early. Taehyung is almost always awake when he creeps in, trying to sleep and inevitably failing, and that night he hadn’t even bothered to hide it. “I mean — I’m sorry, hyung. I understand why you can’t.”

Jeongguk has been better, since that night, but Taehyung hasn’t. He still panics every time he wakes from short bouts of sleep, filled to the brim with what feels like the entire city’s joy and loneliness and fear and laughter. He still freezes every time both Namjoon and Jeongguk stray far enough away that they’re lost in the static.

So when Jeongguk tries to tug him away from the horrifying mess of the Governors’ Ball, coaxing Taehyung to join him in his exploration, he can’t make himself.

The prince invited Namjoon here, out of what must have been spite or at least an effort to irritate Namjoon into more social obligation. The prince is going to be here. And wherever the prince is, Jimin isn’t too far behind.

Jeongguk understands the second Taehyung turns him down. His eyes go wide as he glances toward the open pavilion, wood pillars and eaves wreathed with ivy and ancient gilding, the crowd sending up a nearly-unanimous murmur before silence starts to settle. Taehyung nearly stumbles back with a wave of — respect, awe, envy, anxiety, guilt, pride, a swelling in his chest he can’t find the name for, that has him bent over and bracing against his knees.

“Fuck,” Jeongguk murmurs. “Hyung, are you —?”

His hand is gentle on Taehyung’s back, rubbing calm and steady despite the anxiety Taehyung can feel from him.

“Fine,” he gasps out. He shrugs Jeongguk’s hand off as he straightens. “I’m fine.”

Taehyung has always been a terrible liar. He feels like he’s being ripped in a thousand different directions by the crowd of people he can just barely see from down here, a quarter of a block and a grand stairway from the party itself. The reverent silence settled over the street is stifling, too much for him to think through — Taehyung grabs Jeongguk’s wrist to steady himself, and then lets go before he can be overwhelmed by concern, exhaustion, frustration, shame.

“If you’re going, then go,” Namjoon whispers. He doesn’t need to, but no one else around them is speaking above a gentle murmur, casting glances as some of them hurry toward the gala, parting around where the three of them have stopped on the road like a stone jutting out of a river.

“I’m coming.” Taehyung means to sound assertive, but by the look on Jeongguk’s face he falls short by a mile.

At least they don’t have time to argue about it. Namjoon is already turning tail to vanish into the crowd, and Taehyung gives Jeongguk his best approximation of a smile before he follows, quick and sure and as quiet as any servant should be.

“You should have gone with him,” Namjoon says as they close in on the formal entrance, barely audible. Taehyung just looks at him, and watches the wince crawl over his face, the half-shrug he gives in apology. He can barely feel the sheepish resignation over the swell of the crowd’s adoration of their Empress, whose voice he can hear now through the columns.

She sounds regal, Taehyung supposes. Calm, collected, perfectly eloquent. He hasn’t spent any time around politicians since he was young, but he remembers — there were so many people who spoke like her who filled the space of the governor’s manor when his father still held the seat. Taehyung was always the only child around, playing hide-and-seek with imaginary friends in the historic halls and parlors and banquet rooms. He spent hours eavesdropping on his parents’ meetings not because he was interested, but because outside of school there wasn’t much else to do.

He remembers how excited he had been when his parents sat him down and told him he was going to have a sister. He was six years old, and only wanted someone he could show all the secrets of their impossibly old house, someone who could keep him company, even if they warned him she’d be too little to be his friend for a while.

Taehyung listens to the Empress speak as he and Namjoon linger outside the pavilion, waiting to enter so they don’t seem disrespectful, and thinks about his little sister, nine months old, murdered in her crib for imperial mining contracts.

The speech ends. Kim Namjoon and his aide are ushered through the brief security scan, and into the crowd.

They don’t particularly stand out, at least. Now that they’ve reached Namsan, Namjoon has been given a salary and an established account full enough to keep them comfortable and then some, for the three of them to dress according to Namjoon’s new station. Taehyung, despite himself, enjoys the empire’s wealth of fine linens and furs and tailors, and likes even more that he hasn’t received any of the same passing looks his two patched, non-uniform outfit rotations got him from fellow servants on the Imugi during their off hours.

And so Taehyung’s new, middling-fine clothes mean he doesn’t stand out among the servants as he and Namjoon keep close to the outer edges of the pavilion, both of them too nervous and overwhelmed to risk wading into the throng of dancing and conversation and politicking.

They’ve been around enough by now that Namjoon has plenty of acquaintances and a handful of friends, but most of those friends are nowhere to be seen. They’ve all tended toward the academic, less likely to be invited to such a political event; the acquaintances he does have here are lukewarm at best, turned off of them by the prince’s public disdain. So the two of them linger awkwardly, Namjoon sipping champagne and Taehyung resisting the urge to chew on his fingernails, until —

“Namjoon-ssi,” the prince grins, as friendly as a shark. He appears out of nowhere, Jimin absent from his side, a pink smudge of lipstick on his flushed, perfect cheekbone. “You got my invitation!”

Taehyung steps back, angles himself behind Namjoon’s broad shoulders. It doesn’t really work; the prince keeps looking at him, sharp glances in between the barbs he and Namjoon trade back and forth. Taehyung tries to get a read on him and fails, the pavilion too crowded, the internal noise so constant and uproarious that if Taehyung listens too hard, his vision starts to go black around the edges.

He edges away as they keep talking. If he didn’t know better — and in truth, even though he should — he’d think that the prince enjoyed this as more than an opportunity to drag Namjoon out of his comfort zone and practically humiliate him in public. It would be more of a social sting to ignore him, really, and even as they talk the prince is approached by three or four different people who have to stand, waiting, until the prince deigns to give them a glance, a routine acknowledgement, and then send them on their way.

And Taehyung is so engrossed in watching, paying careful attention to the way Namjoon sways toward the prince like he can’t help himself, until they’re a handspan apart and still making underhanded jabs at each others’ literacy, that he forgets to be wary. He forgets the empire that Namjoon’s guide is the prince of.

He forgets, critically, that this is the Governors’ Ball, and that he should have never followed Namjoon in in the first place .

From behind the prince’s back, a face is staring at him that he’d almost forgotten. Wide mouth, strong brows, a carefully-trimmed mustache with more silver in it than he remembers. Eyes, one double lidded, one folded, wide and surprised and, still, calculating.

Taehyung’s father was a twin. Taehyung’s uncle, his spitting image, had been the one to run to the police in a panic, reporting that the man had gone mad, that he’d tried to wrest the blaster away and failed, that he’d barely escaped with his life after his brother, their governor, fired on his wife and his children and, finally, himself. And since then, that first scrambled election in the wake of such senseless violence, he’s been Onjo’s strongest voice for imperial power as their governor.

“Hyung,” Taehyung says. It comes out a strangled whimper, one that stops even Hoseok in the middle of a sentence as Namjoon, finally, looks further than a foot in front of his face.

“Oh, shit,” he says.

And Taehyung, his heart about to burst in his ears, runs like the prey he’s never stopped being.

♜

The serving corridor that spat out tray-laden servants and personal attendants swallows Taehyung like an open mouth. It’s dark, compared to the dazzling lights strung from the pavilion columns, with lights glowing up from the floor and out of recessed nooks, just enough to see by that he manages not to cause any catastrophic incident. He gets looks, of course, as he follows the hall down and into the catering venue,; he obviously doesn’t belong to the palace staff, but he’s clearly not noble. There might be a face or two he recognizes, who raise their hand in acknowledgement or furrow their brows in concern, but Taehyung is too busy trying to breathe enough to see straight to notice or care.

He doesn’t know where he is. That’s his first concern — if he doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know how to escape if it turns out he’s been followed. If — if —

Taehyung can’t even think it. He swallows vomit, thick in his mouth, and the audible gag makes a horrified-looking older woman grab his arm and shove him toward the communal restroom.

“If you get sick in my venue, kid,” she hisses, but leaves him at the door with a pat on his shoulder and instructions to sip water, slowly.

Taehyung sips. He spits into the sink. He stares at his own reflection until it distorts, his eyes red and watering as he tries not to blink. As he tries not to see his father in the cut of his jaw, the slope of his nose. Visitors to the manor used to tell him he looked like his mother, when he was small enough that it could have meant anything, but he knows the truth of it now, after nearly twenty years spent forgetting the faces of his family.

His ears ring in the abrupt silence of the restroom. He finally gives in and blinks until the tears stop coming.

Namjoon can make it home by himself. Taehyung steps out into the dim, narrow hall with his head bowed and his stomach churning, and makes it three steps toward the back exit before a hand, soft and shocking like a burst of static, closes around his wrist.

“Taehyung-ssi,” Jimin says. Taehyung’s skin burns, as hot as his cheeks, as hot as the scar seared across his side. “We need to talk.”

And he drags Taehyung out, scattering the staff around them simply by existing in their space. Taehyung barely manages to hold himself back from reaching out through Jimin’s touch; even without trying, Jimin has dulled him to nearly everyone but the other servants in the halls, who watch Taehyung with confusion and pity and a disgusted sort of amusement when the more familiar of them realize who exactly is towing him away.

They cross from the side building off the pavilion into a side alley. Taehyung jolts at the smack of the cold autumn night, trembling almost entirely from the chill. He follows Jimin blindly down streets, between buildings, eyes half-closed, feeling the world around him get dimmer and dimmer even as he holds himself back from doing anything to Jimin’s frayed nerves, his overexposed senses. His anger and confusion spills up in Taehyung’s throat almost as acrid as the vomit.

Taehyung thinks — he hadn’t realized Jimin could feel so present. It’s like a varnish has been stripped away from him. He’s not watching the world through the layer of his prince, a gauzy separation that Taehyung didn’t know he was filtered through until now, all of Jimin’s jagged edges shocking with how obvious they always should have been.

Jimin is angry. Jimin is scared, not of anything trivial or pointless or innocent. Jimin’s grip on him is the grip of an animal backed into a corner, afraid for its life, and Taehyung is comforted by that only because it means that he’s not alone.

And finally, finally, Jimin seems satisfied. They’re in a neighborhood Taehyung has never been to before, with straight rows of government buildings packed together with empty courtyards and darkened windows. Jimin pulls him into a gap between two of them, not a true alley but something darker, more enclosed, with less room to run.

“No more lying,” Jimin tells him. He feels out of breath. He looks — Taehyung can barely see him in the absence of light, but he can see that Jimin’s face is pale, with two bright spots of color darkening his cheeks. “Don’t — I can’t take it anymore, okay? I need to know.”

Taehyung swallows. Sags back against the low brick wall behind him. Swallows again.

“Know what?”

His voice sounds wrecked. Jimin steps forward, closing the space Taehyung had put between them. He hadn’t noticed when they stopped touching; Jimin’s already worked under his skin, into his veins, but he notices when Jimin reaches out, perfectly deliberate, and touches two fingers to the back of his hand. Just the same as Taehyung had done, one of those first nights on the Imugi.

The world goes silent. It’s as if each of Namsan’s millions and millions of residents have boarded ships and left the atmosphere, the planet empty and silent and dark. And it’s a quiet that Taehyung isn’t used to, and it’s as close to peace as he thinks he can get right now, and it’s instinct after these long empty weeks to reach back, to give Jimin what he’s been silently asking for for as long as Taehyung has been able to feel him through a crowd.

“This,” Jimin breathes. As Taehyung fixes him, as he takes back some of the awful damage the empire has done. As he gives Jimin peace and quiet and solitude in return.

And then Jimin takes his fingers away, and it’s just the two of them. The city might as well have vanished into the night.

“Senator Kim Seokjin called Hoseok my guide,” Jimin says, a series of words that Taehyung has to think over before he can remember the world of politics, the world outside these two buildings, pressed together, keeping them safe. “But that’s not true, is it.”

His hand comes up, now. He touches Taehyung’s skin, by accident, as he draws out the leather cord, the alabaster totem, from underneath Taehyung’s new fine linen dress clothes.

“I didn’t really want to know when you told me the first time. I still thought — I thought maybe it would go back to normal. That he could still help me.”

He’s still touching Seonmul. He’s not looking at Taehyung. So Taehyung gets to watch him, just enough taller that he can see in the dark the fall of Jimin’s eyelashes. The texture of his skin. The tug of his brows as he rolls Seonmul between his fingers, and then looks up with eyes darker than the sky.

“But I was wrong.”

Taehyung takes a deep breath in, and knows that Jimin can hear it rattle.

“Yes.”

“And there have been others. Like me.”

“Not for a long time.” Taehyung doesn’t look away, but he does slump further against the wall, bringing himself down to look at Jimin eye-to-eye. “They stopped surviving it before you or I were born.”

“Sentinels.” Jimin rolls the word around in his mouth, dragging it out, tasting it. Taehyung can feel him feeling it, can feel smooth stone under his empty fingers. If Jimin is under his skin, Taehyung feels draped over his, replacing that layer of fog that blanketed the world and the halls of the Imugi and their moments together, snatched in seconds or minutes and never any longer.

“Bo was the first. It’s not something just anyone can be. You have to be born with it, and then — you have to be activated, inducted. And she was all alone, and it almost killed her too, until she found Seonmul.”

This Taehyung has known since before he can remember learning it. He has a memory, faded and blurred, of his mother telling him that Twins used to stand on streetcorners and sing their epic for alms. They were practically nonexistent in the city by then, just the occasional elder in white at the market or festival. In retrospect, it might have been a miracle that Taehyung found one at all when he ran, as quickly as he could, away from the manor and the corpses of his family.

“And Seonmul almost vanished,” he continues, barely whispering, falling into the rhythm and the rhyme of the poem he would have sung on streetcorners a century ago. “Into the world around her — because she could feel them all inside of her, all their anger, all their joy —”

“And you can feel me,” Jimin says. “You — that’s how you knew.”

“Since the first time I saw you.”

He doesn’t know if Jimin knows when, but he does feel the flare of recognition. The shift and lock of understanding, as Jimin drops Seonmul but doesn’t step away.

“I thought I was hurting you. Your friend told me I was hurting you.”

Taehyung can feel Jimin’s anger again. He’s too tired for it — he tries to let it fizz out of him like carbonation from his fingertips, bursting into the air. If he thinks too hard about that he’ll start wondering when and why and he’ll stop being able to forgive Jeongguk for the awfulness that’s been twisting them both up since they left.

“He lied. It’s not just one of us, Jimin-ssi. I can help you, but —”

Taehyung closes his eyes, so he doesn’t have to look at Jimin when he admits it. It feels wrong to curse the city when Jimin has had to survive it his whole life, but he’s too wrung out to stop himself as the words drip from his tongue.

“The city hurts. There’s too many people. And I can feel all of them, when it’s been long enough, and it doesn’t leave any room for me.”

With his eyes closed, Jimin feels even closer. Taehyung is braced against the wall, his hands flat on the bricks behind him. Jimin, who was half a step away at most, is now close enough that Taehyung imagines he can feel the rise and fall of his chest in the space between them.

“One more question,” Jimin says. Taehyung nods. “What were you running from?”

At that, Taehyung breathes out a laugh. That’s easy, and impossible to answer, and he’d just let himself forget about politics and whatever Jimin had said about Kim Seokjin, and so he skips the words entirely. He just unties the sash at his waist, and pulls away three layers of fabric to show him instead.

The scar healed well, at least. It cauterized itself, and took only a small chunk of flesh under his ribs, just where his side curves. A few inches to the right, and it would have put a hole right through him.

“Oh,” Jimin breathes. And then he’s quiet for long enough that Taehyung drops his hand, fabric shifting mostly back into place, and opens his eyes.

Jimin’s brow is furrowed. He’s still looking down, his shoulders hunched. Whatever he’s feeling, it’s all a knot over Taehyung’s heart that aches, physically.

“Hey,” Taehyung says. “Jimin-ah.”

Jimin’s head snaps up. It’s so dark — he’s mostly outline now, all traces of sun gone from the sky, shadows melting into each other. The adrenaline has leaked out of Taehyung’s bones, leaving a gaping wreck inside of him, a yawning hunger, an exhausted desperation.

“Thanks,” he whispers, and then leans in to kiss him.

Taehyung isn’t a stranger to kissing, but — in all his life, he’s kissed two people. Namjoon, once, drunk in his inn room while Jeongguk sweated out a fever back at the temple. And Jeongguk, over and over, the two of them together but not quite right. Kissing Jimin is nothing like either of them, exploring, playful, tentative.

When Jimin realizes he’s being kissed, he unfolds. Physically, too, but Taehyung feels that knot in their chests melt away as Jimin grabs him at the hips. As Jimin opens his mouth and digs in his fingers and leans his weight forward and gives up some of the simmering anger to make room for wanting.

And Taehyung wants back. Taehyung can’t breathe, hands caught in Jimin’s hair on instinct, pulling him closer, barely thinking of anything but the warm wet give of Jimin’s mouth. The way he’s shoving Taehyung back, pressing into him. The way Taehyung wants to crawl inside him, sliding his tongue into Jimin’s mouth, digging his nails into his scalp. His eyes are closed against the dark, hard enough that red swims over the black of his eyelids, Jimin’s heartbeat slamming against his chest, echoing in his ears. Jimin groans, low and wet, against Taehyung’s tongue. Jimin’s palm finds its way under Taehyung’s clothes and presses a searing brand against the scar on his waist.

“Mine,” Jimin gasps, in the split second they separate to gasp for breath. Taehyung can’t see him, but he doesn’t need to. He drags Jimin forward again without bothering to answer, because he knows that Jimin knows, and they don’t need to talk when Taehyung can let Jimin’s tongue between his teeth and moan back and crawl underneath his skin, into his veins, to feel his own mottled, burnt skin against his palm and taste himself between them.

Taehyung could stay here forever. His lungs burn until he has to force Jimin’s head back to breathe and hold him there, his lips half-numb, his jaw dropped. He gasps Jimin’s air.

“Mine,” he agrees. He should have said it weeks ago. He would have, if he knew it would feel like this.

For a moment, they just breathe. Taehyung dares to open his eyes and sees that Jimin hasn’t. That his lips are flushed and swollen. That he keeps jerking forward and stopping himself, like he’s waiting for permission.

Taehyung gives it to him. He presses kisses, short, chaste, against Jimin’s open lips. With each one, he gives Jimin a snapshot — utter silence, and then nothing but taste, and then nothing but the feeling of Taehyung’s skin where they’re touching. Palms, fingers, scalp, lips.

“Can —” Jimin cuts himself off into a gasp, when Taehyung can’t help himself and pushes forward to lathe his tongue over Jimin’s throat. “Can you just — can you —”

Less, is what Taehyung can feel he’s asking for. And also more, in a way, and he doesn’t even need Jimin to finish talking so he leaves his throat before he can give into the impulse to bruise and kisses him again.

He gives Jimin nothing to hear but their bodies, their breaths. He narrows his smell and his taste and his sight, almost blurred. He lets Jimin feel him with nerves that don’t scream to scrape over fabric. He finds the perfect reflection of the world Jimin needs without needing to even think about anything but how soft his lips are. How wet his mouth is, both of them getting messy and uncautious and desperate the longer they go on.

It’s almost good enough to never end. It’s almost good enough that they let themselves forget.

But Jimin isn’t a creature used to comfort. Jimin worries almost on reflex, and Taehyung does too, and sooner than he wants they’re caught in a feedback loop of anxiety, of Taehyung’s lingering fear and Jimin’s unease at disobedience. The kisses slow, and then stop, until they’re just standing, caught up in each other, breathing in the cold crisp air of Taehyung’s first Namsan autumn.

“Jimin-ah,” he says, when he’s finally caught his breath. Jimin is still holding onto him; his fingers at Taehyung’s waist clench at the affection in it. Taehyung can feel that he wants to recoil; Taehyung can feel that he forces himself not to. “Come find me again, okay? You know where we’re staying.”

“And you’ll tell me more?” Jimin asks. Seonmul is bare over Taehyung’s clothes, warm from their chests pressing together.

“Sure,” he agrees. Mostly he thinks about the desperate surge of gratitude in his chest. Mostly he thinks about how Jimin feels relieved to have instructions, to be told what to do.

“Okay.” Jimin’s eyes flutter closed.

“Jimin-ah,” Taehyung says, again. He likes the feel of it in his mouth, though that might just be the swollen echoes of Jimin’s kiss. “I’m not him. I can’t — I’m not your prince. I’m just myself.”

That, even as gently as Taehyung whispered it, makes Jimin’s eyes slit open. His hands go stiff. He leans away, just barely enough for Taehyung to notice.

“I know.”

He doesn’t say anything else. Taehyung doesn’t make him. There are already too many questions bubbling up inside his chest, so he does his best to press them down and breathe in deep, as he nudges Jimin further away. As he takes back his body weight from the wall behind him, as he feels the ache of disused muscles in places he’d forgotten could hurt.

Instead of letting Jimin slip away into the shadows, Taehyung holds out his hand. They can’t fix anything tonight. They can’t sever Jimin from his prince completely, and Taehyung can’t even begin to ask Jimin what his real role is in the palace, and neither of them know the right thing to say. But he can do this. He can thread his fingers with Jimin’s, and refuse to let him be entirely alone. For now, at least, they can give each other a little more relief.

“Walk me home,” Taehyung says. It’s not a question, barely a request. Jimin smiles, a soft, quiet thing that almost truly reaches his eyes.

And Jimin does.

Chapter Text

♖♜

“This is unacceptable,” the Empress says.

She doesn’t yell. The Empress Suro, in all the years Jimin’s known and feared her, has never had to raise her voice. But those words send cold, vicious fear spearing through Jimin’s stomach, as she pushes forward a humiliatingly sparse datasheet.

It’s Jimin’s messaged report, what little of it there was, from the ball last night. It’s evidence, damning, of failure.

“I understand,” he whispers. He’s not brave enough to draw his gaze up the high collar of her robe; he settles for her wrist, where her skin vanishes under silk, where her veins rest blue and almost-vulnerable underneath her aging skin.

“I don’t think you do, actually.” She pauses. Splays her fingers over the sheet. Jimin flinches when she pushes it forward, though he’s nowhere near the desk. He can read each word perfectly. He can still taste vomit on his tongue — not eight hours ago, he’d thrown up in Hoseok’s personal restroom after pressing send on the report.

Catastrophic failure, and for what. For the scant answers Taehyung had given him? For the two or three hours of relief after he left Taehyung at the gate to his village? For —

He can’t even finish the thought. Not in front of her.

“You’re nothing to me,” the Empress says, and still her tone doesn’t change. She may as well be reading a legislative proposal, for all the emotion she puts into it. “Nothing at all, if you can’t be useful. You’d do well to remember that, Jimin. I’ve noticed that my son has less and less time for you, of late, and if you can’t keep his attention — well.”

Her hand retreats from the report, to fold with its twin placidly under her sleeves. Jimin doesn’t know her face well enough to imagine the expression on it as she speaks. She picks around her words delicately.

