my ✩ sign is virgin!

The room is smaller than it was this morning.

Which doesn’t make sense, architecturally, because rooms don’t shrink. Walls don’t migrate inward while you’re downstairs eating drugged brownies and letting boys in bath robes corner you against kitchen counters. That’s not how buildings work. That’s not how physics works. You took a science elective. You passed it. Barely, but the point stands.

And yet.

The blue suite feels different. The ceiling’s lower or the bed’s bigger or the air is thicker or maybe—maybe it’s just that Jason closed the door behind him with a click instead of letting it drift shut, and the click had a sound to it. A punctuation.

You didn’t like it.

You haven’t liked any of it walking behind him up the stairs.

He didn’t reach for your hand. Didn’t put his palm on the small of your back the way he usually does in hallways.

He just walked. And you followed.

And now you’re standing three feet inside the door and he’s by the window and the bed is between you like a negotiating table, and everything was fine earlier. It was fine when you got dressed in this room. It was fine when Irya did your collarbones and Jason called you incredible and held out his hand and you took it.

It was fine twenty minutes ago.

So why does the wallpaper look like it’s breathing?

…Okay. That one might actually be the weed.

This was definitely not your best pharmaceutical decision.

Jason turns from the window. Faces you. Brings both hands together in front of his mouth—fingertips touching, pressed to his lips, the prayer gesture. The one people do when they’re organizing a thought they’ve already finished thinking and are now just choosing the delivery method.

He holds it there.

Drops his hands.

“Okay. So.”

A breath. Through his nose.

“What’s going on with him?”

Something catches in your throat. Not a sound—a shape. The shape of a word you weren’t ready for, or the shape of being caught, or the shape of every single moment from the last forty-eight hours compressing into a single syllable that sits behind your tongue and refuses to move.

Fuck.

He noticed.

Fuck fuck fuck.

He saw you at the counter. He saw the way you were standing—how close, how angled, the chocolate on your fingers, the laugh you didn’t authorize—and now he’s standing in this room with the door clicked shut and his hands in that prayer thing and he’s asking, and—

The shower. The orange. The hallway.

«Circles, Nix.»

The bracelet. The fucking bracelet that’s still on your wrist pressing the little rain charm into your pulse point.

He knows. He doesn’t know how much but he knows something.

Act normal.

You are a normal person who does normal things and has normal friendships with her normal roommate and none of those things involve coming in adjacent shower stalls or the word cookie being used as a double entendre in a kitchen full of witnesses.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Nailed it. Completely nailed it. Meryl Streep would weep. Oscar-worthy. Standing ovation.

Jason looks at you.

“Don’t do that.”

Okay. Fuck.

No. Don’t be discouraged bitch. Make Meryl proud, come on.

“Do what?”

“The thing where you act like you don’t understand the question.” His voice is level. Measured. Patient in a way that somehow makes it worse. “You know exactly what I mean. He’s constantly in your space.”

Okay, Meryl, girl. There was an attempt.

Your fingers find the bracelet.

Automatic. Unconscious. The way your hand goes to a bruise to check if it still hurts—you don’t decide to do it, you just do, and by the time you realize you’re doing it you’re already pressing the charm into your wrist and looking to the side, away from his face, at the lamp on the nightstand that is doing absolutely nothing wrong and doesn’t deserve to be stared at this hard.

“We’re friends.” You say it to the lamp. “That’s it.”

“Friends.”

“Yeah. Friends. People who talk to each other at parties. Groundbreaking concept.”

“Y/N.”

“What?”

“Can you look at me?”

You look at him. Force yourself to do it—drag your gaze from the lamp to his face like it’s a physical act, like your eyes weigh something they didn’t weigh ten minutes ago.

He’s not angry. That’s the thing. He’s not doing the thing you’re braced for—no raised voice, no visible frustration, no clenched jaw or sharp edges.

He looks calm. Concerned. Reasonable.

For some reason, it feels like his most dangerous version.

“I’m not trying to start a fight,” he says. Opens his hands. Palms up. The universal gesture of ’I come in peace’ that people only do when peace is not, in fact, what they came with. “I just—I think it’s worth having a conversation about boundaries.”

“Boundaries.”

“Yeah. About what’s appropriate. In front of other people.”