“We both know what happens then, hm?”

Jimin would close his eyes, if it wouldn’t mean showing shameful weakness. He doesn’t want to be here. He hasn’t eaten anything since he threw up what little was in his stomach, but he knows the second he’s out of earshot he’s going to heave up bile and water again.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

She lets it hang. One minute, two, more, as she shakes out her hands and goes back to her written notes. Her perfect penmanship smeared only by the occasional bout of impatience, of unhidden haste. She must run through a sheaf of paper in an hour or less, Jimin thinks, because if he thinks for one second about anything else he’ll lose the scraps of composure that he’s clinging to.

Finally, when his pulse has peached and then slowed, when his body balks against the persistence of his fear response, she sets her pen down again.

“I want follow-ups on all of these. Now. You have the next week, before the senate session opens, to prove to me that you are not a failed investment.”

How, Jimin thinks, desperate. He’s Hoseok’s shadow, he’s Hoseok’s property. Even after years of assignments, he can’t help himself but to keep track of Hoseok’s heart from across a room. After a sleepless night of panic and humiliation, he doesn’t know how to even start thinking of a life without needing him.

“Your Majesty,” he says, instead of questioning her. He inclines his head.

“Some time away from my son might do you good,” she says. “To remind you of your... place.”

The punishment is more — or maybe less — than Jimin let himself hope for, but he can’t feel any of the relief he’d expected to have to hide. Instead, he feels hollowed out. Empty. He knows she can see everything that crosses his face, and he couldn’t stop himself from showing her the truth of it if he tried. That he’d cry if he was allowed. That it takes everything he has to keep his voice level even as his hands shake.

“I understand,” he whispers.

His place is under her thumb. He’s known that for longer than he’s known anything. Since he was let out of that chamber of endless dark and silence and pain, and stumbled to his knees on the cold floor begging for relief, and looked up and up from her embroidered slippers to her silk robes to the pearls that shone at her throat.

Someone had hit him before he could look at her face. He remembers that, too. Had slapped him, hard, and shoved him down by the hair, and told him to bow before his queen and empress while he sobbed, spit and snot and tears smearing across his face.

“Go.” She dismisses him with a flick of her wrist.

He hasn’t cried in front of her since. He’s not going to start now.

Jimin leaves. He doesn’t run. He walks, blank and thoughtless, until he reaches Hoseok’s door, and then he doesn’t know what to do. He stares at it, the solid pine frame, the painted mulberry paper of the door itself. Bright yellows and reds and greens he can see behind his eyelids when he closes them. The first time he saw them, the first time Hoseok was allowed to bring him in, he’d just barely been able to stop himself from reaching out to trace over the painted birds and flowers.

He hears Hoseok before the door slides open — of course he does. He can smell his perfume, can taste the salt on his skin. He doesn’t open his eyes until he has to, until Hoseok breathes out and makes a soft noise, still standing in the doorway. Waiting for him, Jimin wants to think, even if he doesn’t know if it’s true.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok says. Curious, questioning, compassionate.

And Jimin flings himself forward. He lurches into Hoseok’s arms, and Hoseok catches him on instinct, and — nothing happens.

Nothing happens. Not even the instinctive softening Jimin has been trying to pretend at for days now, not even the narrowing of his hearing onto Hoseok’s heartbeat, the focus on his scent. Nothing happens, and Jimin buries his face in Hoseok’s shoulder, where he’s spent hours and hours nestled peacefully, just breathing him in.

And Jimin finally cries.

“Oh,” Hoseok murmurs. Pulls Jimin in further, kicks his door closed. Sinks down onto a nearby cushion in his sitting room, Jimin practically collapsing into his lap. “Oh, no, Jimin-ah. It’s okay.”

Jimin’s chest hurts. His head hurts, his whole face feels swollen. He can’t stop crying, hiccuping into Hoseok’s shoulder, trying not to flinch away from the silk dressing gown that slips down to bare tanned skin as harsh against Jimin’s face as a winter wind.

“I’m sorry,” he gasps. Fists his hands in the back of the dressing gown so they don’t give him away by wandering. “I — I’m sorry, I’m sorry —”

He can’t stop. Hoseok tries to shush him, to console him, but Jimin runs his voice ragged on apologies that don’t mean anything, that remind him horribly of Yejun, screaming in a locked room, until Jimin could hear the second his throat tore and started spilling blood down his throat. He’d listened to that from Hoseok’s bed.

“Don’t be sorry,” Hoseok tells him, over and over. He sounds like he doesn’t know what else to say. “It’s not your fault, don’t apologize, Jimin-ah, come on.”

Neither of them believe that one. Jimin listens to Hoseok lie, and tries to pretend that it doesn’t hurt to know that soon, he won’t even have this anymore. Sooner than later, the Empress is going to find out. Sooner than later, Jimin is going to die, and it’s going to hurt, and Hoseok won’t even be able to stop it.

He’s crying, he thinks, because he’s mourning himself already.

The tears stop eventually. And Jimin pulls away, and doesn’t meet Hoseok’s eye, and vanishes into a freezing shower that only makes it more obvious how swollen his eyes are, how red his nose and eyelids and ears have gotten in his hysteria. He breathes against the mirror for longer than he should as Hoseok takes personal calls and briefings in his sitting room. He checks the time over and over, counting down the seconds until they have to leave to make the next engagement, the next party or luncheon or meeting that requires the prince of the city’s gracious time.

It’s never as long as he needs it to be. He breathes out, sends one last gust of fog to cover his own reflection, and prepares himself for the afternoon.

And that night, after hours spent lingering in Hoseok’s shadow, Jimin slips out of the inner palace and gets to work.

♜

Once, when Taehyung was still small enough to fit on his mother’s hip, he asked her whether he could be a sentinel. She was fond of the stories, of the white-robed strangers who sang on streetcorners when she was young, and she had poked his nose and said you can be anything you want.

At the time, Taehyung had believed her. Of course he had — he doesn’t know how old he was, but he thinks about it as he stares at the sloped ceiling of Namjoon’s servants quarters, sheets tangled around his legs from half a night of unrestful sleep. He remembers laughing first, because he knew that she was going to. He remembers asking her why she was so happy all the time, and remembers her hand, warm and callused, guiding his toward her stomach.

He rolls over. Shoves his face into his pillow. Turns his attention inward, to the city he can feel creeping back in like a river overflowing its bank after a storm.

Jeongguk and Namjoon haven’t asked, but their concern radiates from the sitting room. Taehyung can’t hear them, like Jimin might, but he could tell exactly when Namjoon told Jeongguk about the ball when the hanok flared with anger and upset and fear. That more than anything had deterred him from rolling out of bed to find breakfast; he doesn’t want to answer questions, but more than that he doesn’t want to have to offer reassurance.

Instead, Namjoon pokes his head through the door with a wave of near-condescending sympathy, and tells Taehyung he can have the day off.

“Okay,” Taehyung says, entirely listless. Namjoon leaves a space in the conversation for argument, but he’s too wrung out to fill it.

“Oh. Okay. Yeah, just... I should be at the library after lunch. If you need anything, just comm us.” Namjoon shifts. “Taehyung-ah—”

“Thanks, hyung,” Taehyung says, and turns his back to the door.

It doesn’t take long for the two of them to bustle out of the house, but even by then Taehyung can feel more of the city; it takes him a few seconds, instead of minutes, to lose them in the wave of emotion that exists outside the scant protection of their house.

Come find me, he’s asked Jimin, what feels like over and over again. Not just because Jimin needs it. If he let himself, Taehyung could lose the whole day here, rolled over back flat on his back to stare up at nothing, to let himself get reeled in like a fish on the hooks of anyone who turns down their street. If he let it, Namsan could wash him away.

Taehyung, as much as he wants to when it hurts this much, doesn’t let it.

He gets up slowly. Jeongguk left him a platter with breakfast in the kitchen — a tasteful, modern room so different from the rustic counter and agungi that were all they had to work with back at the temple. Here, he thinks he could stretch out more. Could figure out how to cook without Jeongguk standing over his shoulder, pulling faces and dropping ingredients into the wok whenever Taehyung said go.

The hanok feels too big, suddenly. Or Taehyung feels too small.

He finishes a third of the breakfast, tugs on his shoes, and leaves. There’s a protected forest a mile or so away, and though there’s no river cleaving through this continent, the closer Taehyung gets the better he feels, the clearer his mind becomes. He has room to think, when the city is farther away and the wind is cold at his back; he passes through an ancient, wrought-iron gate, from cobbled stones to dirt footpaths, from engineered natural walkways to true forest going brown with the fall.

There are a few signs and hammered-in trail maps, a particularly prominent one warning him to watch for bears or wolves.

According to Namjoon’s history textbooks, there were tigers on Onjo, once. They went extinct long before the Twins did, hunted or driven out by the mining operations that settled most of their moon. Taehyung wonders — if Jimin has been out here, in this forest. If Jimin liked it, or if it was just the same torture as the city.

He’s too cold to linger, as much as he wants to. The whole day feels like a daydream until he makes it back to the outskirts of the city, Jimin’s gloves keeping his hands the warmest part of his body as he approaches the library.

It’s too early for Namjoon to be there, but Yoongi almost always is.

“Taehyung-ssi?” He says, when Taehyung knocks at the frame of his open office door.

“Scholar Min.” Taehyung sketches a bow and hopes idly that he doesn’t have leaves in his hair. “Is this a bad time?”

Min Yoongi pokes glasses Taehyung hasn’t seen before up his nose and blinks like he’s coming up from the bottom of a river. From what Taehyung can see of the scroll in his hand, he’s looking at musical notation, a notepad to his side crammed with his handwriting.

“Oh,” Yoongi says, blinking hard. And he gestures Taehyung in, toward a cushion on the other side of his desk that’s currently occupied by a stack of books and boxes and a few drawstring pouches. “Yes, come in, feel free — just shove some of that stuff over. Sorry for the mess, Taehyung-ssi.”

“I’m the one imposing.” But Taehyung does, after a moment of hesitation, shift aside the pile, so that at least half of him can fit on the cushion.

“I assume this isn’t a social call.” Yoongi sets aside his glasses, carefully rolls up the scroll. Taehyung can see his notes from here but can’t read a word, the characters too small and rushed to be able to make out from this far away, much less upside down.

“No. It’s not.” Taehyung is too tired to deflect, and for once someone’s in front of him who seems willing to talk to him straight. Yoongi spreads his hands, a silent invitation, and so Taehyung sucks in a deep breath through his nose and asks —

“I’d like to know about Jimin and the prince.”

Yoongi goes still. His hands fold under his chin, elbows propped on the table. He’s looking at Taehyung like Namjoon sometimes did, back when he was still working on his first degree. Like Taehyung has asked him the right kind of question, or Taehyung has become the right kind of question, and he’s projecting a placid curiosity that almost, almost masks the sadness and concern lodged in the pit of his chest.

“What about them?”

“You said one day, Jimin was just there. But — Yoongi-ssi, why? Where was he before that?”

Before he answers, Yoongi stands up to close the door. He lingers in the doorway for a moment, glancing down the hall, before he slides it shut and rejoins Taehyung at the desk.

“You haven’t asked him?”

Min Yoongi isn’t difficult to read — no one is for Taehyung, these days — but he’s calmer than most of the people Taehyung has met here. His emotions are more like a lake than a river; placid, difficult to disrupt, swelling instead of crashing over themselves. It makes being in a room with him almost entirely bearable.

“I know pieces of it,” Taehyung says. “But like you said. He’s not doing well. I just want to understand better.”

Yoongi sighs. He shakes his head, just a little. Taehyung doesn’t press further; he knows he’s going to get what he wants. And so he watches, silent, as Yoongi pulls out a tablet from one of his desk drawer, skims through the interface, and pulls up a photograph.

“Look,” he says, and hands the tablet over.

It’s Yoongi. Yoongi, round-cheeked with an unflattering haircut, no more than thirteen years old, standing next to an equally baby-faced prince of Namsan. They’re both making faces at the camera; they’re both wearing school uniforms that Taehyung doesn’t recognize but understands, implicitly, must have been more expensive than what he ostensibly makes in a month as Namjoon’s aide.

“Jimin was here,” Yoongi says, and taps a finger in the empty air next to the tablet’s border. “Just at Hoseok’s side. But he wasn’t allowed to be in the pictures.”

Taehyung tries to picture Jimin at eleven or twelve years old. He finds that he can’t manage it. Jimin’s cheeks are so hollow, his wrists so slight, all of him dangerously delicate, that any attempt to conjure him as happy and well-fed as these two children look only leaves Taehyung’s mind blank. Yoongi feels so sad, or maybe it’s just Taehyung, realizing that Jimin’s youth didn’t even leave him with a scar to nurse.

“He went to school with us, mostly. I remember... he did assignments, and went to class, but he was never allowed to leave Hoseok. Not for projects or play or anything. And the instructors treated that like it was normal. They were told he was Hoseok’s whipping boy, or something like it.” Yoongi uses the old word for it, one that Taehyung only knows from Namjoon’s historical texts, old journals from Amnok’s ancient royal temple.

“I don’t know where he was before that for sure, Taehyung-ssi, you have to understand. Not even Hoseok talks about it, if he even knows. But the instructors — from what they used to say, it sounds like he was picked because no one would miss him, if they even noticed he was gone.”

“I see,” Taehyung says. The tablet screen goes black. He hands it over, because there’s no point looking at the picture for longer now that it’s seared behind his eyelids. “And now he’s — something else.”

“Yes.” Yoongi puts the tablet away, and now he won’t meet Taehyung’s eyes. There’s guilt welling up from the bottom of that lake, slow, like a current of poison. “He does work for the Empress, Taehyung-ssi. Everything else is to distract from what he can do, when she sets him to it.”

Taehyung remembers the back corridor of a banquet on Obara. Jimin’s horror and disgust and loathing at a stranger’s hands under his clothes, his eyes wide in the darkness. The bruises ringing his throat for more than a week after.

“He belongs to Hoseok because the Empress tells him to. He guards him because he couldn’t survive without him, however that worked between them.” Yoongi leans in close. He speaks in barely more than a whisper, as Taehyung leans in to match him, as he tastes Yoongi’s nerves and resolve on the tip of his tongue. “Listen to me. If you want to help him, you can’t do it anywhere the Empress can get to him. He’s not just a bodyguard, Taehyung-ssi, and he’s not the whore the court calls him. He’s valuable. Understand?”

Taehyung understands perfectly. He wishes, with a sinking dread in the pit of his stomach, that he didn’t.

“Thank you for your time,” he says, and knows Yoongi hears the crack in his voice because he gets a flash of pity, of hope and sadness and regret.

And then he retreats, like a coward, back to Namjoon’s office, where he sits with his head between his knees and his mind alternatively racing and horribly blank, until Namjoon and Jeongguk unfold him and stick a research paper in his hands and, extremely politely, wait to ask him the questions he can feel burning inside them.

For a few hours, Taehyung distracts himself with the empire’s expansive archive, until he gets a message from an unknown source that buzzes at his wrist until he opens it to read — almost nothing. A string of coordinates, and a time.

Meet me, is the caption.

Hours later, long after Namjoon is asleep and snoring in the main suite but before Jeongguk makes his way to bed, Taehyung pulls on Jimin’s gloves and Namjoon’s down jacket, and wraps a scarf Sister Shin knit for him before she died around his neck and over his mouth.

Jimin is waiting for him, bundled and desperate at the wrought iron gate to the protected forest. For the first time, he’s done what Taehyung asked. And as he walks through the freezing night, Taehyung turns over Min Yoongi’s words in his head, over and over, until they stop meaning anything at all. He tries, and tries, and keeps on failing to imagine Jimin, young. Jimin, happy.

“You came,” Jimin breathes out, when they’re close enough to touch.

“I promised, right?” Taehyung says, though he barely remembers the words.

“Yeah,” Jimin breathes. As Taehyung works one glove off. As he presses his fingers against Jimin’s cheek, his skin as cold and hollow as marble. “You did.”

♖

When the Empress handed down Jimin’s punishment, he doesn’t think she’d intended it to become a blessing. The nights are cold, yes, and without the buzz and glamor of a royal event it’s harder to track down and overhear the information she wants, but Jimin can’t make himself hate the hours he spends outside of Hoseok’s rooms, prowling the streets of the inner palace and its surrounding villages, because —

“Jimin-ah,” Taehyung murmurs, and pulls him in for a kiss.

Jimin gets lost in him. Or he gets lost without him, or he just lets himself forget that this alone could get him killed if anyone saw them, recognized him, passed the information along. He’d written up his report in his head before he even reached the gate to the outer palace, and he knows there’s nothing left for him to hear this far away from the inner walls, but there’s something tight and anxious in his chest that Taehyung’s touch is pulling out, picking at like a hangnail.

“Hey,” Taehyung says again. He’s pulled away, just barely, and Jimin looks without meaning to at the shine of spit on his lips. His blown pupils, swallowing up irises Jimin can’t pick out fibers of. He can barely see at all, in the dark, with Taehyung’s wrist pressed against the back of his neck where he’s started reaching, automatically, to pull him in. “Jimin-ah. I asked what you were thinking about.”

“Hm?” Jimin tries to let it sound light, easy, and knows he fails completely when Taehyung pulls away further. He curses himself, trying to pull Taehyung back in; it’s one thing for Taehyung to explain, over and over again, and another for Jimin to see the proof of his own transparency.

“Hey, I’m not — I just wondered. I’m sorry.”

Taehyung uncurls his gloved hand from Jimin’s neck. It’s not snowing yet, but the autumn’s first cold snap has blanketed the city in quiet. Jimin catches Taehyung’s hand, just to look at his own gloves, the way the suede has molded to Taehyung’s joints. Taehyung lets him, breathing out clouds of frost into the scant inches between them. Jimin thinks — the gloves fit Taehyung better than they’d ever fit him. He doesn’t want to think Hoseok’s name, but it’s too late.

“I’m sorry,” he echoes. He doesn’t look up. “I just. I shouldn’t be here.”

He’s been here every night for the last week, though. He’s closing in on the last scraps of an arms deal between an Obaran weapons manufacturer and some planets on the outer ring of the empire. He’s already caught up on the Empress’s interest in a particular voting bloc in the Senate, and it took him less than two days to puzzle out what he’d missed from the court’s usual banquet office, and still Jimin keeps stretching this out. He uses a public comm station near the palace kitchens to tell Taehyung to meet him every night, and he draws out his surveillance to take him further and further away from the palace’s inner rings, and he lets himself believe that the Empress knows him well enough to believe he wouldn’t put himself in any more danger.

He hopes because he has to. Because he doesn’t know if it’s true, and he doesn’t know if there have been eyes on him this whole time, and he doesn’t know if he’ll show up one night to an empty forest because someone caught him, and reported him, and the Empress decided to remove his distraction — the threat he’s turned Taehyung into —

“Jimin!” Hands, gripping his shoulders. Taehyung’s breath warm against his cheek. Jimin gasps, his breath short, his chest tight and aching. “Calm down — fuck, hey. Look at me.”

For most of Jimin’s life, that order has been one he’s never thought to refuse. He looks up on instinct, in just enough time to see the awful grimace that pulls at Taehyung’s mouth.

Taehyung doesn’t seem to know what else to say. Jimin doesn’t know what to tell him. There’s a barrier between them that’s been broken for days, now, but Jimin still hasn’t figured out how to climb over the wreckage. How to talk to Taehyung like he wants to, how to tell him what’s wrong without being terrified of the consequences.

“I wish,” Taehyung says, and then stops. Jimin can breathe again. He can barely see through the dark to the slope of Taehyung’s nose, the quirk of his lips into something too sad to call a smile. Jimin hums, questioning. Encouraging. Taehyung hasn’t let go of him, and it’s only that tether that keeps Jimin from being swallowed by the new, dark quiet of the night at his back. “I wish I could show you our temple.”

“On Onjo?” Jimin exhales it, and leans in to press his forehead close to Taehyung’s just to watch the way Taehyung bows down a few centimeters to meet him, like he doesn’t have to think about it. Like he knows when Jimin will move before he’s even started.

“Mm. It might be empty by now, but. I’d like you to see it.”

“I’d go with you,” Jimin says, the closest he’s ever been to treason. “If I could.”

Taehyung has given him bits and pieces of his world this week. Jimin knows about the shuttered temple in the heart of Onjo’s forest. He knows that the Twins were the only family Taehyung had growing up. He knows that they sent Taehyung out into the galaxy to find him, and to stop the empire from defiling their gods.

Jimin had told him that he didn’t have to worry about that. The Empress wrote him off as a failed experiment a long time ago.

“But you can’t,” Taehyung says. Jimin had left it hanging in the air between them, but closes his eyes to try and make it feel less true.

“I can’t,” he agrees.

Taehyung, at least, is kind enough not to say the rest. That Jimin isn’t much better than a dog on a leash, and it’s only his own failure that gave him enough time to slip the lead and vanish into the forest.

He’s been gone too long already. He has to leave before he can convince himself that Hoseok won’t notice, that he doesn’t care what Jimin does on his mother’s orders. Taehyung sighs, and leans in to kiss him again, and Jimin’s no guide but he can’t be imagining the resignation on his breath, the regret pinched in his brows when he pulls away.

“Tomorrow?” Taehyung asks, like he has every night.

His bare wrist drags across Jimin’s neck. His braid, slung over one shoulder, has come loose from Jimin’s hands in it; a few strands cover his cheek, his jaw. Jimin shudders, and the world stays still and quiet and peaceful, and he does his best to reflect that back at Taehyung. A reprieve for the both of them, a regular salve for Jimin’s pain that he can’t make himself refuse. A kindness that makes him almost love the city, if this is how Hoseok has been able to move through it his whole life.

“Tomorrow,” Jimin agrees. He tries not to let it sound like a promise.

♖

Tomorrow dawns windy and gray, and Hoseok spends most of the morning grumbling out his windows and waving off attendants trying to coax him out of his rooms.

“I’m tired,” he tells one. “My head hurts,” he tells another, and then has to walk it back when she immediately offers, deferential, to summon a physician. Jimin watches all of this quietly from his place on a low futon; Hoseok joins him sporadically, slinging his legs over Jimin’s lap until he sighs and gets up again. Once to fling open the doors to his expansive closet, once to rifle through the papers on his rarely-used desk, once just to do a lap around the room before he returns.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok moans, when midmorning has come and gone and the most productive he’s been has been signing a few charity waivers from his sitting room. “What do I want, hm? You look like you know.”

Jimin blinks, confused, until he realizes — he does know. He thinks of the word guide, and the fact that Hoseok isn’t his. He remembers Taehyung’s reaction to the city after days and days of separation. Maybe Hoseok can’t help Jimin the way he used to any longer, but here’s a scrap of proof that Hoseok can still read him easily, maybe because of something innate, or maybe just because he’s known Jimin for all the parts of his life that matter.

“Maybe a walk, hyung?” Jimin suggests, purposefully light. “We still haven’t returned our library books. If we leave it any longer, Yoongi-hyung will probably summon us himself.”

Hoseok heaves a dramatic sigh, wriggles himself into Jimin’s space, and tugs gently at a strand of Jimin’s hair that’s grown long enough to tickle the top of his shoulder. Jimin lets himself look distracted from the book in his lap — an old, familiar copy of Hoseok’s favorite novel, that Jimin pulled off the shelf a few hours ago just to have something to look at.

“You’re right,” Hoseok grumbles, though he sounds much less aggravated than usual. “As usual. Come on, come on, I should get dressed.”

Jimin keeps his mouth shut. If Hoseok wanted, he could stroll through the Senate chambers in nothing but his fox-fur slippers, and in less than twelve hours half the city would be declaring nudity the newest fashion. He lets Hoseok drag him into the walk-in anyway, runs his hands across what seems like an endless expanse of Hoseok’s favorite wools and linens and silks while humming along to anything Hoseok tells him. His hands don’t hurt when he touches. His stomach still feels uncomfortably full, from when he’d been able to choke down a steaming bowl of dakjuk while Hoseok was too distracted to notice.

“Pretty,” Hoseok says, and Jimin comes back to himself with a jolt. He’s holding onto a dark red overcoat, felted alpaca wool lined with silk, one he hasn’t seen Hoseok wear in at least two years. Jimin drops the sleeve, but it’s too late; Hoseok is looking at him, perfectly sincere like he hasn’t been since — well. Since Jimin isn’t sure when, exactly. “Want to wear it, Jimin-ah?”

“Oh, no,” Jimin murmurs. “Isn’t it supposed to rain, hyung?”

That gets him a sigh, and a different, rain-proofed coat tossed to him instead. Jimin is already dressed, but he folds it over his arm obediently and helps Hoseok into his layers, tying him into his jeogori and setting out a pair of waxed leather boots.

“Rain,” Hoseok scoffs. “Almost makes you miss the desert planets, hm?”

Jimin tries not to let himself wince. The desert planet they’d visited on tour had been a nightmare, even with Taehyung’s generosity.

Even as Jimin hears rain start to beat against the roof of the palace, Hoseok’s mood keeps climbing. He sends off a few missives with attendants before they slip out of the royal quarters with a bag of library books slung over Jimin’s shoulder. From there it’s easy. From there, Hoseok distracts himself with the busy work of the Namsan streets: he helps an ajumma ease up a tarp over her yarn shop’s exterior table, he twirls water from his hooded rain-shawl onto a group of splashing children. He seems nearly manic with the energy of the city, even as icy, sleeting rain covers them all in what’s bound to turn eventually into a crystalline layer of ice.

And Jimin — Jimin gets distracted. Jimin, for the first time, is enjoying the rain. Instead of an ugly, debilitating addition to the city’s overload of information, Jimin is eased enough from days and days of Taehyung’s touch that instead, he can appreciate the repetition of rain striking ceramic roof tiles; the rich smell of damp soil that lingers from the city’s carefully cultivated greenery, the delight of a slip of wind darting between his layers to send a chill from his spine to his fingertips.

Jimin gets distracted. Jimin watches Hoseok linger in a market sector’s arched entryway, chatting with a palace-contracted glassmaker and her apprentice. Jimin doesn’t realize until — until —

He tastes a lick of burning metal. Hears not the start of a blaster’s whir, but the firm clunk of the trigger. Feels the heat of the air at the muzzle, the way all the air around it is puckered and distorted as the shot rings out from a rooftop Jimin hadn’t been looking at.

It’s too late to get Hoseok out of the way. Even as Jimin moves, reflexes too sharp to feel human even to himself, he knows there’s no way he can keep Hoseok safe by moving him. He’s flung suddenly into perfect, crystal clarity: not overstimulation, but a concentration Jimin has never, ever felt before. After days of calm, of a lack of pain he’s almost grown used to, Jimin is rested and restored and now moving faster than he’d known he could — it’s like he can see the warp of air that comes before the bolt, like he can see where it will hit before it halves the distance between shooter and Hoseok’s unprotected chest.

Jimin doesn’t think. He only reacts, and puts himself between his prince and the single shot.

And so, before anyone else on the street has time to react, Jimin crumples at Hoseok’s feet with fire bursting at his shoulder, smoldering through the skin — to the bone — he think’s he’s screaming from behind gritted teeth, all his years of pain training fading to distant memory as Hoseok drops to cling to him. As Jimin hears, distantly, screaming. A stampede of feet. A single, frustrated growl as — maybe — a sniper fails to find another shot.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok is saying. “Hey. Hey. Jimin, come on, open your eyes. Open — good.”

Jimin blinks at him. He’s not crying but his face is wet. He’s not crying, but — he’s cold. He’s soaked through with water and mud, another pair of Hoseok’s nice gloves covered in the filth of the streets. He’s cold but he’s burning, he can feel his own flesh being eaten away by the corrosive blast, can smell himself catching alight under the singe of silk and wool.

“Hyung,” he says. His throat rasps. Hoseok’s hand is bare on his face, anxiously roaming between his cheek and his forehead and his neck and back again, Hoseok’s brow furrowed, his lower lip caught under his teeth. He’s wet too, hood pushed back, water running in rivulets down his face.

“Keep your eyes open,” he instructs, like he knows Jimin can’t disobey. He probably does, Jimin thinks.

“Okay.” He’s not sure he says it aloud. Keeping his eyes open is hard when there’s rain in them. He tries to grab Hoseok’s hand, confused why he can’t seem to until he realizes — his hand hasn’t moved. His arm won’t lift. He can barely feel his fingers through the mess of pain and shock and burning at his shoulder, just below his collarbone.

When he’d pressed his palm to Taehyung’s stomach, he hadn’t thought that it felt like this.

Hoseok is still talking. Jimin watches his lips move instead of listening to the words, as capitol guards approach to form a protective circle around Hoseok, energy shields up in a ring of blue that makes Jimin’s eyes cross with the effort it takes to see through it. As all the paramedics who aren’t tugging Jimin onto a stretcher hover around Hoseok like fruit flies trying to see if he’s hurt.

I’m fine, Jimin sees Hoseok snap at a young woman trying to coax him into a blood pressure cuff. She bows away, pink cheeked, and Hoseok wilts in response, and Jimin only sees him open his mouth maybe to apologize before he’s hauled into the emergency streetcar, surrounded by the green and blue uniforms of medical staff who, at this point, are already halfway through cutting off his clothes.

When he stops being able to see Hoseok, the pain rams back into him with such intensity that it makes his chest go tight. Jimin wheezes something unintelligible out, tries to sit up, to reach for the closed doors, but too many hands hold him down, strapping him in for the ride.

He doesn’t stop struggling. The pain is so awful that he can’t even think anything but Hoseok’s name, that he can’t stop trying to claw his way back to him, hoping even as the engine rumbles to life beneath him that the doors will fling open, that Taehyung — that Hoseok will come and take the pain away again.

“Put him down,” someone says. The first thing Jimin hears clearly — and then, abruptly, the last.

The drug they give him doesn’t knock him out. Not entirely, at least, the way they think it does; Jimin isn’t fighting it, but it keeps him swimming just above unconsciousness. He can feel most of his limbs, loose and shuddering as the streetcar rumbles over pavestones. He can feel bright, frigid points of pain where his shoulder is being dressed. He can feel, startlingly, the vibrations of voices above him so precisely that he imagines in some drugged delirium that they almost form the shapes of the words themselves.

And he comes back to himself in a hospital bed, the sun setting through the rain out the window, entirely alone.

Jimin likes to think that his pain tolerance is better than it used to be. When he was a kid, when he was eleven and twelve and thirteen, he’d tapped out early and often while training with the capitol guard officer the Empress assigned to him. As the years crawled by he learned how to bear a shoulder pulled to the brink of dislocation, and the dull throb of black eyes or bruised bones, and as he lies alone in a private suite of the palace district’s public hospital, Jimin admits to himself that most of what his trainers called tolerance was a front.

What he’d really done, any time he’d been knocked down in training, was focus on anything that hurt more. Whether it was the very fibers of his uniform or the smell and taste of layers and layers of sweat and blood and skin covering every inch of the ring — there was always something else that kept him from really caring what was being done to his body. So it’s not that he can tolerate the burn in his shoulder even with a sling cradling his arm or the hot numbness that sinks down through half his chest. It’s just that it’s so much easier to pretend that the only thing that exists is the glint of shiplights through the fuzz of rain, the hospital a few kilometers from the private shipyard that Hoseok’s handful of rec vehicles are parked and maintained at. If the wind blows the rain just right, Jimin can even make out the embossed names of a few luxury atmospheric resorts jettisioning toward the night sky.

He’s still looking out the window when Hoseok bursts in, but only because he knows Hoseok doesn’t want to think about Jimin’s senses right now.

“There you are!” Hoseok almost scoffs it. Jimin blinks, tears his eyes away from the pitch-dark sky, and watches as Hoseok shakes out his damp, frizzing hair onto the nearly-clean wall beside him. “Jimin-ah, come on, I got you transferred back home.”

Back home probably means one of the palace’s on-call doctors. If Jimin’s lucky, it’ll be one who’s treated him before — the handful of times he’s been hit by something meant for his prince, the physicians have been in turn condescending or abrasive when they realize who they’ve been summoned to fix. Instead of trying to argue, Jimin just disconnects the pads of his heart monitor, stands up, and takes the bag of clothes Hoseok tosses onto the foot of the bed.

He gets almost entirely dressed without incident — until his thumb snags on a hem of the pale green robe, jerking his sling, and he can’t bite back the cry of pain that tears out of him.

“Oh — oh, baby, let me.” Hoseok’s voice is sticky-sweet. His hands are gentle as he drapes the robe over Jimin’s bandaged shoulder, and then wraps him in a raincoat for good measure.

“Thank you,” Jimin rasps. He doesn’t know what else to say that won’t give away that the burn in his cheeks is from humiliation, and not exertion. Hoseok gives him a sad, dimpled smile that tells Jimin he already knows.

And then, like it hadn’t happened at all, Hoseok starts to talk. He guides Jimin gently and slowly down the halls of the civilian hospital, pausing only briefly to acknowledge passers-by — partly because Jimin had heard him at the entrance a solid hour before he burst into the room, and had spent that time going between patients and medical staff with kid words and blessings and a cheerful smile. He’d bought himself a half-serving of privacy, to catch Jimin up on the end of his evening and the aftermath of the attack.

“No one found the sniper,” he sighs, as they pass another cross-section of the hospital halls and another unsubtle pair of the queen’s personal bodyguard contingent. “Eomma was furious — not at you, Jimin-ah, of course, but — really! A sniper, all the way to the heart of the city!”

The worst part is that Jimin isn’t even surprised. No one in the city is stupid enough to talk about ordering hits on royalty out loud, too paranoid even in their dozens of miniature rebellions and corruptions, but — Jimin has been walking the streets at night for a week now. He’s been listening in on conversations for much, much longer than that. He knows as well as and maybe better than Hoseok the way the grinding machine of imperial politics works, and how the Empress listens and takes his reports and sometimes doesn’t even act on it.

Hoseok’s mother hasn’t lived this long by acting on every piece of intelligence she collects. She might not have known Hoseok would be a target this time, but the assassination attempt reeks of a well-laid trap, of just-taken bait.

By the time they make it into the royal apartments, Hoseok has wound his chatter down to that too.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” he says, after he’s bullied Jimin into sipping at some vegetable broth and a glass of cold water. They’re both on his bed, but Hoseok is perched on the side, alternatively fluffing up pillows to fit under Jimin’s elbow or trying to adjust the drape of the fleece robe he’d bundled Jimin into. He doesn’t quite meet Jimin’s eye as he says it. “I tried to get her to tell me who was behind it — and I know she could, but — ah, you understand how she is.”

A beat of silence. Jimin stares down at his fingers, the set resting in his lap instead of held against his chest.

“I’m just so tired of not knowing.” For once, Hoseok goes completely still. His back is to Jimin, his hands resting on the mattress on either side of him. His profile is turned against the light, so that all Jimin can see is the regal slant of his nose. The shadowed flecks of each separate eyelash.

“All she ever tells me is that I’m the face of the dynasty,” Hoseok continues. “Three assassination attempts in the last year — it’s never been like this before. I’m sick and tired of being bait for her, when she won’t even tell you what we’re supposed to be looking for.”

Jimin looks down again. His chest feels hollow, yawning open with some horrible mix of emotions he’s too exhausted to name.

“You could have died,” Hoseok says, and he sounds sadder about that than he has any right to be.

And Jimin lets the silence fall thick and heavy between them, because there’s nothing that he can say to Hoseok that isn’t a variation on a theme. That’s okay, he thinks about saying. He can feel the shape the words would take on his tongue. It would be better than admitting that he almost wishes that he’d lost his arm entirely, just so the Empress might have offered to put him down neat and painless. It would be better than saying that if he’d been paying more attention, he would have had enough time to make sure the blaster burned clean through his heart.

Instead of saying anything, Jimin leans his head back against half a dozen pillows and looks up at the wooden beams that hold up the ceiling. He lets Hoseok putter around, finally putting in a summons for the doctor, taking a cup of tea from a silent attendant at the door. He keeps his eyes open, so that no one tries to touch him to wake him up when it’s time to be poked and prodded and sneered at again.

He tries not to think about Taehyung waiting alone in the freezing rain.

He fails.

♜

After a day and night of torrential, sleeting rain, Taehyung isn’t sure he’ll ever feel warm again.

Winters in the temple were cold, but manageable. They were far enough from the coast to be spared the worst of the damp, and not close enough to the mountains to get more than a light dusting of snow — one that Taehyung loved, for the handful of weeks it stuck around, for the way it dusted over Bo and Seonmul’s statues like a glistening shroud. But here, in the capitol, the first freeze comes on the tail of two days of sleet, and it covers the city in a shroud that doesn’t quite manage to dampen the press of the people against all of Taehyung’s attempts at shields.

And, on top of the cold, Taehyung is worried.

“He didn’t say anything?” Jeongguk asks, the second morning after Taehyung spent too many hours at the edge of the forest and came home with every inch of himself frozen down to his bones.

“I told you,” Taehyung says. He almost regrets telling Namjoon and Jeongguk about their meetings, about some of what happened after the ball, except that it feels like a weight has edged off his throat every time he looks at them. Keeping secrets has never been something the Twins asked him to learn, and it’s a relief to shed the idea that he should. “Everything was normal. He just didn’t show up.”

Namjoon’s fingers drum against the heavy tabletop. Breakfast has come and gone, dishes stacked on the tray they arrived on; its daily delivery is Taehyung’s favorite part of the city, he’s decided, even if it had been a late addition to their accommodations package. A gift, Namjoon had explained with pursed lips and obvious reluctance, from the royal household itself. Now, he stares down at the dregs of tea in his cup, and Taehyung watches him gnaw at his lower lip and feels him wavering in indecision until he can’t take it any longer.

“Spit it out, hyung.” Taehyung pushes away his own cup, which Jeongguk takes as an invitation to finish it. His knee is pressing against Taehyung’s under the table, and even though it means his anxiety and drowsiness are heavy in Taehyung’s head, it’s a comfort he hadn’t realized how much he’s missed.

“It’s — I just read the news, while you were bathing.” Namjoon says it like a wince, as he picks his tablet off the floor and holds it out. “I think — well. There’s some answers, between the lines.”

The dread that settles in Taehyung’s stomach is entirely his own, but it doesn’t stop him from grabbing the tablet with both hands. From skimming the headline, and choking down nausea, and reading as fast as he possibly can without skipping entire sentences. He can feel Jeongguk, leaning over, reading and jolting in shock.

Our prince Jung Hoseok, the publication calls him, more than once. Namsan’s heart and the city’s blessing, the dynasty’s jewel, targeted in a failed assassination closer to the heart of the palace than any since the Empress was a young woman. Taehyung skims the interviews from law enforcement, skips over the political musings entirely. He looks for a description of the event itself and finds nothing, nothing at all, until —

Emergency medical services retrieved one victim from the scene, though no fatalities have been reported and our prince remained unharmed. Undeterred from his humanitarian efforts, he visited the Hope Bridge emergency relief site early yesterday evening to assist staff in preparing Namsan for the winter ahead. Representatives of the Imperial family declined to comment for this developing story.

One victim. They didn’t even print his name, Taehyung realizes — and there’s no question in his mind who the victim had been. But there’s a vast chasm between the words that Taehyung can read just as clearly as Namjoon. That no fatalities were reported, but it doesn’t mean none occurred. Taehyung remembers on the Imugi, Jeonghwa shrugging off his questions about Jimin’s official title. His pet, or something. So vague, even among tenured court staff, that Taehyung has no doubt that the royal family wouldn’t think twice about sweeping his death under the rug.

His death. The thought leaves Taehyung’s frozen bones brittle and trembling. He has to put down Namjoon’s tablet before he drops it, and then can’t help himself from dropping his head into his hands. Jeongguk’s hand is as hot and abrupt on his neck like a brand, and Taehyung wants to tell him don’t, wants to explain that that’s where Jimin’s hands have started to creep at nights, unthinking and desperate as they kissed.

“I’m sure he’s okay,” Jeongguk says, apparently forgetting that when he touches Taehyung like this, Taehyung can practically taste the lie on his own tongue.

Namjoon, at least, has the grace to take back his tablet silently, offering nothing but a brush against Taehyung’s fingers to give him compassion, resignation, a firm taste of hope. And even that — it feels too grating, too abrupt, and Taehyung holds his breath and fights tears and tries not to think about Jimin flinching away from the texture of his own impossibly fine clothing.

When Jeongguk pulls away, even his leg shifting back into his own space, Taehyung fights the urge to follow him. It’ll only make him feel worse, trying to seek out comfort that Jeongguk can’t give; it’ll only make the guilt twist deeper into his gut.

“Look,” Namjoon finally says, low and generous. “I’ve got a lunch meeting with Kim Seokjin today by the Senate chambers. Why don’t you come, and we can poke around the palace district and see if we find the prince.”

It’s barely anything, a scrap of a plan, but it’s not as if Taehyung has anything else to do. He shoves aside the instinctive fear of proximity to the government; from what Jimin had explained to him, the council of governors lasts for another six days of constant conferences and meetings, and Taehyung has little to fear from following Namjoon to nonpolitical events. A meeting with Onjo’s Senator isn’t quite nonpolitical, but he trusts Namjoon to at least not lead him blindly into danger.

“Okay,” Taehyung breathes. He reaches out, in a moment of humiliating weakness, and brushes the side of his hand against Jeongguk’s, to drink in his familiar restlessness.

The longer they stay here, the more he thinks the Elders might have been onto something, sending Jeongguk away from the temple. It’s not that he seems happy here, or at least not without a complicated torrent of everything else, but — when he starts to fidget, when he gets agitated at being cooped up indoors, there’s more than a forest outside for him to disappear into. The city of Namsan, the sprawling palace complex that goes on and on until it dissolves into industrial sectors or spaceports or open forest, is a world unto itself. If Taehyung were more like Jeongguk, he thinks that he’d never want to leave.

He’s not surprised, then, when Jeongguk peels away from him and Namjoon halfway through their walk to the legislative district, distracted by someone waving him over from the open window of what looks like a bustling cafe. In the days since the weather turned, Namsan has transformed for the winter — the wide, open-skied footpaths that serve as the city’s main traffic corridors have been covered by high scaffolded ceilings held up by precisely painted wooden pillars; the stops for the streetcars that wind through the city have been adorned with space heaters and plexiglass walls; the doors of businesses stay closed to trap in heat, but glazed windows have been cracked to let in the fresh air. Jeongguk rejoins them with three small, precariously balanced cups of espresso, and beams when Namjoon wraps an arm around his shoulders in thanks.

“You’ve been making friends,” Namjoon teases, and Taehyung can’t help but smile at the rush of pride he feels from Jeongguk.

“Always,” he grins back, and takes that as his cue to start chattering about where he’s been recently. The friend who gave him the coffees apparently works nights bartending at a club in a more metropolitan part of the city, heavier with nightlife and hostels and trendy little stores, and Jeongguk has been spending some nights with a group of the bartender’s friends, and Taehyung listens to him talk and pretends like half the reason Jeongguk is telling them about it isn’t to distract Taehyung from — well. From everything, really.

It works, at least, even if Taehyung resents it. The heaters lining the most frequented footpaths make the cold almost bearable, and after two straight days of rain, the blue skies and bright sun bring Taehyung more relief than they should, and sooner instead of later he finds himself following Namjoon up the steps adorning a small hill to a bustling neighborhood at the foot of the palace itself, with the grand Senate hall looming at the end of the street.

Kim Seokjin meets them in a barbecue restaurant, instead of a historic office building, and Taehyung can feel that this more than anything is what endears Namjoon and Jeongguk to him before he even opens his mouth. Well — that and his perfect face, his beaming smile, his respectful bows as he ushers them to sit.

“I’ve been meaning to reach out for weeks,” the Senator explains, as the three of them get comfortable. “I guess that’s my fault, underestimating how much time I’d be spending in meetings and orientation — I’m sure you know, Scholar Kim, but there’s a lot more paperwork in this city than the dramas sold me on.”

Namjoon immediately waves off the honorific. “Ah, the glamor does wear off when most of my day is spent talking about my work instead of doing it.”

“Exactly!” Kim Seokjin’s eyes gleam. He starts grilling as Namjoon makes introductions, as sparse as he can leave them without drawing too much attention. Or — he tries, but Seokjin’s gaze lingers on Taehyung for longer than he’d like, a vague wash of curiosity winding out of him, across the table.

Namjoon introduces Jeongguk as his research assistant — Jeongguk has a two-year correspondence degree from the university on Amnok, and Taehyung had been too terrified to have his name in the public records — and Taehyung as his personal aide. Kim Seokjin has the power to look up their visas; Kim Seokjin has the power to get them revoked, or extended, or to flag Taehyung’s forged ID card to the imperial authorities.

“It’s good to see faces from home, even if we haven’t met,” Seokjin says. He inclines his head to each of them. Taehyung can feel a question coming and hopes against his own instincts that Seokjin won’t ask — that they can spend their lunch talking about Namjoon’s work and Onjo’s cultural legacy. But his hopes are dashed when Seokjin cocks his head, all nonchalance and a quick hand working the grill. “Sorry, Taehyung-ssi, but I have to say: you look quite familiar. Did you grow up in Tamjin?”

Onjo’s population, last Taehyung heard, was just over ten million people. Tamjin is their second-largest city, at just under a million residents. Taehyung doesn’t know what answer would get Seokjin off his back — if he moved to Tamjin when he was elected, or if he went to the same primary school Taehyung did, just a few years above him, always in the periphery of politics and the national news cycle.