Something hot flickers in your chest. Not guilt anymore. Something meaner.

“What exactly was inappropriate?”

“I didn’t say inappropriate. I said—”

“You literally just said what’s appropriate, Jason, which means something was inappropriate, so what was it?”

He takes a breath. The patient one. The one that says ’I’m going to let that tone slide because I’m the mature one here.’

And god, you hate that breath. You hate it the way you hate being corrected by someone who’s technically right but fundamentally missing the point—that specific, grinding frustration of being managed.

“I just don’t think it’s a great look,” he says. “Having another guy’s hands all over you at a party where we’re here together.”

Hands all over you.

Hands all over you?

The kitchen counter flashes—Jungkook’s palms flat on either side of your hips, the heat, the proximity, the vanilla bottle sitting there like a prop in a play about your bad decisions—and your stomach drops because okay, maybe from across the room that did look—

“That’s not what was happening.”

“From where I was sitting—”

“Then maybe you were sitting at a bad angle.”

“Y/N.” The patient breath again. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just saying—as someone who cares about you—I don’t think you realize how it looks. To other people.”

His eyes drop. To your wrist.

“And—I wasn’t going to bring this up, but since we’re talking about it.” He gestures. A small tilt of his chin toward your left hand. “That thing.”

You don’t need to look down to know what he means.

“What about it?”

“You’ve been wearing it all week. I couldn’t help but notice.” His voice is still calm. Still measured. Still wrapped in enough reasonableness that the words almost sound like concern instead of what they are. “And I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to—but it’s a bit childish, no? The colors. The beads.”

Yellow. Orange. Red. Little silver letters spelling ‘Rogue’ across.

“It’s a bracelet, Jason.”

“It says Rogue.” He says it amused in a way that’s worse than mean—condescending, like he’s being generous by only finding it slightly embarrassing. “What does that even mean?”

“It’s an inside joke.”

“With who?”

“With—people. It’s a friendship bracelet. People have those.”

“At your age?”

The question hangs. Rhetorical. Already answered by the tone he used to ask it.

His eyes move from the bracelet to your hand. To the back of it. To the fleshy part below your thumb where—

“And—is that a bite?”

Your hand snaps behind your body so fast you nearly throw out your shoulder.

Too fast. Way too fast.

The speed of it is its own confession—nobody hides an innocent injury like they’re palming evidence at a crime scene—and you watch Jason clock the reaction the way he clocks everything: slow, but sure.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s a bite mark.”

“It’s not. I just bumped into something.”

“That’s teeth.”

“It was—the brownie thing. In the kitchen. It was stupid, someone was—it was a joke.”

“A joke.” Flat. “Someone bit you. As a joke.”

And the way he says it—someone—makes it clear he doesn’t need you to fill in the name.

His jaw works once. Controlled.

“So you’re out there getting drunk and high and—what, bitten by people at a party? Randomly? While we’re here together?”

“It wasn’t—”

“That’s the kind of behavior you think is—”

“It was a joke, Jason, we were fighting over a brownie and it was dumb and it lasted two seconds—”

“I just—”

He runs a hand through his hair. Looks at you with an expression that’s trying so hard to be gentle it comes full circle into something sharp.

“That’s not the girl I know. The beads and the nicknames and the—getting bitten in kitchens at midnight—it’s not you.”

Not you.

Not the version of you he knows.

Not the version he built in his head from seminar answers and coffee dates and the careful, polished, composed woman who shows up when he’s watching.

The version that wears matching jewelry and speaks in complete sentences and doesn’t have an inside joke with her roommate spelled out on her wrist in colored beads like a kid at summer camp.

“Maybe you’ve just never known me.”

You say it quiet. Looking right at him.

His mouth opens. Closes.

And for one second—half a second—surprise cracks in the diplomacy.

Then the composure reseals. The crack plasters over. The expression returns to its default setting: concerned, measured, slightly wounded.

“I think you should be more mindful. That’s all. About how you carry yourself. I think you should—”

A pause. Careful. Choosing.

“—respect yourself a little more.”

Respect yourself.

Your mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.

“You deserve better than being someone’s—I don’t know—physical prop. Being grabbed and hung on and—it’s not how someone treats a person they respect. And I think you know that.”