“Only for a few years,” Taehyung chokes out, and hopes that he sounds less strangled than he feels. He looks down at the table but can’t stop feeling Seokjin’s eyes on him, can’t stop noticing Namjoon’s hesitation, Jeongguk’s protective nerves, the petty worries and amusements of the dozens of people around them.

“Ah, it’ll come to me!” Seokjin says, after Taehyung fails to come up with anything else. “Yours is just a face I’d remember, I think.”

Taehyung tries not to flinch at that. Now that he’s seen his uncle, after years of avoiding newsreels and photos and his own memories, he can’t stop seeing it in the mirror. When he was young, his mother’s friends patted his cheek and told him how much he looked like her. He has proof, now, that he’s grown out of that mirror image more completely than he ever could have imagined. He wishes, so badly, that he hadn’t — or at least that he could keep living in ignorance for a while longer.

But the conversation moves on. Namjoon steps back in, to find out that Seokjin was just two years ahead of him in school; that Seokjin started his political career after successfully petitioning Amnok’s university system to open a location on Onjo, in their biggest city that until a handful of years ago, had only community colleges and an off-moon transfer system. That, at least, they knew; Namjoon had half-heartedly invited the two of them to a rally in Pyeonghae, and only sighed and clapped Taehyung on the back when he refused.

“I couldn’t hack it in academia,” Seokjin sighs, after they’ve finished their first few cuts of meat. “I mean, politics isn’t much better, but — I need the variety, you know? I can work on different projects with my staff, at least, instead of spending a few years on a book.”

“And I could never deal with politics,” Namjoon agrees. He, at least, has relaxed, while Taehyung is just barely managing not to throw up the meat Seokjin so politely grilled. “And, I mean, clearly you’re good at it. How have you found working with our esteemed governor?”

He puts just enough inflection into the phrase that Seokjin’s lips quirk up at one corner. He takes a sip of his beer, and then looks at Taehyung. And keeps looking, this time, his emotions as placid and peaceful as a lake. It’s not that Taehyung struggles to read him, but that even compared to Namjoon, whose composure and stability Taehyung has relied on since they were teenagers, Seokjin is just — calmer. Almost like the elders at the temple, not dulled by their long years but smoothed out by them, like stones wearing down at the bottom of the Tamjingang.

“Out esteemed governor,” Seokjin says, almost on a laugh. “He’s not the most approachable of men, is he? Funny thing, Namjoon-ssi — he asked me about you, too.”

Tension crackles across the table. Taehyung jolts before he even realizes he’s moved, spine straightening, elbows braced on the table to lean forward.

“Oh?” Namjoon says. He’s trying to sound casual but mostly he sounds like he’s choking. Jeongguk, the only one of them unfortunate enough to be sitting next to Seokjin, looks at Taehyung with wide eyes, all his weight shifted to one side, like he’d be ready to run if only one of them indicated he should. “I’ve never even spoken to him, Senator.”

“Seokjin, please.” His hands are spread, his face open, his eyebrows lifted in what might be concern, if Taehyung could push through his own frozen lungs and tight chest to confirm it. “No need for concern, Namjoon-ssi. I’m not in the habit of sharing personal conversations with Yeongsoo, and I certainly wouldn’t betray the confidence of any of my constituents. I’m just curious about why he’s so interested in you, though of course I understand if you’d rather not share.”

Namjoon’s leg shifts, to press his thigh against Taehyung’s. His hands are still and flat on the table, as Seokjin drops his gaze back to their lunch, picking up a second serving of beef and starting to prepare it. Taehyung closes his eyes, just for a moment, and listens to Namjoon instead of the frantic slam of his heart against his ribcage.

Trust me, he thinks Namjoon is saying.

So he does.

“I’m not sure,” Namjoon starts, slow and careful. “But perhaps it has something to do with my research?”

“Religion?” Seokjin asks; light, casual, glancing at Namjoon instead of Taehyung. “Of Amnok?”

“My unpublished research,” Namjoon corrects. “Into the Twins.”

Something ripples across that flat, even surface of Seokjin’s projection. He fills Jeongguk’s plate, and then Taehyung’s, and then Namjoon’s all in silence, as if on autopilot as his lips purse, as his eyes narrow. Taehyung can feel him thinking. Taehyung is perched on the very edge of his cushion, like getting closer to him will let him see through the reflection of light off a pond’s surface and to the layers of silt settled at the bottom.

“Such research seems difficult,” Seokjin says. Carefully articulated, carefully balanced. “When the governor has had all official records and investigations sealed. Even his own personal files are redacted — what few of them remain.”

“Remain?” Namjoon echoes. Seokjin smiles, a wry little twist of his lips.

“I studied information science and communications, Namjoon-ssi. I was an academic well enough to understand an archive, and to notice when someone is trying to cover up a gap.”

Taehyung meets Jeongguk’s eyes across the table. Both of them know, from stories a few elders had deigned to pass down, that the Twins used to be known throughout Onjo and even into Amnok. This was generations ago, before the systems nearest them had even begun trade with the Jung Dynasty — of course, even as the order shrank year after year, they would exist in records and art and histories that trickled through the cultural memory, ebbing and flowing with the decades. By the time the Twins chose to vanish from even Tamjin, the last holdout of pilgrimages to the city, those texts and stories and artifacts were as dead in the water as the temple library. But they should exist, somewhere, as easily accessible as any other religion Namjoon has excised from the annals of history.

“The sentinel project,” Namjoon says. Not an official title — the records Yoongi preserved were far too damaged for anything like that to have survived — but something they’ve started calling it in conversation. The sentinel project. The result: one man, the last holdout of a failed collaboration between Onjo’s first imperial governor and his Empress.

“Nothing of the kind exists,” Seokjin replies. “If it did, it was either never recorded or destroyed. No one from the Twins exists to confirm anything I might suspect, of course.”

His eyes turn to Taehyung, and the totem around his neck burns. It’s as if Seokjin is looking through the layers of clothing to draw Seonmul out as surely as Jimin had, with careful fingers and an unspoken, instinctive reverence. Taehyung wants to open his mouth and deny it, or to confirm it, but before he can even find his own voice in his chest, he feels it.

A click of recognition that’s so loud, so obvious, he’s surprised the whole restaurant doesn’t fall silent. Kim Seokjin looks at him and sees his father’s son. Taehyung stills, gone so cold so quickly that it feels like his breath has frozen in his lungs.

“At least,” Seokjin says. “That’s what I’ve assumed.”

The table is quiet. Taehyung waits for him to speak again; he waits for Seokjin to send an alert to his governor, since he’s so clearly discovered the reason for his interest in Kim Namjoon’s presence in the capitol.

Instead, Seokjin just gets back to eating. He’s enjoying the meal, his attention drawn away, and eventually he’s forced to break the silence he’d created by turning to Jeongguk and asking him if he’s had the chance to see more of the city, since he’s been cooped up in the Senate district since the moment he arrived. Taehyung white-knuckles his way through that conversation, watching the way Jeongguk’s body shifts from alarm to enthusiasm as he talks, the same way he’d gotten Taehyung through their walk not an hour earlier.

But before the lunch wraps up, the topic circles back around. The restaurant is emptier, though a few tables remain with similar meetings taking up the time of politicians and constituents and the endless parade of bodies needed to keep the empire running from day to day, and so Seokjin speaks softer.

“Look,” he says. “I’d love to talk more about the project you mentioned, Namjoon-ssi, but not here. And I’m afraid I don’t have much to add. I can illustrate the archival gaps, and some of the redacted documents left by my predecessor, but most of what I know is that there is an absence in the record. And that there is someone here, in the city, who might need help.”

“We know,” Taehyung says, before Namjoon can step in to add more words than that. Seokjin’s eyebrows rise, just barely. He’s not surprised, not manipulative or angry or anything else Taehyung could definitively name, but he is thinking, hard and concentrated and determined.

“Good, good — then I think we should schedule another meeting somewhere... quieter than this neighborhood.” Somewhere we won’t be heard, Taehyung understands. “I’ll send you my schedule, Namjoon-ssi?”

“I’m sure I can fit you in,” Namjoon agrees, wry. “Thank you for your time, Senator, really. It seems that our home has had quite a large impact on this corner of the empire, as much as I’m loath to admit it.”

“Strange,” Seokjin agrees, as they rise. “But I suppose it’s my job to keep us all safe in the aftermath.”

He emphasizes safe, and meets Taehyung’s eyes, and so as they part ways to leave the restaurant Taehyung touches Namjoon’s shoulder, falls back, and catches up with where Seokjin has already started to hurry back toward the looming Senate building.

“Taehyung-ssi!” Seokjin doesn’t feel surprised, but he feigns it well. “Did you need something?”

Taehyung looks at him for a moment, and tries to imagine Seokjin retreating to his quarters and informing on them. He can’t quite do it — he can’t quite reconcile Seokjin’s even, reassuring interiority with the sick resolution and triumph of that last night in the manor, of the cold-hot-overwhelming terror of staring down the muzzle of a blaster.

“Your governor,” Taehyung says. “Do you trust him?”

Seokjin blinks. His full lips flatten into a considering line, and he takes Taehyung by the sleeve to pull them out of the flow of foot traffic.

“He’s a competent man,” Seokjin admits. “I’ve known him most of my life. He married my mother not long ago — she’s been a partner of his from the finance industry since before his first election. As a politician, I respect him.”

He’s looking at Taehyung like he can see right through him. For the first time, Taehyung considers that maybe he can; in the last months, he’s learned of the existence of a sentinel he thought had gone extinct; he’s met a guide born in the heart of the palace. There are longer odds than Kim Seokjin being a guide. There are worse people who could have been chosen.

“There are questions I have about him. About his values, and his history. And if there are reasons for me not to, I would believe them.” Seokjin speaks lowly and clearly. “I attended a funeral, a very long time ago, for a tragedy I wish could have been avoided.”

Taehyung’s breath catches. He doesn’t know much of anything about the funeral. He had been in and out of a fever for weeks, had lost more time in those first few months than he cares to think about. He hadn’t even known, at first, that there had been a memorial at all; he read about it in a short news article on the fifth anniversary. That was when he learned the official story. That was when he learned that, officially, Kim Taehyung had been dead for years. That there was no identity for him to go back to, even if he hadn’t been too afraid to try.

His hand presses against his side, where scar tissue has had years to stretch and fade and work its way into his skin.

“I wasn’t there,” Taehyung says. It’s all he needs. Seokjin nods, and lets go of his jacket sleeve.

“I have to go.” He feels remorseful, and sad, and still so self-assured that Taehyung wants to claw at him and beg him to explain how. “I’m sorry, Taehyung-ssi. But when we meet again, I have an offer that I hope you’ll consider.”

And then he squares his shoulders, and puts a smile back on his face, and steps back into the crowd all rushing toward the heart of the capitol, suddenly as indistinguishable from them as a single pebble, smoothed and weathered, resting at the bottom of a rock-covered riverbed.

♜

They don’t find the prince or his shadow in the Senate district or its outskirts. They barely look, honestly; Taehyung gropes his way through the crowd, vaguely searching for any hint of the mass swooning the prince’s presence usually sparks, but there’s nothing there but the usual too-present clamor of the city. There’s nothing there but everything, but the pressure that buries him deep inside himself and leaves him too tired to try to surface.

Namjoon has the grace not to ask what he’d stopped Seokjin for, but when Taehyung starts to fall back just for some distance between himself and the steady trickle of bodies through the path, Jeongguk slows to meet him.

“What did you think?” He asks. A moment of silence, where Taehyung isn’t so much thinking as actively trying not to, and then he clarifies: “About Senator Kim, I mean. He seemed okay?”

Okay, Taehyung’s mind echoes back at him. He gives Jeongguk a shrug, a companionable knock of their shoulders together, buying himself time.

“I think so,” he finally manages. Jeongguk knocks him again, just a brush between the two of them. A scrap of hope shared, some of the confidence that even the turbulence of the last months hasn’t been able to shake from him. Jeongguk came to the Twins just over a year after Taehyung did; he showed up at their temple with nothing but the filthy clothes on his back, near-starving after weeks of travel from a remote mountain town and a fraudulent shipmaster on the Tamjingang, and still had energy enough to stubbornly outlast any attempts by the Elders to force him to leave, to make a life for himself in the city.

Taehyung thinks, in retrospect, that the only reason they let him stay was for Taehyung. That maybe, even as they retreated into themselves, his family looked at him and decided that it might be unfair, to raise one young man while turning away another.

“It seems like he wants to help.” A brush of their fingers together, and Taehyung practically hears it — let him, let him, let him.

The stifling anger of the Imugi seems years and years in the past. Jeongguk is pale from a lack of sunlight, but the city fills him with a purpose Taehyung is too scared, he realizes, to ever let himself grasp for. That’s the difference between them. Jeongguk, now that he’s not spending his days clinging to the Twins, begging their elders for permissions he’d never be given, is ready to fling himself into the world with open arms.

Taehyung, on the other hand, wants to run and run and never look back.

“I think he does,” he allows, and gets for his effort a small, beaming smile, one that takes over Jeongguk’s face and transforms him into a ghost of a happier past. A phantom of afternoons on the riverbank, of chores gambled over late-night card games, of a boyhood that’s been over for longer than Taehyung wants to admit.

They make their way out of the center of the city, and Taehyung catches up with Namjoon and tries to enjoy the frigid sunlight and the blessed absence of rain.

And then, instead of being found in his usual haunts, the prince comes to them.

He’s not rushing to meet them — he’s not looking for them at all. He’s talking to Yoongi on the carved stone steps of the library, sprawled in the sunlight like a cat, two squat electric heaters keeping his cheeks warm and flushed. He looks — subdued, somehow, even in a green-and-gold silk quilted coat, jewelry glinting at his ears and wrists and fingers. Even though whenever Taehyung sees him, the whole world seems to be warping toward him, a curved mirror angling to offer him its best reflection of the world, of the people who flock to him like moths to light.

But Taehyung doesn’t care about the prince’s faded luster, he can’t care, because —

Jimin is perched on a step three above his prince, head bowed. One sleeve of his obviously-borrowed coat is empty, and his left arm is cradled to his chest by a wrapped sling. Taehyung, without thinking or intending, strains toward him, and stops only because of Namjoon’s fingers caught hastily in the back of his jacket.

The prince — Jung Hoseok, jewel of the city — is looking at them. Jimin’s head stays bowed as the prince looks his fill, as Yoongi purses his lip and leans forward as if to try to intervene. But he only watches, lips pursed, head tilted. And eventually, after a tense moment, Namjoon lets them start moving again, putting himself in front of Taehyung. Paying attention to the politics, Taehyung supposes, and feels a hot burst of rage that he’s surprised to realize isn’t anyone’s but his own.

The prince raises a hand in greeting. Yoongi jerks his head to beckon them over. Before they can mount the few steps to reach them, the prince stands to brush himself off; Jimin stays seated, stays looking down into his own lap, stays muted and still in Taehyung’s chest.

Taehyung wants to run up and shake him out of whatever stupor clings to the both of them — Taehyung wants to grab him by the neck and vanish the throb of pain he can feel in his own shoulder. The smolder of blaster fire. The familiar stinging smell of antiseptic and burn ointment. Taehyung would take away every nerve from the pads of Jimin’s fingers to the tips of his toes just to make that pain go away for him. To remind Jimin that he’s a person, and not a body shield for the empire’s favored son.

“We were just leaving,” the prince says, after Namjoon’s politer-than-usual greeting. He offers a smile, and for the first time Taehyung senses something in him that isn’t a constant, placating brightness. It’s not something he can name; it’s something as instinctive as the gut reaction after smelling spoiled milk. Something has curdled in the prince, underneath the shining, handsome veneer. Taehyung blinks at him from behind and below Namjoon. The prince, in a rare moment of perception, shifts his gaze and blinks back.

For a moment, Taehyung observes him. He remembers the assassination attempt during the tour, though that had been mostly gossip fodder. The prince hadn’t seemed so solemn in its aftermath; he’d barely acknowledged that it had happened at all, and continued each stop on his tour like he’d never been targeted at all.

This is different. The prince has been dragged into the real world, despite the way the sunlight still seems to be trying to bend to his favor. Taehyung can feel himself being observed; for the first time, he considers what the prince — according to Namjoon and Jimin’s continued existence, a strong enough guide in his own right — might feel from him.

And then the moment breaks. The prince looks away, and Namjoon flicks his wrist, and Taehyung takes that as permission to skirt around the two of them, catching Yoongi’s eye as he and Jeongguk climb a few grand steps higher.

Jimin hasn’t looked up. Even Jeongguk is unsettled by his stillness — he steps away from them, toward where Yoongi has stayed seated while Namjoon and the prince complete whatever overly-elaborate, tense ritual they’ve created to soothe each other as sentinel and guide. And Taehyung, too confused and overwhelmed and always, always scared, doesn’t know if he’s allowed to sit to join him. So he just stands there, between Jimin and the clamor of the world, thinking about the word sentinel. About how, more often than not, it feels like he’s the one guarding Jimin; about how the empire’s meddling, the ill-fated sentinel project, has inverted the two of them.

He feels the echo of Jimin’s resignation and shame, a pit in his chest deep enough to swallow the whole planet, and thinks about hunting the forest for a smooth chunk of alabaster, and showing Jimin how to carve Bo from its solid weight.

“Goodbye, Namjoon-ssi,” Taehyung hears Jung Hoseok say, and turns his head just enough to see him offer out a hand to Namjoon. He sees Namjoon’s hesitation, before he reaches out and takes it; he sees the way Namjoon relaxes into the touch, and offers Hoseok the most genuine smile he’s capable of.

It’s only then that Jimin moves. He lifts his head, but Taehyung is in his way; instead of the prince he was looking for, he’s standing in Taehyung’s shadow, and Taehyung gets a close-up view of how sunken Jimin’s cheeks look. Of the dark hollows under his eyes, of the bloodless chap of his lips. Jimin has always been slight, has always been too thin and worn-looking at the seams, but there’s nothing left in his eyes besides exhaustion. He feels like a sigh turned person, like a gust of wind could send him fluttering off toward the mountains.

“Hey,” Taehyung says, and offers out his hand, gloved in suede and mink and Jimin’s own generosity.

Jimin stares at it. He shivers, the odd drape of his jacket baring a sliver of skin at the side of his neck.

When Taehyung blinks, he can see it burned against the back of his eyelids. Jimin’s bare, chapped hand, wrapping around Taehyung’s. His fingers brushing up against Taehyung’s wrist, giving and taking in turn. When Taehyung blinks, when he breathes, when his heart beats — he can feel how much Jimin wants it.

But Jimin only exhales a breath that lingers in the frigid air, clouding between them. Jimin averts his eyes, and presses one hand against cold stone to push himself upright. He sways, and Taehyung jerks forward on instinct, and Jimin steps back so quickly that he almost trips and goes sprawling up the slope to the building.

“Jimin-ah,” the prince says. Not a call to heel, like Taehyung has seen him gesture at before.

Jimin doesn’t meet Taehyung’s eyes. He just steps around him, head lowered, shoulders hunched to protect his injured arm; he just fits himself at his prince’s side, and doesn’t even meet his eyes, and he stands at a full attention that Taehyung can feel straining at his own ears, his nose, his lips.

The prince — Hoseok, Taehyung allows, a concession of humanity — stares at Taehyung. His eyes are wide, mouth pursed into a barely-open oh. His hand, which had started to drift up as if on instinct toward the back of Jimin’s neck, drops back down to his side. And Taehyung feels it — that same click of understanding that he’d felt from Seokjin across the lunch table.

For a moment, he thinks Hoseok is about to stride forward. To get in his face, to demand answers, to have Taehyung shoved onto his knees and dragged back to the palace for questioning. But there’s no one here to drag him; there’s only Jimin, exhausted and beaten. There’s only Yoongi, looking with a weary kind of acceptance at Jimin’s shrunken posture. There’s only Taehyung, too shocked to move, to defend himself, to do anything but try and shove at Hoseok in the only way he knows how.

So Taehyung pictures balling up everything he’s felt for Jimin in the last weeks, the months on the Imugi and late nights in the capitol and fleeting touches behind closed doors and turned backs. He can’t put a name to it. He can’t do anything but try to give Hoseok perspective on the magnitude of Jimin’s relief every time Taehyung reaches out and takes all his pain away. He can only flay himself open and show Hoseok how it feels when a city this size doesn’t hold an all-feeling guide up as its prize jewel, and instead tries to ground them into crowded oblivion.

Namjoon reaches out and touches the back of Hoseok’s hand, and Taehyung feels Hoseok in turn. The way Namjoon focuses him like a tuning fork, and Hoseok floods with shock and understanding in the split moment before he breaks his gaze and turns his back on all of them.

For a moment, even though he and Jimin hadn’t touched, the city recedes. Jimin tilts his head toward him, like he’s listening to all the parts of Taehyung he can’t hear from inside his own body.

And then —

“Come on,” Hoseok says. Throat rough, voice gentle. “Let’s go, Jimin-ah. Places to be.”

And the world, Yoongi’s sadness and Namjoon’s intrigue and Jeongguk’s seething, roiling envy, comes crashing back over Taehyung’s chest.

♖

Days pass. Jimin walks through them at Hoseok’s heels — from one location to the next, barely registering the chatter Hoseok inundates him with, barely letting himself think about anything but his job. It gets excruciating twelve hours after he leaves Taehyung on the library steps; it passes through unbearable and stops him from sleeping the day after that. He lies in Hoseok’s arms and stares up at the ceiling, or at the backs of his own eyelids and tries to stop himself from straining his ears, trying to twist himself through streets and neighborhoods to find the echo of Taehyung’s voice, of his breaths, of his heartbeat.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok says, the morning of the third day. A slow morning, after a harsh beginning of the week with press meetings and briefings and a particularly brutal afternoon spent with a group of Hoseok’s old university friends. But today Hoseok squirms around in his bed after a light, catered breakfast; he makes no move to get up, instead wrapping his arms around Jimin’s waist and looking up at him with wide eyes.

“Hm?” Jimin asks. He tries to force the sound into lightness, to match Hoseok’s energy, but — he’s so tired. Hoseok’s smile dims.

“I was just thinking — you know, it’s been so long since we had a quiet day.”

For Hoseok, quiet is relative. For Hoseok, crowds are where he shines, like a diamond turning to show off gleaming facets. Jimin thinks about that, instead of the way Hoseok’s weight feels worse than it ever has. Instead of how similar it feels to being pinned under an assignment, Hoseok’s head turning to rest against his stomach, the pressure of his heartbeat as painful as a sledgehammer to Jimin’s organs. His shoulder throbs in time with it, still cradled by the sling Hoseok won’t let him remove.

“Sure,” Jimin agrees. He can see out the window from here, into Hoseok’s private courtyard. The flowers have long gone dormant; the manicured stream and fountains have been drained for the winter; the giant ginkgo in the back corner, planted a thousand years ago by one of Hoseok’s esteemed ancestors, had burst yellow and dropped its leaves mere days before the Imugi docked. It’s one of Jimin’s great sorrows, today, that he won’t ever see that again.

He’s past the point of trying to assert anything with Hoseok. Whatever he suggests, Jimin agrees to; wherever he leads, Jimin follows without complaint.

“I ordered lunch in,” Hoseok is saying. His thumb rubs over Jimin’s hip, over the pure silk of his borrowed pants, and Jimin bites back a scream. “But after that, maybe — I know we don’t have much downtime, lately, but we could go pick up some new books. I’m sure Yoongi-hyung has a few he’s been waiting to recommend.”

The implication is unspoken, but Jimin turns his face into the pillow to hide from it anyway. Hoseok keeps — he keeps hinting at things, keeps giving Jimin long, mournful looks when he thinks he can’t see, keeps starting and deleting drafts of unsent messages on his tablet. And Jimin can’t keep ignoring it, not when the days keep ticking by with no relief, with the constant strain and burn of existing in the world. Jimin can’t stop himself from understanding that Hoseok already knows that Jimin is beyond his help. That Jimin’s senses aren’t his to soothe, that Jimin’s loyalties have been compromised so irreparably as to constitute treason against the crown.

He knows that there’s only so long Hoseok can let it know unspoken. He knows that the accusation is coming, that he only has until Hoseok can’t get away with ignoring it for another second. And then — and then what?

Hoseok is offering now, but what will he do when Jimin needs Taehyung’s gift every three days, every two, every handful of hours? Half a year ago, Jimin could barely tolerate a day parted from Hoseok’s side without collapsing. His tolerance is only better now because of the excruciating crawl of adjusting to what Taehyung could do for him, of weaning himself off of Hoseok’s touch without even intending to.

Princes take care of their things, the Empress had taught him. The kindest thing Hoseok could do now is stop trying to let Jimin have his treasonous crutch, because that will only make Jimin’s punishment worse.

And he knows the punishment is coming. As soon as he slips again — after another assignment, or assassination attempt, or avoidable accident in the city — the Empress will take Jimin back, and she’ll do what she’s always promised she would if Jimin were to outstay his usefulness to her.

He can’t follow Hoseok to the library, and look Taehyung in the eye, and pretend like he’s anything other than a corpse already burnt to nothing more than embers and smoke. He can’t keep acting like anything he does matters, and he can’t let himself be drawn in with promises of comfort, of escape and security and a quiet temple in an alien forest, because it hurts worse knowing that at any moment, the eyes of the city might sell him out to their mistress, and he won’t even have time to say goodbye.

So here’s what Jimin’s going to do: He’s going to confess.

Not to treason — not to finding someone else, instead of Hoseok, to keep him alive. But he can tell her that he’s fading. That Hoseok can’t help him any longer, and Hoseok will confirm it. He’ll go to the Empress on his knees and apologize for not being useful, and he’ll beg for her mercy, and if he promises that he only wants to eliminate her security risk, to die for his prince as faithfully as he’d lived for him —

Well. Jimin thinks — maybe, she’ll execute him quickly, and painlessly, and let him tell Hoseok he’s sorry before he goes.

And maybe, if Hoseok will repay him, he can pass that apology on to Taehyung.

He won’t do it today. He can give himself that much, at least; even if the pain keeps getting worse, doubling every second, he can hold on a little while longer. Hoseok understands that. Hoseok keeps touching him, keeps hurting him, but he’s trying to give Jimin the best day he can.

“Jimin?” Hoseok asks. He lifts his head from Jimin’s stomach, looks up at him with wide, sad eyes.

“What?” Jimin blinks up at the ceiling, tearing his eyes away from the brown wasteland of the courtyard. He can’t remember what Hoseok asked him. He can’t remember why he cared.

“You don’t want to go,” Hoseok says, a confirmation instead of a question, and a concerned wrinkle furrows between his brows. Thoughtlessly, Jimin reaches out. He smoothes it out with a strangled grunt of pain as the tiny hairs and pores and unthinkable human imperfections dig against the strained nerves of his index finger.

“Sorry,” he replies. Bland, careless, stupid. It’s a nice weight to have lifted from his shoulders — that he doesn’t need to be smart anymore, or analytical, or always listening. Hearing everything isn’t quite so bad, as long as he doesn’t have to pay attention to it.

“But don’t you —” Hoseok exhales hard through his nose. His face has darkened from that placid encouragement, and Jimin moves with him, to roll away when Hoseok props himself up on his elbows. “I’m just trying to help, Jimin-ah. Can’t you let me?”

At least Jimin isn’t looking at him any longer. He doesn’t have to hide the way that makes him wrinkle his nose, shame and disgust twisted together in his chest. He doesn’t want Hoseok to help. He doesn’t want anything to change, just for today, and that means that Hoseok shouldn’t be worried, shouldn’t go out of his way to give Jimin what he thinks he wants.

Hoseok sighs. Jimin listens to his heartbeat, a little faster than usual. The slow gurgle of his stomach digesting breakfast, the click of his eyelids when he blinks.

“Of course not,” Hoseok says. “Of course you won’t.”

That stings. Won’t, Hoseok says, like Jimin has any scrap of a choice. He grits his teeth, pretends it’s a smile, and ignores the comment entirely.

So instead of shadowing Hoseok to the library, they visit another old haunt. There’s a training room in the royal wing of the palace — of course there is, when each member of the family has a private wing and an acre of courtyard space to themselves. There are several training rooms Jimin’s familiar with, but the one they head to today was Hoseok’s favorite growing up, for its mirrored walls and the memories of hours and hours of childhood dance lessons.

When Hoseok was young, before Jimin knew him, he had trained as close to professionally as a child under ten could achieve. By the time Jimin met him he was, at the will of his mother, expanding his interests to ceremonial swordplay and functional sparring styles, but for years and years in their youth, when Hoseok wanted to decompress, he would take Jimin here and dance. Today, the routine makes Jimin’s eyes sting hot with tears. The stripping of their formal clothes in an adjacent chamber, the familiar drape of the standard outfits already laundered and waiting for them, the way the air parts smoothly around Hoseok, like it’s been waiting for him the whole time he’s been gone.

“It’s been a long time,” Hoseok says, and even though he’s quiet it echoes around the hardwood furniture, the cabinets and wall panels leading toward the white-tiled private showers. “Ah, I hadn’t even realized.”

It’s been — Jimin thinks back, as he fits himself into a rough-spun undershirt and linen pants, biting his lip to try and ignore the scrape against his skin. It’s been at least nine or ten months since Hoseok danced, since they visited this room instead of the sparring center, which keeps a collection of practice blades that Hoseok likes to test himself with, against Jimin or a trainer or his sister, who Jimin knows practices with her swords every morning after she wakes. Even before the tour, Hoseok had been keeping himself busy, had been caught up in the ever-spinning wheel of politics and public relations, of straining to meet his mother’s expectations.

So it’s been almost a year since Jimin followed Hoseok out to the mats and started to go through their stretching routine, gasping aloud at the burn as he starts.

“Ah, you’re so tense,” Hoseok murmurs. The echo is better in here, some of the noise muffled by the mats. Jimin doesn’t look at the mirrors as Hoseok stands over him, as Hoseok starts gently pushing him into positions he can’t quite reach. As Hoseok’s thumb, quick and firm, digs into pressure points at his neck until Jimin can’t help but gasp in pain and horrible relief. The gasps turn into tears before he can stop them, but even though Hoseok notices he doesn’t stop. He only guides Jimin through the routine, his hands warm and soft and painful, like if he can get Jimin through this they can keep going. Like if Jimin could just let him, he could stop everything from changing.

“Good.” Hoseok’s voice is as firm and awful as the pressure of his fingers. “Just relax, Jimin-ah, come on. Almost done. Almost done.”

Jimin blinks through blurry tears as he stretches, and catches a fuzzed-out glimpse of himself in the mirror. Of the two of them, both in white, Hoseok bowed over him. Hoseok guiding him, helping him, easing Jimin’s pain.

He’s seen Taehyung’s pendant enough that the image makes sense. The figure carved from white alabaster — the guide. Taehyung sounds scornful of Hoseok, sometimes, but he’s never seen him like this. He’s never seen the Hoseok behind the facade of the prince, the man Jimin has watched him become. The world bends to Hoseok’s will because of his title, yes, but also because he practically glows with love for it, and the people in it.

Hoseok, Jimin knows, will be fine without him. And that’s good, that’s right — it’s what Jimin wants, and what he deserves.

Jimin blinks. Another wave of tears fall. Hoseok’s hands stutter on his shoulders, and Jimin tastes salt in the air.

“Ah,” Hoseok says. Choked, nearly silent. And he stands there, silent and still, holding his breath in his chest until he can’t bear it anymore, and Jimin hears his lungs inflate behind his ribs as he sucks in a desperate breath.

“Come on.” In the mirror, Jimin sees him draw up a smile from a reserve Jimin has always admired. “Let’s dance, okay? We’ve got plenty of time.”

♖

That morning, they dance. That afternoon, Hoseok kisses the nape of Jimin’s neck in the shower he’s sure Hoseok thinks isn’t too hot; Hoseok dresses Jimin himself, unusually somber, and takes his hand before they leave.

“Walk with me today,” he says. The closest he’s gotten to acknowledging what they both know is going to happen in the morning.

Jimin doesn’t agree, but he can’t bring himself to say no. He shadows Hoseok through the palace, the inner grounds bustling and familiar. The Senate session starts next week, after all the Imperial worlds’ governors have gone back home, and with the Senate session comes the bustle of legislature, the city swelling with staff, the endless parade of formal events and a thousand voices a day jockeying for Hoseok’s attention. Jimin won’t miss it, but the promise is at least reassuring — the world isn’t going to end any time soon.

Hoseok takes him for street food in the Senate district, where the winter covers for the open-air markets and courtyards and gathering places have been set up, and the crowds themselves do as much to keep the air warm as the electric heaters. Hoseok wraps Jimin in a scarf and encourages him to eat anything he wants; when Jimin doesn’t want anything, Hoseok buys a few chicken skewers and makes his saddest eyes until Jimin can’t help but open his mouth and let himself be fed.

Today, Hoseok is recognized, and he passes through the streets smiling, but he doesn’t let himself be drawn away. He’s perfected the art of being in a crowd, of moving through people who are desperate for his time without letting himself give too much of it away.

Usually, he uses that skill to make appointments, to keep as punctual as his mother always instructed him to be. Today, Jimin watches Hoseok use it to camouflage them, almost. To keep them moving, to keep his attention on Jimin, to stay attentive and cheerful and excited to move them on to the next place, the next unspoken goodbye.

Chicken skewers in the senate district. Jimin’s favorite fountain on the outskirts of the sprawling university grounds, which in the summer is full of lily pads and frogs and in the winter is frozen over and withered and still beautiful, with its sculpted iron fence and weathered granite statues all wrapped in dormant vines. Hot chocolate from a cart near a bustling session of the Governors’ conference, where Hoseok whines at the teenager and her grandfather working the stall, who both do their best to feign a straight-faced, unimpressed air until Hoseok’s voice reaches a pitch that makes Jimin wince, and the teenager breaks into a desperate fit of giggles.

It’s almost normal. Jimin scoffs into his cup and shakes his head; he doesn’t take a sip, because he can taste the cocoa powder in the stall and the burnt curl of over-steamed milk and the breaths of every person on this street already.

The longer they stay out, the more unbearable it gets. Jimin is so close to calling it, to taking Hoseok’s wrist and tugging him toward home. His eyes burn every time he blinks, from the strain of pulling out each strand of fiber in the endless parade of clothing, from narrowing in on Hoseok’s pores so tightly that he can’t even understand the bigger picture of his face.

Jimin’s ready to go home, one last time, and so of course that’s when he hears it.

Three blocks down, past three air-shifting intersections of foot traffic and tram routes. Not too far from the conference hall hemorrhaging occupants at the end of the day, from the cluster of vendors, from Hoseok laughing with strangers, from Jimin rooted to the ground with his heartbeat roaring in his ears so loudly that he almost has to strain to hear Taehyung’s heartbeat.

Taehyung’s heartbeat, pounding rabbit-fast and terrified. Taehyung’s choked breaths, Taehyung’s grunted let me go, let me —

Jimin can’t find Kim Namjoon or Jeon Jeongguk anywhere in this district. Taehyung wasn’t following either one of them. Taehyung is alone, Taehyung is in an empty pavilion with a governor Jimin has made himself familiar with in the last few weeks. Taehyung is gasping in pain, and Jimin drifts away from the cart without thinking, closing his eyes because even if it still hurts to be able to see the veins and capillaries of his eyelids, it at least frees up some of his attention to focus more on Kim Yeongsoo’s elevated heart rate. On the sound of his hand wrapped around something metal and solid, and Taehyung’s gasps.

“ — finally crawled out of wherever you’ve been hiding,” Jimin hears Governor Kim hiss. “What are you trying to accomplish here, hm? There’s nothing you can do to hurt me. You don’t even exist, you know that, you sniveling coward?”

“I’m not here to — ngh — get off me —” Taehyung grunts. There’s the sound of contact, of Taehyung’s back hitting a wall. Jimin is trembling all over. He’s moving without even thinking about it. He doesn’t know if Hoseok has noticed, too distracted. There could be a firing squad aimed behind his back, and Jimin wouldn’t be able to tell if it meant tearing his attention away from waiting for the smell of burning, the whir of a blaster’s power cells in the split second before a shot.

“Who hid you, huh? I looked for you, Taehyung-ah, I really did — tell me.”

Jimin shoves through a crowd of senate staffers. He barely stops before the trolley tracks. He’s not running, but he’s close; he listens to Taehyung struggle and fail and ignores what sounds like Hoseok calling from deep underwater.

No, Taehyung says, over and over. I won’t.

“Oh, but I can guess. Were you hidden in some decrepit temple somewhere? Did you really run off to the Twins?” A mocking laugh. Taehyung coughs, and Jimin can see in his mind’s eye his own arm, pressed against Jeongguk’s throat, cutting him off without even realizing. “You’re lucky our Empress already wasted her time on you, then.”

A moment of sudden silence. Jimin can hear the thin rasp of air into Taehyung’s lungs. He’s breathing too shallowly for how fast he’s moving. His chest burns, his eyes burn, his whole body burns with sensitivity and breathlessness and panic.

“Fuck you,” Taehyung wheezes.

“Too bad,” Kim Yeongsoo hisses. “There’s nothing you can do to stop what’s already happened. You can’t bring back what’s dead — but of course, you know that. And I’ve always regretted leaving loose ends in my work.”

Three blocks isn’t far. The conversation has dragged on long enough that Jimin has time to reach them. That by the time Yeongsoo has the blaster settled under Taehyung’s chin with an unshaking certainty, Jimin has already scaled the steps to the parkway. That Jimin, even overstimulated and panicked and jerking his injured arm out of its sling, can move faster than any human he’s ever known, and reach forward, and —

When he pulls Kim Yeongsoo’s arm out of its socket, the scream almost covers the sound of the blaster going off.

The shot fizzles halfway through a wooden column, and Taehyung collapses to the ground, and Jimin’s grip with his injured hand is strong enough to snap the bone in Yeongsoo’s forearm. He does it without thinking. It’s a reaction, instinctive and furious, to the sight of Taehyung’s chin tipped up by the muzzle of the blaster. To the streak of tears down his face. To the desperation of his heartbeat, and even as Jimin throws the governor to the ground he knows that even though he’s signed the warrant for a death much worse than the one he’d hoped for, it’s worth it because that heartbeat is settling. That heartbeat is the only thing he can hear, barely bothering to kick away the blaster as he drops to his knees and grabs Taehyung’s face.

“Jimin?” Taehyung gasps. “Jimin — what did you —”

“It’s okay,” Jimin tells him. It rasps against his throat, and suddenly he can hear the world again. He can hear Kim Yeongsoo wailing in pain, and he can feel the burning, searing pain of his own injured shoulder, wrenched out of its half-healed stasis, and he can taste the salt of Taehyung’s tears and the burn of the shot.

“No it’s not!”

Security is already on their way. If the shot hadn’t alerted the ones stationed by the conference, the screaming would have. Jimin has a minute before they arrive, at most; he has barely more than that before Hoseok manages to slip through and follow.

“Run,” he says, instead of telling Taehyung any of that, and grits his teeth through the pain of grabbing him under the arms and pulling him up. “You have to leave — you can get out, find somewhere to stay —”

“I’m not leaving you.” Taehyung grabs the front of Jimin’s coat. Stares at him, eyes wide and red and unblinking.

Half a minute. He can feel the tendrils of Taehyung’s calm working through him, and he can’t trust himself to hear the footsteps, the shouting, over the wrecked moans of the prone governor and his overwhelming need to keep tabs on Taehyung’s heart, even though he’s alive, even though nothing should stop it now.

“Yes,” Jimin breathes. Doesn’t blink. “You are.”

He shoves Taehyung away, hard enough that they both stumble back, the contact broken. The world rushes back in, and Taehyung looks at him, and for the first time Jimin understands how he might be able to feel someone else’s shock and betrayal and hurt like it’s his own.

Taehyung takes a step back. For a moment, Jimin is terrified that he won’t listen, that he’ll have to tell the Empress about him, that he’ll misunderstand why Jimin needs him to go. He tries to form an image in his mind, fear filling him from throat to stomach — Jimin, on his knees in front of her, unable to lie about who, exactly, he’d stepped in to save.

He shouldn’t have worried. Even with the chasm between them, Taehyung understands, and Taehyung blinks out the last of his panicked tears.

And then, to Jimin’s desperate relief, Taehyung runs.

The capitol guards find Jimin on his knees, hands behind his head, shaking from pain and adrenaline and pure, blinding terror, and Jimin counts himself lucky that they take him away before Hoseok can make it through the crowd.

♔

By the third time Hoseok gets turned away from his mother’s office, he’s had enough.

“I’m sorry, your Highness,” the attendant says, her face sheet-white, her nerves as clear as the tremor in her voice. “She won’t see you.”

“That’s all right!” Hoseok beams. His face hurts from smiling. “I’ll just wait until she will.”

This attendant — Soohee, maybe, Hoseok hasn’t been keeping up with them lately — has been in to check her orders three times now. Hoseok gave her some breaks, took a lap around the Senate chambers to keep himself settled and present, but now he only leans back against the wall and smiles at her. Quiet, and constant, and as nonchalant as he can make himself appear.

By the third minute, Soohee — or is it Sunghee — starts shifting from foot to foot. By the fifth, her smile has flagged. Hoseok blinks, and tilts his head inquisitively, and succeeds in not grinding his teeth into a grimace. Soohee swallows. Hoseok can practically feel the sweat crawling down the back of her neck, under the starched white collar of her uniform jeogori, which is so freshly starched that it must itch terribly.

The time crawls by, minute by minute, and Hoseok focuses on that starched itch and the stifling pressure of her necessary discomfort so he doesn’t have to think about anything else at all.

Thirteen minutes pass, an impressive holdout, until Soohee blanches and wipes her hands on her thighs.

“I’ll — I’ll deliver your request, my prince.”

She turns, exuding both fear and relief. Hoseok swallows his own thick spit and contemplates an apology gift — a paid holiday, maybe. If she has children, there’s a winter botanic garden on the other side of the Jangsan peak that could do nicely.

The office door slides open, shut. The soundproofing is very good; the second it closes, all Hoseok can hear is the echo of the near-empty building, a few custodial staff making their rounds.

It’s long past midnight. It’s long past anything that could be considered night. Hoseok doesn’t need to look out a window to see that the sun is starting to creep over the mountains, casting the city sky shades of orange and indigo. Not that there are windows this close to his mother’s private office; he can practically hear her chiding tone, the phrase security breach so constant in his childhood that at one point, he’d ceased to hear them as words at all.

The door opens again. Soohee, sweat shining on her brow as she bows.

“You may enter,” she says. The relief is thick, now. Hoseok feels like he’s swimming through it, as he leaves her with a nod and brushes in, like he doesn’t want it, like he’s walking over a canyon of vast, empty air.

His mother, who probably hasn’t slept in a day or more, barely glances up from her notes as the door closes behind him.

“Hoseok-ah,” she says, after a moment. “If you could stop terrorizing my staff...?”

He lets that one hang, until she sets down her pen and heaves a sigh. Dry amusement quirks at the corner of her lips, the flint-shine of her eyes.

“Ah,” she sighs. “That.”

Hoseok grits his teeth. There’s an urge bubbling up inside him to start yelling — to pitch a fit like a displeased toddler, complete with a stomp of his foot and a quick burst of hot, angry tears. Instead, he takes the seat his mother gestures him to and folds his hands neatly, observing the creases by her eyes and the weary tension in her neck.

“I’d like to know what’s to be done with Jimin.”

He phrases it so nicely. Hoseok doesn’t do this often — can hardly remember the last time he was even in this office, much less to make such a significant request — but he remembers the etiquette well. His mother, who hasn’t been commanded at anything since she was a small child, prefers to be asked.

So Hoseok asks nicely, and he waits patiently while she mulls over the request. He can feel her thinking; he can always feel her thinking, she never stops. Dawon doesn’t either, has learned far too many habits that Hoseok disapproves of in the decades she’s spent training as heir.

“My darling boy,” she finally says, after an interminable age. “It’s best to leave this one to me. Do you understand?”

She reaches across the desk and lays one hand over his, still folded neatly, his recently-done nails not even digging into flesh.

“I understand, Eomma,” Hoseok tells her, entirely earnest. “But I don’t agree.”

He understands a lot, these days. Like she’d taught him to; when he was a child, Hoseok remembers sitting at her feet while she read to the two of them not from storybooks, but from legal documents or court petitions or legislative drafts.

What are the words saying, she’d always asked, after the initial briefing. And then, later, during rounds of discussion that were as often fascinating as they were tedious: what is being said between them?

Everything about Jimin has always been kept discreet, half-official, between words and suggestions and pointed looks. When he’d been old enough to question it, he’d come to this office and been shown handwritten notes and a sealed birth certificate; the only proof of Jimin’s existence is in here, in a bio-locked set of cabinets along the wall. The only proof of what had been done to him, to create him, is impossibly well-guarded and, if Hoseok knows his mother, likely to be destroyed entirely sooner than later.

“I suppose it was naive of me to assume I was doing you a favor. After all —” She quirks a brow, retracts her hand, clicks perfect nails against the ancient wood of the desk. “I noticed that he’s been... distant with you, lately.”

“Hardly.” Hoseok waves the accusation off with one hand, tilting his head. He knows his mother can’t read minds, but he’s never quite been able to put away that particular childhood assumption. It feels like if he even thinks about it — about Jimin’s stricken, blanched white face, his reticence and horror and shambling dread — she’ll know, and she’ll send him away, and he won’t be able to stop her. “You’d shut me out, for — what? A rough patch? Eomma, I’d like to see you share flagship quarters with someone for months and not want a little space after.”

That gets a smile out of her, though it still creases with pity.

“Assault of a governor isn’t what I’d call a rough patch. Something’s wrong with him, darling. Like all the rest of them.” She sighs, taps her nails again. She does, truly, seem displeased with the turn of events. “They all went mad, you remember. Suicidal. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that this one broke too, only — he’d been doing so well.”

Hoseok looks down. His chest hurts too much to keep trying to calculate every word, every expression he lets cross his face — but it at least works in his favor when she leans forward, reaches out again. Her soft hand tips up his chin, and Hoseok lets her see him blinking too hard. It’s not like he can stop his face from flushing, his eyes from swelling. He’s not trying to hide how much it hurts; he’s only trying to hide what he’s planning to do about it.

“Oh, Hoseok-ah,” she sighs. “If we must.”

And she rises, as poised as ever, and Hoseok lets muscle memory guide him to his feet, to her side, with his arm offered out and her hands around his arm.

“He’s a security risk,” she says, nearly inaudible as they leave the office. Hoseok knows there are guards following them, a practical squadron of the best-trained officers in the entire empire surrounding her in a constant perimeter, but it’s at least nice that they leave them the illusion of privacy. “And a volatile one, now. I won’t justify myself, but — I am sorry that it happened this way. I know he’s important to you.”

“I shouldn’t have had to ask like this,” he chides, when she falls silent. She’s a centimeter or so taller than him, in these shoes, but Hoseok still feels shockingly small. “You promised he was mine — you should have at least told me, instead of making me come to you.”

She doesn’t get angry. Hoseok could feel it if she did, with her hands on him. Instead, there’s a little swell of amusement, of acceptance.

“Maybe,” she agrees. “But I’m your mother, hm? Not just your Empress. I know you, Seok-ah. I’d rather you be angry at me now than have had to help me make the call.”

He was mine, Hoseok thinks, echoing around in his own head. He’d believed it for so long that it’s almost instinct to accept — that Jimin was his, is his. He’d believed it so fully that he thinks he’d convinced Jimin, too. Not alone, not without the heavy weight of his mother’s threats and expectations, but — Hoseok can remember the moments he’d started to feel Jimin’s acceptance of it waver. Hoseok can’t stop thinking about his own failure. About how he was the one who kept Jimin alive, as vital as life support, until all of a sudden he wasn’t.

They’re going deeper into the palace complex, not outside it. It’s a sector that’s rarely used — there’s a hollowed-out shell of a dynasty stronghold thousands of years old here, always under some form of construction, hosting overflow staff or city watch recruits in its brief stints of usability. Bureaucratic hangups has always been the excuse, ones that Hoseok delighted in when he was very young, playing vast games of pretend with his sister and their court friends that spanned the acre of near-abandoned buildings. Now that he’s older, he knows that those hangups might have been woven in intentionally, to give his mother and her pet projects a space closer to home than the University laboratories.

And underneath one of the handful of landscaping buildings, down a narrow flight of stairs, is the place where he’d first met Jimin. Hoseok can see the impression of him behind his eyes when he blinks, the dull lights of the hall casting strange shadows against the walls as they descend.

He hadn’t known someone could be so frightened. That’s what Hoseok remembers, mostly. That Jimin had been tiny, and bruised in strange places, and scared of everyone who walked through the door of his pitch-dark cell space. And after what felt like an eternity of testing, of going in and out of the room and letting Jimin cling to him like a lifeline, being told he was helping when he stroked through Jimin’s hair, his mother had knelt in front of him. Had looked at him, and told him to make a promise.

Princes take care of their things, she’d said. Hoseok, at the bottom of the staircase, bites down on the inside of his cheek so hard that he tastes blood.

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” his mother says. There’s a guard stationed outside the familiar door; there’s a screen mounted on the wall, with a command pad beneath it, that the guard fiddles with before the door unlocks, heavy and triple-reinforced. “You’re here to say goodbye, Hoseok. Don’t try to make me change my mind.”

He hears what’s between those words, too. You won’t want to, when you see it.

But the door opens anyway, grinding and slow. His mother steps back toward the staircase with the guard at her heels, for at least a small gift of privacy. Hoseok takes a deep breath in, and tries to ignore the searing agony radiating from the darkness inside. The rage, the desperation, the hopelessness.

He walks in.

When he does, the room goes from nearly-black to softly lit from the low lights on the floor. There’s warm air coming from a vent somewhere, but the room itself is freezing, barely starting to thaw. There are speakers mounted along the low ceiling’s borders — large, and visible, because the surround-sound was important for testing.

And Jimin —

Jimin is there. Jimin is sprawled on the floor, knees bent like he’d been on them when he collapsed. Jimin has his ankles cuffed with heavy metal bands; his arms are pulled back, behind and underneath him, with blood crawling through the bandage around his shoulder. That’s the only thing he’s wearing above the waist — he’s been stripped of everything but the pants Hoseok had dressed him in after dancing, black wool and fleece.

There’s a smear of vomit by his head. There’s a curtain of black hair over his face.

He’s shaking, violently. Hoseok knows, without caring how, that he’s only not screaming because his throat is already full of blood.

“Jimin,” he says, as soft as an exhale. It doesn’t stop Jimin from flinching away.

He wants to reach out and push the hair out of Jimin’s face. He wants to get up and run and run until the winter wind snaps him back to a childhood that barely existed while he was living it.

Hoseok grits his teeth, and extends his hand.

Jimin’s eyes are closed. His lips are bloody. When Hoseok touches him he keens, guttural and anguished, and slits his eyes open just enough that Hoseok can see them glittering, dark and swollen and red-rimmed in the low light. His skin is freezing, and damp, and Hoseok wishes that he didn’t know all the ways sensation could drive Jimin mad, so that he wouldn’t have to imagine what’s been happening in this room for hours now.

And — and, when Hoseok touches him, it only makes Jimin worse.

“Stop,” Jimin begs, barely intelligible. His teeth barely part. His tongue barely moves. But Hoseok knows him better than anyone, or at least he used to, and so it’s not hard to understand that Jimin is begging not for Hoseok to stop, but for the pain to go away. Pain that, just weeks ago, Hoseok’s touch would have soothed.

The instinct is hard to repress, so he gives into the urge to try. He thinks back to being ten years old, and holding Jimin’s little face in his hands, and trying to make him go numb like a sat-on limb. He presses his palm against Jimin’s cheek and feels it get wet and sticky with tears and snot and blood, and nothing happens except that Jimin moans, and the agony spikes, and Hoseok rips his hand away like he could take it back if he just moved fast enough.

“Make... it.... stop.” Jimin’s eyes close again. He’s relearning his mouth. “Make it stop. Make it —”

“I’m sorry,” Hoseok whispers. Even as human as he is, he can smell the filth, the blood and sweat and the humiliating stink of urine. He can’t leave Jimin here, but he doesn’t have a choice.

Jimin shifts. The chains on his wrists and ankles grind against the concrete floor, which makes him flinch, which makes his forehead smack back against the ground, which makes him moan again. Hoseok is going to throw up if he doesn’t get out of here soon, which his mother probably was counting on.

“Please,” Jimin gasps. He opens his eyes almost entirely this time. “Don’t leave, don’t — hyung.”

“I’m sorry,” Hoseok says again. Impotent. Useless. “I’m so sorry.”

Jimin’s eyes, dull and lifeless, go wide with horror.

“Don’t go — you have to — no, you can end it, you can — make it stop —” He’s losing coherence fast, spiraling back down into pain, and Hoseok edges away and pretends like it doesn’t break his heart. Jimin tries to crawl after him, some gut instinct lurching him forward until he remembers — until the chain holds him fast, and his shoulder strains trying to roll onto his stomach, the sight so vile and pathetic that Hoseok claps his filthy hand over his own mouth and stumbles back as Jimin screams, a wailed, jagged thing that echoes in the cell around them and escapes out into the hall.

Kill me, he sees Jimin mouth. Blood dripping from his tongue. On the end of the scream, it isn’t even voiced — it’s just a choked-out rasp that rattles in the dead air between them. Over and over. Kill me.

“I’m sorry,” Hoseok whispers from behind his hand, and gags at the smell.

“Hyung,” Jimin exhales. Eyes still wide and bloodshot and crazed. Inhuman. “No. No, no, no —”

And Hoseok, to his eternal and tormented shame, turns around and leaves.

♜

By the time dawn has spilled over the mountains, Taehyung’s bag has been packed for hours. It hadn’t taken long — he doesn’t own much, even after a few weeks collecting new clothes and city trinkets. He’s left Jeongguk most of his new things, except for the warm coats and wool layers that had been scarce back home. He’s been pacing around the hanok for hours, despite Namjoon’s attempts to get him to sit down.

“Should I buy it?” Namjoon asks him, when he makes his next pass through the sitting room.

Namjoon’s tablet is in front of him. Taehyung takes it without asking, without thinking, and looks again at the flight path.

Amnok, after more than fifteen years of incorporation, is a known destination from Namsan, but not a common one. There are three commercial routes on official Imperial transit, and two on private cruise lines, and all five would get Taehyung home in three weeks or longer. Three weeks, on a ship smaller and more cramped than the Imugi, alone. A ticket that would eat up the savings he’d put away from the government stipend, that would barely leave enough for the daily shuttle between Amnok and Onjo, not to mention the basic necessity of eating.

Alone, because Namjoon can’t contractually leave without going through official University channels; alone, because Taehyung wouldn’t do that to Jeongguk. Alone, because there’s no one else.

He’s thrown up twice. Once while stumbling home, sick with the sight of Jimin dropping hard to his knees on the stone, sick with adrenaline and panic and a horror he can still feel sitting at the base of his throat every time he swallows. Once while he was packing, when he unrolled a pair of pants he hasn’t worn since the tour, and a violet pouch had fallen out of them. He’d barely made it to the sink, wooden earrings digging through cloth into his clenched hands, to spit up nothing but thick bile and saliva.

His ears feel heavy with their weight, as he looks again at his options. Five of them, all with the same destination — three weeks, alone, on a ship, and Taehyung might die before he even reaches home.

He’s never heard of a guide dying like that before, like the initiated sentinels from the elders’ generations did, but there’s a first time for everything. That brief touch in the plaza, Jimin’s palm on his cheek, hadn’t done anything to soothe either of them. There was too much happening, too much fear between them, and so Taehyung is already shaking with the weight of the city. He wants to believe that a ship will be better, especially one with fewer passengers, but he’s not willing to bet on it.

But if he doesn’t —

If he doesn’t —

Taehyung puts the tablet down before he can drop it. Jeongguk is behind him, suddenly. There’s a hand heavy on the back of his neck, pushing him down onto a cushion, rubbing across his back.

“Breathe,” Jeongguk tells him, with a hard edge of desperation shining through. “Hyung, come on. Just breathe.”

Taehyung can’t. Taehyung has forgotten how to.

If he stays, Yeongsoo will find him, or someone he’s hired will. If he goes, he might not last the journey.

Either way, he’ll leave Jimin behind. Either way, Jimin is lost to him already.

“I should go with him,” he hears Jeongguk say, through miles and miles of empty space. “Fuck, hyung, we can’t —”

Taehyung doesn’t hear the rest of it. He’s tired of listening. He’s tired of being able to feel the currents under the words, Namjoon’s self-loathing and Jeongguk’s frustration — their compiled exhaustion and pity and resignation. The thundercloud underneath them, that takes Taehyung a moment to place; the storm center spinning closer, of grief and rage and focus, until he realizes that it isn’t coming from inside the hanok at all.

“Wait,” he breathes out.

And then there’s a knock at the door.

Taehyung lets Namjoon answer it. He doesn’t need to see, but he follows anyway — through the hall, bright now with the shine of morning, to the entrance where the thunderstorm is waiting to be let in. Where Taehyung knows, without having to see, that the prince is settled on their stoop.

“Huh?” Namjoon says, when he slides the door open. And Taehyung can see why he’s confused; the prince is dressed down almost comically, in plain but heavy winter clothes, a hood pulled up over his head, his face so solemn that at first glance, it renders him almost unrecognizable. But Taehyung doesn’t even have to look through it. He only has to exist, to feel the city around him, to recognize the way it bends around Jung Hoseok even in his anger, even as he waits for Namjoon to come to the same slow realization.

In that split second, Taehyung steps forward. Namjoon’s not much taller than him, not much broader; it doesn’t take much effort to jostle him into sharing space in the doorway.

Hoseok meets Taehyung’s eyes. It’s deliberate, and it tells Taehyung all he really needs to know.

“Come with me,” Hoseok says. Not to Namjoon, but to him. “And bring your bags, if you’ve packed them.”

Taehyung doesn’t need to be asked twice. The panic from minutes earlier has bled away; what’s left of it is bleeding into adrenaline, into the focused intent Hoseok is radiating from city blocks away, and it takes him moments to swing back through the hanok into the sitting room, where he’d left the tablet and his bag and Jeongguk, who only needs a sharp jerk of Taehyung’s head before he falls in behind him.

“Where are we going?” He asks.

“The prince,” Taehyung tells him, and appreciates that Jeongguk bulldozes through the instinctive jealousy with a firm nod and a hand around Taehyung’s wrist.

“I’ll come. Anything you need, hyung.”

Taehyung doesn’t know what might be waiting for them, wherever the prince has them rushing toward, but he’s grateful for it anyway.

It takes a handful of minutes, if that, for the three of them to be ready to leave. Taehyung flips up the hood of his own coat for good measure, hurrying to catch up with Hoseok, who’d started walking nearly before Taehyung had even arrived back at the door.

“What are they doing to him?” He asks, because he can’t stand the thought of not knowing before he gets there.

For a moment, he thinks Hoseok won’t answer. The stormcloud is cut through with hesitance, with shame; it’s the most Taehyung has ever felt from him, the most concentrated emotion he’s been privy to in Hoseok’s presence. It’s also infuriating, because Taehyung doesn’t care. He only wants the answer, and maybe Hoseok can feel him too, because he huffs out a quick, ghosted breath through his nose as they pass through the checkpoint that leads into the palace district itself.

“There’s a place they built when he was... recruited.” Hoseok steps delicately around the word, and Taehyung pictures throttling him for it. “A holding cell where they ran tests. On his senses.”

Taehyung can feel Jeongguk, a step behind them, straining to hear. Namjoon doesn’t have to try at all, of course, and Taehyung listens for his instinctive flinch at the implication. He glares down at the ground so he doesn’t trip on the paths Hoseok treads without ever second-guessing his course.

In the brief week they’d had in the forest, the handful of hours Taehyung has been able to have Jimin entirely alone and settled, they hadn’t talked much about Jimin’s work for the crown. It had seemed — not unimportant, but not urgent. Taehyung had thought, whenever the conversation veered close, that he’d have time to work up to questions he knew he wouldn’t like the answers to. Now all he has is formless assumptions, the memory of Jimin’s sinking dread and shame. The guilt that’s so thick between him and Hoseok that Taehyung doesn’t understand how he even has the space to feel anything else.

He doesn’t reply. Hoseok’s mouth is a flat, unhappy line; it twitches into a grimace the longer Taehyung lets the silence sit.

“I think,” Hoseok finally says. Pauses. Sinks another step ankle-deep in his own guilt as he waves them through a series of footpaths Taehyung decides must be exclusive to the highest-ranking officials in the city. “I think she’s waiting to see what kills him.”

If there were any less panic propelling him forward, Taehyung would stop. He would brace his hands on the low brick wall and close his eyes, and some horrible noise might escape his chest. Even imagining it has his chest burning with unreleased breaths. There’s nothing he can say to that, nothing that would add more than Namjoon’s horrified no, Jeongguk’s sharp gasp.

He keeps walking, almost-running. Hoseok keeps not looking at him.

And the closer they get, the more Taehyung can feel that something — something is wrong. It’s not Hoseok’s storm cell, it’s not the unbelievable crush of the city. It’s something underneath that; it’s foundational, jolting into him with every step, radiating from the brick pathway through the soles of his winter boots, up through his legs and his guts and his chest.

He stops dead at a cluster of disused office spaces. Namjoon nearly runs into his back, Jeongguk barely stumbles away. Taehyung can’t keep walking toward this — it gets stronger every second, pulsing through him, searing the city.

Hoseok pauses. Turns around, so deathly pale that Taehyung doesn’t need to even ask.

“You can feel it?” He asks. Tucks his arms around his waist, uselessly self-soothing.

“Of course,” Taehyung breathes. How could he not? He doesn’t understand how anyone else could just ignore it, how they could stand on the ancient stones and feel nothing at all instead of a radiating hurt so potent that the longer he stands, the closer his limbs get to numb.

Hoseok blinks at him. Exhales another little puff of misted breath.

“Good,” Hoseok says. Relieved, at the confirmation that Taehyung is what he needs.

What Jimin needs, Taehyung reminds himself, and pushes down on his own resentment. There can be time for grudges later. There can be time for hard questions, and hesitance, and guilt, when all of this is nothing but a memory to be passed down.

Taehyung tugs the leather cord of his pendant over his head, and clutches Seonmul tight in one hand, and keeps walking.

♜

At some point, Taehyung stops needing Hoseok to guide him. By the time they reach the section of empty, half-renovated buildings, Taehyung is half a step ahead of him, barely breathing, barely blinking. He ends up in front of a hollowed-out storage shed, or something similar; before he even realizes, his feet have stopped moving, have rooted him to the spot as he blinks through the darkness at the gutted structure.

He can almost hear something. Like a mosquito dancing by his head in the middle of the night, half-awake, wondering whether he’d dreamed it. He can almost hear —

Hoseok’s hand wraps around his forearm. Pulls him not straight ahead, but around to the side of the shed, to a set of doors inlaid against the very bottom of the foundation, doors that Jeongguk tests himself against and then hauls open, passing Hoseok back a shining silver key that Taehyung hadn’t even noticed being given. All he can do is stare into the black pit below them, the steps leading down and down. His whole body prickles like a slept-on limb. His chest aches with what feels like a thousand thousand pounds of pressure, and he’s afraid that if he takes another step — if he descends into that pit — all his ribs might snap underneath it.

“No,” he croaks out. Namjoon’s hand presses against his lower back, and he barely feels it.

But Hoseok doesn’t offer comfort. He just gets into Taehyung’s space, their faces inches apart. Taehyung feels the closeness like a shove, like Hoseok has pushed him as hard as Jeongguk used to, when they’d get into teenage spats that ended, at least once or twice, in a frustration-fueled punch.

“Either help him, or leave,” Hoseok says. “We don’t have time for this.”

Namjoon’s hand drops away. Taehyung sucks in short, shallow breaths. Hoseok turns on his heel, and starts his descent, and Taehyung only lets himself think about taking one step at a time. One stair, one more burst of agony, one more breath. By the time he hits the hallway, starting to glow with light.

“I bought us some time with the guard, but not much,” he hears, distantly. “So — we have to be quick, okay?”

Taehyung gets the hall in flashes. Jeongguk, peering at a dual-screened panel, mouth dropped open at whatever he’s seen. Namjoon, reaching out to grab Hoseok’s hand, nails digging in as Hoseok taps in a code. The door, the one sucking all the air out of Taehyung’s lungs, giving a slow chime as it slides, weighted down with what might be soundproofing and insulation and — and —

In the split second before Jeongguk manages to turn it off, the hall is filled with the sickening pulse of strobe lights — of a dozen or more frequencies of throbbing bass and pitched metallic shrieks — of a blast of heat that hits Taehyung in the face almost as strong as the sick wave of nausea and pain and mindless panic that sends him stumbling to his knees as all of it suddenly vanishes. As the hall rings empty, and dark, and cool with the chill of an underground winter.

“Oh, fuck,” Namjoon says. Close to the floor. He’s hit the ground too, Hoseok kneeling next to him, a hand braced on the back of Namjoon’s neck as he sticks his head between his knees. “I can’t go in there, Taehyung-ah, fuck.”

“I can’t — alone —” Taehyung manages. His head isn’t working right. All he can do is stare into the dark room, waiting for — for something. For permission to crawl through it, and look for what feels like less of a person and more of a supernova. He remembers showing Jimin what one looked like, weeks or years or lifetimes ago.

“Come on,” Jeongguk says. Taehyung blinks, and suddenly he’s on his feet, head spinning, Jeongguk’s hands firm under his arms. “Let’s go, hyung.”

For this, Taehyung realizes, even as it happens — for this, he’s going to owe Jeongguk something unpayable for the rest of their lives. He knows it in the part of his chest that knows Bo and Seonmul, that knows the temple that raised him, that knows the sentinel waiting for him in the scorching hot cell. The sentinel he can see, almost, as Jeongguk propels him that first step forward, and the room slowly begins to brighten, as creeping as the dawn.

The second they’re in, Jeongguk retches. Taehyung hears it over the wet, ragged panting of the body on the floor. He doesn’t feel it, though — he’s too powerfully overcome by pain.

He doesn’t know how he stays upright. He doesn’t know how he makes it to the corner, where Jimin has dragged himself in a filthy scrape of blood and vomit and urine across the floor. Where he’s lying now, convulsing, unable to even realize that the torment — at least, the obvious one — has stopped.

“Jimin,” Taehyung breathes. He can see, as the room brightens, the sickening angle of the shoulder he’s lying on. A bled-through bandage. A joint torn from its socket.

Jimin doesn’t move. His chin is tucked into his chest, face hidden by his hair, whole body curled into itself but still facing the door, like he hadn’t had the strength to turn over, like he’d watched someone leave and kept waiting for them to come back. Taehyung doesn’t know when he stopped standing — he only knows that his knees hurt again, that Jeongguk has fallen with him, ashen and trembling. Jimin’s skin is cold and damp, and he flinches away when Taehyung touches his shoulder, his hand curling open with the indent of Seonmul. The totem clatters to the ground so loudly that it makes Jimin open his mouth to breathe out a bloody keen.

Hyung, Jimin almost manages to say. He unfolds a fraction of an inch; his eyes slit open, and Taehyung slips his hand down to cup against his jaw as he pushes against what feels like an impenetrable wall of pain, trying to find a crack to slip relief into, trying to focus on just one thing — Jimin’s eyes, burning at any presence of light or darkness, feeling like they’re cooking in his skull.

“It’s me,” Taehyung tries to tell him, and bites down on his tongue when he feels the lancing pain in Jimin’s skull at the sound.

Hyung, Jimin tries again. There’s blood leaking out of his mouth, a watered-down pink froth smearing onto the metal floor below him. At the temperature Jeongguk had stopped, the metal might have been hot enough to leave burns. Taehyung can’t see his wrists behind him, but he can imagine the scorching marks the chains will leave behind.

Calm, he tries to tell him. He tries to give Jimin darkness, as he jerks his head to gesture Jeongguk forward.

Taehyung can’t feel him, while he’s focusing so hard on dark, on the way he can feel the pain in Jimin’s eyes easing a little more with every second. He can’t feel Jeongguk, but he can see how awful he looks. The program in the cell is off, but Taehyung understands, suddenly —

The soundproofing. The strange, muffled quality of the space, that makes even Namjoon and Hoseok and the shifting air from the open doorway feel miles and miles away. Jeongguk is sweating, his coat discarded on the floor, his jacket plastered to his back, as he fumbles with a key and flinches, almost as badly as Jimin does, at the scraping sound of metal.

But Taehyung doesn’t have time to care. Even as his attention is drawn away Jimin starts to keen, barely audible, coughing up a spray of bloodied spit as his wrists are free and his shoulders reflexively wince forward.

“Hoseok,” Jimin wheezes, and coughs again. Taehyung grits his teeth, and closes his eyes, and wishes so badly that he’d gotten any kind of training, anything that wasn’t a half-remembered phrase from a drowned library, or an elder’s wistful recollection of trying to pair with the sentinels who’d died decades before Taehyung was even born.

He thinks, then, of the Tamjingang. Of the river rushing over his head, of submerging himself under feet of frigid mountain run-off every year, at the turn between spring and summer, when she’d bloated and run over her banks. The current was strong, and Taehyung had gripped onto roots as thick around as his waist to keep from being swept away.

Jimin’s pain is a wall, and Taehyung can’t break it down. Until he realizes: he doesn’t need to.

Stop, Taehyung thinks, then, instead of calm. He doesn’t want Jimin’s pain to ease, he wants it gone. He wants to be the river, not to batter at the wall but to surround it, to submerge it, to drown the Empress and her cursed experiments and leave Jimin empty and clean in the aftermath.

And as he pictures it, Taehyung feels that wall crumble. He grabs Jimin with both hands, and ignores the flare of pain he feels in his own shoulders, his own wrists and skull and freed ankles. He’s not looking at Jimin anymore, not really. He’s looking through Jimin’s eyes, and his own, a mirror reflecting endlessly into itself — he knows Jimin’s body better than his own, now. He’s inside of it, and in control, and Taehyung pulls in a breath that fills Jimin’s lungs, that escapes from his, that slows both their panicked heartbeats to match behind their ribs.

“You came,” Jimin mouths. Taehyung doesn’t need to hear it, because he feels the words forming on his lips. And he doesn’t need to reply, because he only needs a nudge to fill Jimin up with relief, as blissful as water in the scorching desert.

But relief, he knows, isn’t going to be enough.

One by one, breath by breath, Taehyung shuts Jimin down. First his burning eyes — Taehyung shutters them, removes sight entirely. Smell next, and taste, both gone numb as Jimin drags in awful, desperate breaths. As he scrabbles at Taehyung’s chest with one hand, the other dragging limp against the ground, barely able to twitch his fingers without a searing bolt of agony. So Taehyung takes that away too, the nerves of everything down from his wound, the pain in his throat. He can’t heal, but he can numb, and so he does with abandon until Jimin is shaking.

With every second that passes, darkness swallows up some of the panic and pain. Jimin can hear now, just barely, so Taehyung takes the chance to whisper to him, a vague litany he barely hears, it’s okay and you’re safe and a promise, over and over again.

“We’re going to leave,” he tells Jimin. And Jimin clings to that, in the long minutes it takes Taehyung to beat him down into nothingness, into the vaguest sensation of a body, and none of the pain Jimin associates with being alive. Jimin pants out open-mouthed breaths, and Taehyung presses his cheek against the top of Jimin’s filthy head and tries to picture the temple as fully as he can, and give Jimin the comfort that swells up in his chest.

“Please.” Jimin breathes that out, and Taehyung nods, and brushes back a matted strand of hair to look into Jimin’s sightless, open eyes.

“I promise,” he says. And Jimin’s face cracks, his mouth convulsing, his eyes swollen red even though he’s too dehydrated to cry.

“Hyung,” Jimin says, then. “Hoseok. Please, Hoseok, please.”

And Taehyung could be sick. That comfort — that all Jimin associates it with is his prince, is the son of the woman who left him here to die like an insect under a microscope.

Somewhere behind him, he realizes, as he comes back to his own body and his own senses, Jeongguk has been sick. But he still stumbles over when Taehyung calls him, still helps Taehyung haul Jimin up, good arm slung over Jeongguk’s shoulder as Taehyung holds him by the waist.

“Please,” Jimin begs him. “Please, I want — I want to go home.”

It’s barely voiced. It’s hardly a whisper, Jimin’s throat still damaged, even though he can’t feel it. Taehyung can shield Jimin from some of the seething anger that it draws out of him, but not all of it — Jimin keeps gasping shallow breaths, and tries to reach out with his left arm, and all it does is give a weak little spasm where it hangs against Taehyung’s back.

“It’s okay,” he says, instead of answering. “We’re going home, Jimin-ah, I promise. We’re going home.”

And then, as they reach the threshold of the cell, Taehyung seals off Jimin’s ears.

Taehyung thinks that he understands, for the first time, why the Twins became gods. He understands, for the first time, the weight of it. That he can reach inside Jimin, like a key inside a lock, and leave him — like this. Stripped, senseless, defenseless against the world. Numbed to even the barest scrap of touch, of smell, of taste.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk breathes, as they emerge. “How...?”

And the world, even the muffled underground hall space, hits Jeongguk like a fist.

He doubles over, and Taehyung has just enough strength to keep Jimin from collapsing. Jimin, who clings to him with what little strength he has, and keeps breathing, loud and rasping through his injured throat.

They’re out of the cell; its door slides shut with a grinding whine that makes Jeongguk wail, that makes Namjoon wince, even with Hoseok’s hand still white-knuckled in his. Jimin doesn’t even twitch. Jimin doesn’t hear it, and he doesn’t hear Hoseok’s hiccuped sob, and he doesn’t hear the shocked gasp when Hoseok seems to realize what Taehyung has done.

“Jimin-ah,” Hoseok breathes. And he reaches out to touch, and something burns hot and sudden in Taehyung’s chest.

“No,” he says. He turns to put himself between Jimin and the prince, the echo of Jimin’s begging ringing in his ears. Jimin isn’t talking anymore; he’s clinging to consciousness as desperately as he’s clinging to Taehyung’s body, losing coherence fast with the total absence of stimulation.

Hoseok looks stricken — like Taehyung’s gutted him, as quickly and efficiently as a fish caught from the Tamjingang. His hand is outstretched, Namjoon pulled into his side like a helpful accessory. Jimin rattles in a breath, exhales something that might be hyung, and Hoseok blinks tears out of his eyes.

“Please,” Hoseok says, like a man who’s never had to beg for anything in his life. Like he’s not sure how to do it, more confused than pleading. “Please, Taehyung-ssi. I just — I want to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Taehyung asks, instead of answering. “Where is he going?”

Hoseok shifts. Jeongguk has settled onto the floor by Namjoon’s leg, Namjoon’s free hand carding through his hair. Taehyung feels astonishingly calm — there’s something about the bubble of silence he’s given Jimin that’s leaching into him, that’s slowing both their heartbeats and clearing his head. Taehyung can focus, now, on what’s important — on the prince, who seems almost guilty.

“I know you had something to do with the — the assault yesterday, Taehyung-ssi. Governor Kim claimed that Jimin attacked him randomly, but I’m not stupid. You aren’t safe here, and your forged identification won’t hold up if there’s another incident.”

Hoseok presses his lips together, swallows, looks not at Taehyung but at Jimin half-hidden behind him.

“I don’t care about your leverage, your highness. Get to the point.”

“I have a personal ship,” Hoseok says. “It’s docked at a private port not far from here. If you can promise me — if you can keep him safe, I’ll let you take it. Today.”

Taehyung could laugh. Taehyung could cry. He can feel his eyes burning, and works one forearm out of Jimin’s bruising grip to press the heel of one hand against his eye, trying to hold back the burn of tears.

He’s been preparing to leave for hours. His bag is lying next to Jeongguk on the floor. He’d packed it blindly, half-convinced that he wouldn’t survive the trip to unpack it, to find a place in the world without the Twins, without Jeongguk or Namjoon or the elders to help guide him. But Hoseok — he’s offering a way out that feels impossible to accept, and impossible to deny, and when Taehyung is sure that blinking won’t make him cry he reaches, almost unconsciously, to tug at the teardrop dangling from his ear.

“We’d be hunted,” he says, hollow. “A royal vessel? We wouldn’t make it to the moon.”

“They won’t look for what hasn’t been stolen.” Hoseok steps forward, and Taehyung resists the urge to move back, to keep space between Jimin and Hoseok. “Your credentials might not hold up, but you’re officially working through Namjoon — I could transfer ownership to him and have it backdated.”

“Or,” Taehyung says. And then, with that precariously free hand, he reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulls out Kim Seokjin’s gift to him.

It’s why he’d been near the Governors’ conference in the first place. He’d been on his way back from an hour-long meeting in Seokjin’s home office, the only place they’d been sure they wouldn’t be overheard. Taehyung had walked to that meeting a non-entity — someone whose death certificate could be pulled from any information request, who died at nine years old by his father’s hand. He’d walked out of it a citizen of Amnok.

The offer he’d gotten was witness protection, of a sort. Seokjin hadn’t explained more than necessary — that he hasn’t had Taehyung’s death revoked, but has given him new life. As close to perfect a history they can give him, with a bank account and an identification card and an imperial passport, nothing like the cobbled-together forgery Namjoon had gotten him through an ill-reputed friend of a friend before the Imugi took them away from home.

A fresh start, Seokjin had called it. You could go anywhere with this.

Right now, the only place Taehyung wants to go is home.

“I have something better,” he tells Hoseok, and hands over his new identification. Kim Taehyung is someone he hasn’t been in a long time, even though Amnok’s Kim Taehyung has a birth certificate from Amnok’s polar continent and two parents whose names he’ll have to memorize. But Kim Taehyung is the name that comes up when Hoseok pulls out a small tablet from his coat pocket and scans it.

“Ah,” Hoseok says. It’s as close to relief as he’s gotten since he thundered to their doorstep, a minute relaxation of the creases by his mouth, the dimple digging like a scar into his cheek. “That — that’s perfect, actually. Yes, Taehyung-ssi, I can — hold on, I already drew up the paperwork.”

It takes a handful of minutes, but almost sooner than he can understand, Amnok’s Kim Taehyung is the owner of a first-class luxury star cruiser. He gets the transferral to a new information account, and clearance for the vehicle to his cache, and then — he’s standing there, ready to leave, and he can’t make himself unroot his feet from the floor.

Jimin has slumped down, nearly to the floor. Taehyung eases himself down gently, bracing Jimin’s weight against his back; he reaches for Jeongguk, and doesn’t let him pull away.

“Hyung,” Jeongguk breathes. His pupils are constricted so small that Taehyung can barely see them, absorbing too much light and too much detail. He doesn’t even have to reach out to feel it — he laughs, small and wet, when Jeongguk wraps both hands around his own and clutches onto them like a lifeline. “Oh, fuck, hyung. It’s so — it’s so much.”

“Yeah,” Taehyung agrees, on another terrible laugh. “Isn’t it?”

Jeongguk squeezes tighter. He looks up at Taehyung, eyes wet and shining in the low light. Taehyung blinks away another threat of tears, and tries not to feel like he’s abandoning Jeongguk just when he needs him the most.

“You’re really going?” Jeongguk asks. His eyes sharpen, focus, dart between Taehyung’s face and the crown of Jimin’s slumped head. And then he relaxes, and breathes out a sigh. “You have to.”

“I have to,” Taehyung agrees. He stares down at their clasped hands, so he doesn’t have to watch Jeongguk’s face. “But I’ll see you soon, okay? A year isn’t that long.”

A year — the provisional length of Namjoon’s research grant — is longer than they’ve ever been apart before. Losing Jeongguk feels like losing a limb, like an unforgivable abandonment. But Taehyung thinks of the way Jeongguk is shedding his skin in the city, is growing in ways Taehyung never could let himself, and some of the shame eases.

“Go talk to Seokjin,” he suggests, instead of wasting breath on a goodbye. “I think — maybe he can help you. And you can always come home to me, okay? Always.”

Jeongguk laughs. He leans forward, and presses his forehead to Taehyung’s, their breaths mixing. He feels so far away, with Jimin so close.

“We can do this,” he says. A phrase they’d traded back and forth before the tour, before they packed up their lives and set sail. Those words sound so innocent, now; Taehyung feels like he’s aged a decade in the six months they’ve been gone.

“That’s right,” he agrees. Breathes Jeongguk in, one more time. “We can do this.”

The four of them ascend, slow and laborious, into near-blinding sunlight. Namjoon has tugged out of Hoseok’s grip to help Taehyung with Jimin, who’s sunken into himself so thoroughly that he’s near catatonic. He only stirs when they’ve made it out of the construction site to a side street, where an unmanned, private vehicle idles at Hoseok’s call, and Taehyung and Namjoon offload him onto a leather seat.

“Hyung,” Jimin whispers.

“Taehyung-ssi,” Hoseok pleads, and Taehyung lets go of Jimin’s hand and turns back, gritting his teeth to ignore the plaintive whine that Jimin lets out at the abandonment. “Please. He’s asking for me.”

Taehyung crosses his arms over his chest. He tries to look as solid as the word sentinel feels.

“He doesn’t need you right now,” he says, voice low. This is just for them. Hoseok had come to him for help, but he’s owned Jimin for most of his life — there’s nothing he can do about how proprietary he seems, while he waits for Taehyung to let Jimin see the man whose mother had created him, and tormented him, and left him for dead. “He won’t ever need you again, Hoseok-ssi. And I think you know as well as I do that he wouldn’t leave, not if he could see you right now.”

Hoseok blanches, at the informality or the picture Taehyung conjures. Of Jimin, blinking out of blindness, and latching onto Hoseok as his savior.

I’d go with you, Jimin had said once, during one of their long nights in the woods. If I could.

He’d said it so desperately, so sadly, that Taehyung had almost wished that he didn’t know Jimin was lying. I can’t, he’d finished with. And that’s what Taehyung knows is true: that when it comes to Hoseok, Jimin has never had a choice. He wouldn’t know what to do with one now if he did — and, really, he doesn’t. A death sentence isn’t a choice.

“Right,” Hoseok says. Wry, bitter, scathing — but not at Taehyung, and not at Jimin. “He’s not mine anymore, right?”

“Hoseok-ssi,” Taehyung says. “He’s not mine either.”

The electric car leaves Hoseok standing on the cobbled streets. Namjoon and Jeongguk are piled into the front bench, and Taehyung holding Jimin tight in the back, the four of them moving toward a future Taehyung still can’t quite believe is waiting for them.

It’s only later — after they’ve reached the spaceport, and Namjoon helps him load Jimin’s sleeping body into the apartment-sized ship, and Taehyung leaves him and Jeongguk on the tarmac with lingering hugs and promises to call and a handful of quiet tears — that he realizes. That he goes to clutch at his totem, in the moments of peace before the autopilot starts them on their journey, and remembers —

He’d dropped Seonmul on the floor of Jimin’s cell, and forgotten to pick her back up.

♖

Jimin dreams.

He’s not used to dreaming. He’s bad at it — he keeps jolting close to wakefulness, keeps imagining the sleek purr of a vehicle, the shocking cold of water on his tongue, the gentle tangle of fingers through his hair. He dreams of a familiar bed, he reaches out for a body only to realize that his hands haven’t moved, still cupped against his chest. He dreams of blinking into pitch black nothingness. He dreams of quiet, and he dreams of overpowering noise.

Eventually, after an eternity of restlessness, Jimin dreams of nothing at all.

He wakes, in a sense, to darkness. Not nothingness. He doesn’t know why he expects it — why he’s surprised when he opens his eyes and can see, through impossibly low lighting, the shadowed outline of a bedroom. It feels almost familiar, but when he tries to sit up, to get a closer look, he’s brought down before he can even twitch by the searing agony in his shoulder.

It feels worse than it did when — he can’t remember when he left. He can’t think through the pain, and the fog of sleep. He feels like he’s forgotten something important, something he should know. But he can’t think, and he can barely see, and all he hears when he strains is the low hum of an engine, and that only makes the confusion worse.

When Jimin opens his mouth, all that comes out is a wheeze. Another little burst of pain, this time inside his throat.

He almost thinks that he’s alone — that he’s stranded somewhere, robbed of his senses and his memories — until the door slides open.

Jimin hadn’t heard footsteps, and he can barely tell the difference between the sheets on his bed and the clothes against his skin, and he only starts to understand when he peers through the darkness and finds, to a sharp thrill and a dull disappointment, a familiar silhouette.

“Are you awake?” Taehyung asks. He steps into the room slowly, clearly trying to find his way around in the darkness, clearly wary of flicking on a light. Jimin can’t blame him; even the thought of it makes him flinch back into the mountain of pillows keeping him half-upright. Taehyung has made it to the bed by the time Jimin works up the energy to answer, by the time he remembers how to shape his tongue around words it takes him too long to think of.

“Where am I?” Jimin asks — or at least he tries. What actually comes out is a strangled rasp, barely intelligible, and before he can do much more than burn with shame at the weakness, Taehyung has perched on the edge of the prince-sized bed and held a glass to Jimin’s lips.

“Drink.” It’s a soft command, almost a question. It’s no wonder that Taehyung isn’t used to giving orders, with how reluctant he seems to make Jimin take more than a few sips. And it’s not that Jimin doesn’t want it, but the cold cramps his empty stomach, has him trying and failing to hunch into himself as his organs writhe in discomfort.

At least one of Jimin’s arms still works enough that he can reach up, and push the glass away, and Taehyung doesn’t try to stop him. This time, when he forces air into words, they take shape in the air. It makes him feel human again in some small, crucial way; it makes him wish he had enough energy to cry.

“What do you remember?” Taehyung asks back. A question that Jimin doesn’t want to hear, and doesn’t know the answer to.

But he takes a moment to try. He takes a moment to close his eyes and think, despite the pulsing pain and the throbbing of his head, because the longer he’s awake the more scared he starts to get. There’s a gaping hole in his mind, so much that it’s even difficult to think of where to begin trying to remember. He thinks of library steps and a hospital room and Hoseok’s bed, and then thinks about the tearing pain in his shoulder. The last day he really remembers, it was on its way to healed, thanks to the sling and Hoseok’s insistence on summoning a medical aide to redress the wound every evening.

A memory sparks. Thumbs, firm and unforgiving, kneading into the meat of his neck. A mirrored wall, the strain and tears of hands pushing him to stretch past his limits.

“Dancing,” Jimin breathes. “We were dancing.”

He says that, instead of saying that his throat remembers screaming. Taehyung stays quiet, stays waiting. He offers the glass again when Jimin’s breath starts to rasp, and Jimin looks at the blurred shape of him as he drinks, again, and then pushes him away. It’s the first time he can remember being near Taehyung and not needing to touch him, and it feels strange, unnatural. Like he’s suddenly stopped breathing, or blinking, or swallowing his own pain.

He watches Taehyung’s eyes. They’re too shadowed for Jimin to make out much but the impression of iris, of lid and lash and brow. He sees Taehyung blink, and can’t hear the wet sound he should, but — they aren’t touching. The only times he’s ever felt this dull, he’s had Taehyung’s hands on him, and it had faded as soon as they withdrew.

And as he watches, memories trickle back. Disjointed, out of order, blurred by pain or delusion or dreams.

“The cell,” he finally says, and hopes it’s the answer Taehyung is looking for.

Taehyung’s mouth goes tight at the corners. The glass of water hits the bedside table with a nearly-inaudible thunk. Jimin exhales a slow breath and puts the memories aside, trying to focus on his body, to follow a half-remembered meditation and identify where he hurts, and how, and why.

In the time it takes Taehyung to answer him, Jimin notices too many pains to count. His ankles hurt to twitch under the blankets; his knees, used to bearing his weight, feel like they’ve been bludgeoned. His wrists are chafed and raw and bruised, his shoulder sears a burn through his fingers and half his torso. His throat tastes like the memory of blood, and his head throbs with his heartbeat, and his chest is tight with what feels more and more like fear with every second that passes without an answer.

“Where am I?” He asks again, no more than a whisper, and Taehyung turns his face away.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Jimin’s stomach twists, violent and so sudden that he has to swallow down a whine.

“Why?” Jimin thinks he means how. There’s an engine humming around them. There’s no windows in the bedroom. He can barely think, but the longer he can keep his eyes open, the more recognition sinks instinctive into his brain.

“We had to get you out.” Taehyung picks his way around the words. “I needed to get away from my uncle. It was the best option for both of us.”

“Is he here?” Jimin asks, before he can think better of it. He regrets it the second his mouth shapes the words, because Taehyung turns his back entirely. He perches on the edge of the bed like he’s trying to force himself not to leave, and it scares Jimin so badly that he reaches out, stretches enough to hurt every inch of him, to grab Taehyung’s wrist to pull him back.

I’m sorry, he thinks but doesn’t say, because he can’t quite understand what he’s sorry for.

Taehyung’s face turns toward him, profiled in the darkness. Jimin can see the tension in his lips not because his sight is improving, but because he thinks that maybe, after all these weeks, he’s starting to learn Taehyung’s tells.“You should rest,” Taehyung says. “I did my best for your shoulder, but — you have a lot of healing to do.”

Jimin’s stomach churns at the thought of going back to sleep. He doesn’t quite remember what was so unsettling about his dreams; he doesn’t quite remember how he got here, so damaged and drained, but he can guess more and more the longer he’s awake. He doesn’t want to go back to dreaming, to forgetting, to reaching across an empty bed for a body he might never sleep next to again.

Or maybe his stomach just churns because he’s hungry. The moment after Taehyung speaks, even Jimin can hear the snarl it lets out — Taehyung blinks, surprised enough that he turns back to look.

“Oh,” Taehyung says. “I’ll — of course, I’ll bring you something.”

“I can walk,” Jimin rasps. It’s not true, it’s a terrible bluff, but it makes Taehyung smile. Even if it’s laced with pity, it’s a welcome change from the tension between them that Jimin doesn’t know how to navigate.

In the city, Taehyung had always meant relief. On the Imugi, at least, he hadn’t known how easy it could be to let himself fall into Taehyung, and the blissful release he could give, and so at least he hadn’t had to mourn that ease. Jimin’s hand is still around Taehyung’s wrist, and all he feels is numb. Numb, like Taehyung is trying to strip him away, and even if it’s for his own good Jimin can’t help but hate how helpless it makes him feel.

“I’ll be right back.” It’s an easy promise to make. Jimin almost lets himself believe it, before he thinks better of letting that show.

“Don’t —” He starts, and then cuts it off. Blinks up through his lashes. With Hoseok, Jimin had never had to ask; his relief had been bare minimum, he knows now, had kept Jimin stretched taut like the skin of a drum for years and had him calling it survival. “Let me listen, Taehyung-ah. Please?”

He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Taehyung look so hurt. He flinches away from Jimin’s touch, and doesn’t meet his eyes, and Jimin swallows down shame and the hot sting of tears as his hearing floods back — not the impossible press it’s been ever since he can remember, but more controlled. He’s not hearing everything at once, but he can listen to anything on the ship he wants. While Taehyung nearly runs out of the room, Jimin closes his eyes and searches, and barely manages the energy to sustain remorse for the attempt at deception.

He can hear the whir of the reactor, and the hum of the power cells, and the symphony of technology that makes up the ship and all its controls, and he can let it all fade away. He can hear the rush of water through the filtration system, and the rustle of leaves from the hydroponics loft, and he can ignore each in turn without having to let them grate at his senses.

The one thing Jimin can’t ignore, whether it’s physical or lodged somewhere in his reflexes, is Taehyung.

He almost regrets asking, when he listens to Taehyung rattle in trembling breaths from the kitchen. When he realizes that he can’t turn it down even when he tries, even when he lets the constant noise of the cruiser flood back into him in hopes of drowning out the sound of Taehyung’s attempts to hold back tears.

By the time Taehyung makes it back, a bowl of broth and glass noodles cupped in his hands, Jimin is listening to the water systems. There are microbes in the filtration tank in the bowels of the ship, somewhere between the reactor and the sleek pair of lifecraft; they make a noise that he has to seek out to listen to, an impossibly minuscule vibration that, through the water, is nearly too quiet for Jimin to hear. And even as he tries to focus on that high-pitched hum, he’s distracted by Taehyung. The sound of air moving in and out of him, the wet path of his blood, the soft sound of skin as he wipes his cheek with the back of one hand before opening the door.

Jimin lets the filter fade away. He blinks through the blur of the bedroom as Taehyung sets down the bowl, and looks down at the spoon, and visibly weighs the decision of letting Jimin try to hold it himself.

In the end, neither of them pretend that Jimin is in any state to feed himself. In the end, Taehyung perches again on the edge of the bed, and holds the bowl in one hand and the spoon in the other, and Jimin closes his eyes and opens his mouth and pretends like the familiarity of that is only in the mechanics. And Taehyung lets him pretend, and both of them are silent until Jimin turns his head away, stomach writhing at the first food he’s had in what feels like days.

“That’s not even half,” Taehyung says, dismayed. “You need more than that.”

Jimin heaves out a breath through his nose. He doesn’t want to hear the ship anymore, and doesn’t need the distraction anyway. He brushes the side of his hand against Taehyung’s wrist, and his next breath in stutters when Taehyung sets aside the bowl and grabs him, lacing their fingers together, settling the confusion Jimin’s body feels at the awareness of sound and the numb lack of nearly anything else.

“Jimin-ah.” Taehyung’s voice is quiet, and the only thing Jimin can hear, and that’s more relieving than frightening. “Look at me?”

It’s a request, not an order. Jimin reminds himself of that even as he obeys.

He can see more, now. The room comes into focus, even with the lights nearly out. His skin tingles where he can feel it again, and for a moment he can feel the truth behind his injuries — that Taehyung, this whole time, has been shielding him from the agony of his skin against the sheets, and even if he can feel lacerations and bruises and that awful dislocation, it’s nothing compared to the way his body feels as a whole — like a porcelain doll dashed against the floor, limbs wrecked and head shattered.

The pain flares. The pain fades. Jimin breathes in the taste of antiseptic, and the smell of vegetable broth, and the remnants of Hoseok’s shampoo clinging to Taehyung’s long, braided-back hair.

“Oh,” Jimin says, because every other word escapes him. He and Taehyung are breathing in concert. He and Taehyung are practically dancing; with every breath, Taehyung responds to him, and recalibrates him, and nothing hurts except the pain itself, and Jimin thinks —

There’s a future waiting for him outside this ship. It’s a future he never bothered dreaming of, because it’s one without Hoseok in it — but it’s one with Taehyung, with this impossible feeling of completion, full of a kind of relief he’s not sure he knew existed when he was just a child. Jimin tries to picture himself at six or seven, stumbling around an orphanage — a child who never even thought to be grateful for a lack of pain.

“If I stay,” Taehyung whispers. “Will you rest?”

“Okay.” Jimin breathes it near-silently, just for the novelty of not hearing.

The truth is, he doesn’t know what more Taehyung wants for him. The pain has faded away again, and Jimin feels like he’s floating somewhere a few inches below his body. He’s barely moving; he’s barely alive enough to digest a few mouthfuls of broth. But he closes his eyes anyway, the darkness beautifully total. He listens to the room — just the room, and barely that. He listens to Taehyung’s breathing, and thinks about how he could break the synchrony between them. He thinks about how he doesn’t actually want to.

I don’t want to dream, he thinks about saying. Or maybe he does say it, and Taehyung says something back. Something murmured in the darkness, in the quiet, in the place between where he’s drifting and where his body lies.

He doesn’t understand the words, but he falls asleep holding onto them anyway.

♖

The next time Jimin wakes up, he remembers everything.

Or — not everything, but enough that he pulls his shoulder when he leans over the side of the bed to vomit. Nothing comes up, only a rancid string of bile, but Jimin retches for long minutes anyway, long past when Taehyung has flung himself through the doorway to reach him, one hand firm and solid against Jimin’s spine as he heaves. The physicality itself is a reminder — of the way his body tried to fight, long after his mind accepted what was coming, as he’d been dragged down and down and towards his own death.

It’s okay, Taehyung keeps saying. You’re okay, you’re okay. I’m so sorry.

They’re words Jimin remembers. He remembers being shut off, sense by sense, until all he had left was Taehyung’s voice, speaking words he was barely human enough by then to understand. The memory is so overwhelming, so humiliating, that all he can do at its surge is whimper through the mess he’d shedded his throat into as he screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

He can’t stop feeling his body, so Jimin feels every shock of pain as Taehyung eases him upright. He’s not sure that his shoulder will ever be the same again, even if the first thing they do when they reach whatever backwater planet they’ll be holing up in is get him to a doctor. The blaster alone hadn’t warranted surgery, but — the hours he’d spent tearing open the wound, ripping the joint out of place, scraping it against the floor as he tried to hide from the onslaught —

“Don’t touch me,” Jimin grits out, spiteful and cruel, and Taehyung flinches away like Jimin’s skin is a hot stove.

For a moment, Jimin just breathes. He sucks in air through his teeth, head bowed, hair overgrown and covering his eyes even as sweat sticks clumps of it to his forehead. At least he’s hydrated enough to sweat. At least he can weather small discomforts, like the oppressive heat of the blankets covering him. All he can think about is Hoseok’s hand cupped against his jaw, and how that simple touch he’d felt every day for every part of his life that matters had felt like a branding iron sending pain burning down into his bones.

He remembers asking, over and over, for Taehyung to let Hoseok touch him one more time. It feels impossible to untangle the timeline of what happened, and when, but he knows that Taehyung refused because — he has to believe, he has to, that he would remember Hoseok’s goodbye.

Next to him, Taehyung is statue-still on the edge of the bed. His eyes are swollen and rimmed with red, his nose and cheeks are flushed. The skin that dips above his lips is chafed raw. Jimin can’t bear to look at him, but he can’t stop, either; now that he remembers being alone in that cell, he’s not sure he could stand it if Taehyung left again. Jimin doesn’t know how to talk to him, out of the spiral of pain and humiliation and anger, and he doesn’t know how else to keep him here.

Silence settles. Jimin collapses back into the pillows, sweat beading down his face, bile rotting in his mouth. He’ll have to get up soon, to have Taehyung help him stagger into the bathroom, to spit out the taste of fear. But the spasm of movement was exhausting; the pain keeps on going, and every time Jimin manages to ignore it he’s surprised when it surges back again.

“I’m sorry,” Taehyung offers. The words are so familiar by now that they’re meaningless. Jimin turns his face away but keeps his eyes open — there’s a mirror on the wall that reflects Taehyung’s profile back at him, at just enough of an angle that all Jimin can really see is the slope of his nose, the curve of his jaw. His hair is tangled in the back, wisps caught and tugged from the braid that ends just below his shoulderblades. Jimin studies it, and thinks about what that weight might feel like at the back of his head. He’s never had hair long enough to even curl behind his ears; anything longer than a finger was practically an invitation for someone to fist their hand in it.

In the mirror, Taehyung grimaces. He rubs one hand across his jaw, unshaven and patchy with thin stubble for the first time Jimin can remember.

“We’re about three days out from Onjo.” Taehyung speaks slowly, with long pauses between sentences. Like he’s waiting for Jimin to tell him if he’s on the right path, if he’s answering the questions Jimin is too exhausted to even think of posing. “You slept for a few days, after we left. I don’t know if you remember.”

What Jimin remembers is a blur of nothingness. Dreams, maybe, or memories of water on his tongue, of strong, competent hands. He could check, maybe, if he let Taehyung press hands against his chest or spine, to see if he’d only dreamed the pattern of calluses.

And then Taehyung sighs. He looks down at his hands, and Jimin listens to the small sounds of him as he draws in another breath to speak.

“I have something for you,” he finally breathes out. It’s so clearly reluctant that Jimin can’t help but be interested; he pushes himself back up, more reclining than lying, as Taehyung steps out and returns with — a tablet. It’s clearly his, late-model and well-used, and Jimin takes it without bothering to ask what, and the second he looks down he feels his heartbeat trip, his chest constrict until it feels like he can barely breathe.

On the screen is a video message. Jimin plays it without even thinking.

Jimin-ah, Hoseok says, tinny through speakers and lightyears of distance. He’s not in the office he uses for official productions; he’s in his bedroom, cross-legged on the floor in front of his bed.

Jimin could cry. Jimin could dry heave again, looking at the room that doesn’t have him in it, that Hoseok looks small in, all of a sudden, though he’s grown so much from the child he’d been when Jimin moved in.

I’m sorry I have to say goodbye like this. Hoseok’s hands are folded in his lap. His mouth is pulled down into a frown, tight with shame. Jimin doesn’t need him in front of him to know — he doesn’t need Taehyung’s gift to know Hoseok, his friend, his master. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more, or be what you needed.

Onscreen, he takes in a breath that Jimin can’t hear. He looks down at his hands, and then back up at the camera, and Jimin splays his hand on the screen instinctively, like he should have reached out to comfort him when he was there. He should never have left at all, and he can’t imagine surviving if he’d stayed, and Jimin blinks the hot blur of tears out of his eyes and swallows through the noose cinched tight around his throat.

A noose, or a collar. The leash, as always, wrapped tight in Hoseok’s loving hand.

I know I failed you, Jimin-ah. And it’s not safe for us to talk anymore, but I promise I won’t fail you again. By the time you watch this, you’ll have everything I can give you.

The video is unedited. Hoseok keeps stumbling over his words, and starting sentences he doesn’t finish. Every other word is stumbled over. Jimin loves him; Jimin hates him. Jimin covers his mouth so he doesn’t spit on the screen as he sobs, painful and heavy, as Hoseok fixes a sad, awful smile onto his face.

You’re my best friend, you know that, right?

Whatever else the message says, Jimin is too upset to hear. He tosses the tablet away, and almost enjoys the pain in his shoulder. His face is a mess — he can’t quite breathe, hiccuping in little gasps that keep his chest tight and aching.

You’re my best friend, Hoseok had said. Blurred through pixels and canned in speakers. Jimin can imagine him saying it in bed, hand carding through Jimin’s hair. But he can’t remember the last time Hoseok’s touch didn’t hurt; he can’t remember the last time he could look at Hoseok without feeling like he was lying to him.

The door slides open. He hadn’t even realized Taehyung was gone, but there he is — carrying another bowl of broth and a glass of water, a damp towel slung over his arm. He’s smiling, but he’s not happy. If the transmission came in today, there might have been one for him, too.

As well as he can, Jimin shifts on the bed. He makes room. There’s a voice still coming from the speaker, and he catches one last phrase — be happy — before he remembers that he can just ignore it. He doesn’t have to listen; he doesn’t have to hear.

Taehyung takes the hint. The empty space in the bed. He only brings the towel when he crawls into it, when he slides his legs and bare feet under the blankets. It’s the first bed Jimin’s seen him in, the first time they’ve been anywhere that either of them could relax. Jimin’s body aches from injury and lethargy and inaction, but Taehyung comes in close, and puts one hand against Jimin’s sternum.

“Breathe?” He suggests, that same why smile twisting his lips.

Jimin wills the room to vanish, and it does. He wills his eyes to pick up the dips in Taehyung’s skin, the strands of his irises, and they do.

Jimin wills himself to breathe, and he does.

He doesn’t have to feel everything today. He doesn’t have to ask Taehyung those questions he still can’t voice, and he doesn’t have to start planning for that life he still can’t conceptualize.

They have three days to spin through the stars, and Jimin is so tired, and all he really wants is a scrap of comfort that he doesn’t have to pay for.

He feels Taehyung start forming the words before they come out, and Jimin has just enough flexibility in him to reach almost-up, to touch Taehyung’s chest in the same place Taehyung’s hand rests on him.

“Thank you,” Jimin rasps, before Taehyung tries to apologize again. He puts everything he has into those words, into the feelings underneath them. The fear and anger and the confusion, yes — and the relief, and the gratitude, and the budding blossom of something that might be hope that’s clustered in his chest, against his heart.

It’s the closest he’s been in years to happiness. To wanting to live, instead of just waiting to die.

Taehyung is the one who tangles their fingers together, between their chests. He bends down, awkward and endearing, and ghosts a kiss against Jimin’s knuckles, a few inches above the bandages that wrap halfway up his palm.

I want to go home, he remembers saying, in a fog of pain and desperation. Even he hadn’t known what he meant. Home was always a step back and to the side, his head bowed, his senses open. There’s no going back to that. He’d understood it when he was ready to die, and he understands again now.

Wherever home is going to be, he’s spinning toward it through the stars.

♜

While Namsan, when they left, had been falling into winter, Onjo is in the full bloom of spring.

Taehyung hadn’t even thought of it — of two winters in a row, separated by a few weeks of the Imugi’s temperate climate-control — until he’d stepped onto the tarmac of the spaceport and smelled pollen on the air. Even in Pyeonghae, Tamjin’s more popular sister city, the energy of the season had been inescapable. The day and two nights they spent there were crowded with voices floating up to their high-rise hotel window, crowds of students filling every green space, windows flung open and canopies over public spaces rolled away.

In the forest, everything is green and damp. Taehyung has learned how to give Jimin perfectly calibrated scent, so he can breathe in the luxury of wet soil, and the crisp chill of dew, and the needles of fir that brush and snag at their clothing.

The forest is full, and Taehyung clings onto that desperately, because the temple —

The temple is empty. The furniture is cobwebbed. The great open fireplace in the kitchen sits swept-out and cold, and even after almost a week spent airing it out and sleeping on mats under the stars, Taehyung feels like an open wound left to fester.

He’d expected it, in a sense. The last elders had never really talked about what they’d do when Taehyung and Jeongguk left them; Taehyung and Jeongguk had never let themselves ask. The library is as naked as its been since the day Taehyung arrived, and the desks in the living quarters are empty of notes or journals; he’ll never know what happened here, to the five acolytes left to the Twins, and in some ways Taehyung knows that it’s the better option.

What matters most to him, in their absence, is the routine. Taehyung had bought them round-trip rail tickets; he’d given them two weeks, to walk Jimin through the temple and teach him what he could.

So the first day, he pulls out the rusted ladder from the shed behind the temple and takes Jimin to the statues.

The ivy that reached Bo and Seonmul’s knees when Taehyung left has grown up to cover their faces. They’re covered with flowers, now — it takes Taehyung all of that afternoon to cut through the knots to let them breathe. Jimin waits with him the whole time, as quiet as he’s been for days, and calls Taehyung down often enough to keep him from sweating out all the water in his body.

At some point, between hacking away at tendrils and carrying a bundle of them to the hearth, Taehyung starts to cry. He doesn’t realize at first. He wipes sweat from his forehead and tears from his cheeks, and only notices when he blinks and they’re wet again. The growth in a heap on the stone is too green to burn well. There’s no point in this, because it’ll grow back in weeks — except that Taehyung doesn’t know what else to do.

There are enough funds in his new account, thanks to Jung Hoseok, for the two of them to live comfortably for years. Jimin hadn’t said much about it, and Taehyung hasn’t asked. He hasn’t asked because he’s afraid; he hasn’t asked because he doesn’t have an answer.

You don’t have to stay there, Namjoon’s only video message had told him. You could find somewhere for yourself.

Taehyung stares at the mess of vines and blinks through tears, another bout of what feels like an ocean leaving him every day.

Just think about it, Taehyung-ah.

He can’t. He doesn’t know how.

Taehyung makes it back to the statues, and pauses under the great stone arch that leads to the mosaic pavilion. It could have held fifty people once, kneeling in a row. Taehyung can almost see the ghosts of them — the long-dead sentinels, flushed with youth; the guides, left alone to linger through their twilight years. The elders he’d left here lived through the last generation of an extinction event, and Taehyung feels almost impossibly insignificant at the feet of his gods, ten meters tall and waiting open-handed for Taehyung to climb back onto the ladder. To buff away the dirt and insect corpses and rodents’ nests that linger in their crevices, to serve them as they’ve been served for generations as far back as Onjo’s written history.

Taehyung blinks. The ghosts vanish. He looks again, and sees Jimin, cross-legged, braiding the thin tendrils of new growth stripped from one of the first branches Taehyung had wrestled down. He sees Jimin, hands still in his lap, head tilted up to look.

The forest breathes. Wind filters through the canopy of leaves. Taehyung lets the arch hold his weight, and breathes with itt.

Jimin looks like he belongs here. His clothes, pulled from Hoseok’s reserve wardrobe on the ship, hang loose where he’s almost emaciated from years of deprivation and days of half-digesting broth on the journey. His hair is shorter than Taehyung’s ever worn it, and missing in patches where Taehyung had to comb out matting from congealed blood. But none of that really matters when Taehyung looks at him in front of the Twins — settled, waiting. A foreign relic of a gift that could well and truly die with him.

Jimin, and Namjoon, and Jeongguk. Taehyung knows they’re the last. He knows it in the same part of his chest that had felt his mother’s joy when she took his pudgy hand and pressed it to her stomach. In the same place he’d felt his uncle’s resolve the second before he pulled the trigger.

“Jimin-ah,” he calls, when his cheeks have dried tacky and red. When he can breathe in without shaking. When he can bear to see Jimin’s eyes flutter open as he turns, and feel the bubbling relief that still takes the both of them aback when Jimin remembers that nothing hurts. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

They have to be careful on the walk down to the riverbank. Jimin’s shoulder can’t be jostled too much, and the stamina he’d built up at the prince’s side has vanished in the aftermath of injury, so Taehyung bears most of his weight and tests each rock before he lets Jimin follow him down on the path to the dock. The path that’s overgrown, now, instead of trod down with daily footsteps, to the point where Taehyung’s bare ankles itch where the grass brushes against them.

They’d seen the river on the train from Pyeonghae — as crisp as it had been in Taehyung’s memory, swollen with spring. They’d followed it to the temple in a rented cart, the donkey who carried them enjoying the overgrown clearing where Taehyung used to watch the handful of goats they’d had until he was nineteen, when they started costing more than they were worth. But Taehyung still hasn’t reached in, hasn’t felt the frigid waters for himself. He’s almost afraid of breaking the surface and tumbling back into his cot in the city, Jeongguk’s bed unmade and empty on the other side of the room.

Jimin’s fingers tangle with his. Taehyung flexes his feet against the rough wood of the dock, stares down at the different slats. They’d repaired so much of the dock over the years that it’s practically new.

Taehyung wants to tell Jimin about all of it. About the years he spent here, and how his world narrowed down and down until even the thought of leaving was enough to send him into a spiral of panic — about how the elders pushed him away anyway, because they cared. Because they didn’t want him to die here, wasting his life dangling his feet in the river.

He wants to tell Jimin that those elders saved his life. He wants to tell Jimin that part of him regrets leaving, but most of him knows better.

“Swim with me?” He asks instead, which might be the same thing.

At his side, Jimin’s head is cocked. His brow is furrowed, but he nods. He lets Taehyung ease off his layers until they’re both in nothing but their undershorts, everything else spread out to warm in the sun.

Taehyung has had dreams like this. They’re half-remembered, muscle memory that settles as he slips into the freezing current and offers a hand for Jimin to join him. The cold shocks the air out of their chests; Jimin clutches his forearm with both hands as Taehyung guides them deeper, and deeper, until the current rushes past Jimin’s collarbones.

“Taehyung-ah,” Jimin says. Not a prelude to anything, just — says it. Taehyung can’t look away from him, from the deep bruising under his eyes, the just-healed scab of his shoulder wound, bandages unraveled to let the wound air out, wash clean. Jimin looks as much like a ghost as the phantoms Taehyung imagined in the courtyard; Jimin looks more real than Taehyung thinks he’s ever seen them.

He’s been waiting for this for months. He’s wanted to bring Jimin home ever since he started to understand that he couldn’t.

He focuses on Jimin’s breathing. He matches them together, eyes open. He waits for Jimin to realize; he breathes out a laugh when Jimin lets him in.

“Ready?” Taehyung asks, on an exhale Jimin shares.

Jimin nods, and closes his eyes, and Taehyung pulls them both under.

Cold closes over his head. Their bodies drag him down, Jimin too emaciated to float. Taehyung follows him, and doesn’t bother counting, because he can feel Jimin’s breath in his lungs. He can feel Jimin’s heartbeat in his chest. The cold pricks both of their skin; the water fills both of their noses. The river rushes through Taehyung’s head, into his ears, until it feels like his body is part of the current itself. Until it feels like he could breathe in, and open his eyes, and his whole body could be swept away to settle as sand at the rocky bottom.

Jimin’s chest constricts. Jimin’s fingers flutter around his arm. Taehyung jolts at the movement, at the reminder, at the sudden anxiety that spikes through him at the thought of staying down.

The river isn’t going anywhere. The river will outlast the dock, and the temple, and the memory of the twins. It will outlast the alabaster still sitting in Taehyung’s old bedroom, the fist-sized chunk he’ll show Jimin how to carve in Bo’s likeness. It will outlive the two of them; it doesn’t need Taehyung to keep it alive, to keep it whole.

But Jimin does. Jimin’s lungs constrict, after only a few seconds under; Jimin’s body aches at the battering force of the downward rush.

Neither of them have to stay here; neither of them have to die here. But they can come back, and sink into the river, and pry the vines off of Bo and Seonmul whenever they need to.

Taehyung finds his footing at the bottom, and pushes them up, and pulls Jimin close.

Their heads break the surface, and they breathe in together.