The hot thing in your chest is spreading. Climbing up your throat. Making your heartbeat louder in your own ears, which might be the weed or might be fury or might be some volatile combination of both that’s going to end in either tears or property damage and you genuinely do not know which.

“Nobody was grabbing me. Nobody was hanging on me. I was talking to someone. At a party. Like a person. With a social life.”

“You were—”

“What? Finish that.”

“Can you let me finish a sentence?”

“Can you stop starting sentences that end with me not respecting myself?”

“I just don’t think Jimin sees it like that.”

Everything stops.

The room. Your breathing. The weed-warped wallpaper. The hot angry thing in your chest.

All of it hits pause, mid-stride, like someone yanked the needle off a record.

“What?”

“I said I don’t think Jimin sees it the way you think he does.”

Jimin.

Jimin?

He’s talking about—

This entire—every single word of this conversation—the boundaries, the appropriateness, the respect yourself—

“You think Jimin has feelings for me?”

It comes out flat. Incredulous. Like someone asked you to confirm the sky is blue.

Jason’s expression doesn’t change.

Same steady, reasonable, measured look.

Same concerned furrow between the brows.

Same ’I’m saying this because I care about you’ energy pouring off him in waves of cedar and bergamot.

“I think Jimin knows what it’s like to be a guy,” he says, “and have a girl draped all over him.”

Draped.

He said draped.

Like you were fabric. Like you were a decoration. Like the arms you had around Jimin’s shoulders—warm, platonic, the kind of casual affection you give to someone who just did your eyeliner and trusted you with the shape of his questions—were some kind of tactical maneuver. Some calculated display that poor innocent Jimin couldn’t possibly interpret as anything other than sexual, because you’re a girl, and he’s a guy, and apparently that equation only has one answer in Jason’s math.

Your fingernails press half-moons into your palms.

“Draped,” you repeat. Testing the word. Tasting it.

It tastes like your mother.

«You’re too much, you’re too loud, you’re taking up space in a way that makes people uncomfortable, and you’d know that if you’d just stop and think about how you look from the outside for once in your life.»

You feel the beginning of a compression in your chest.

One that you recognize from a long time ago, from fights in kitchens with marble countertops, from sitting at dining tables where every fork was placed at the correct angle and every word was placed at the correct volume and every version of you that didn’t fit the blueprint got folded up and put away.

Your lungs feel smaller.

That’s the weed. That has to be the weed.

“Jimin is my friend.” You say it slow, clear. “He did my eyeliner. I hugged him. I hug my friends, Jason. That’s a thing people do.”

“I’m not saying you can’t have friends—”

“Oh, good. Thank you. Permission granted. Really appreciate that.”

“See, this is what I’m talking about.” He gestures at you—at all of you, the sarcasm, the crossed arms, the whole defensive architecture of your posture. “This. Right here. I try to have an adult conversation and you immediately go to—”

“To what?”

“To this. The deflection. The sarcasm. The making me the bad guy for expressing a concern.”

And the fucked up thing—the really truly fucked up thing—is that he’s not entirely wrong.

You are deflecting. You are being sarcastic. You are making him the bad guy because the alternative is engaging with the actual content of what he’s saying and you can’t do that because the actual content requires you to either (a) explain that Jimin is not interested in you because Jimin is currently navigating something about his own identity that is private and sacred and none of Jason’s goddamn business, or (b) admit that the real problem isn’t Jimin at all, it’s the guy in the Ghostface robe who said circles to you across a kitchen like it was a promise—

And you can’t do either of those things.

Option A outs Jimin. Option B outs you.

So you’re stuck.

Trapped.

Standing in this room that’s getting smaller with every sentence, defending a position that isn’t the real position, fighting a fight that isn’t the real fight, and your chest is doing the thing and your hands are doing the thing and the wallpaper is definitely breathing now and you can’t—

“He was sitting down,” you say, and your voice is thinner. You can hear it. “I came up behind him and put my arms around him. The same way I’d hug Yeji. The same way I’d hug Irya. Are you going to tell me that’s inappropriate too?”

“Yeji and Irya are women.”

“So?”

“So it’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because it is. Because whether you want to acknowledge it or not, there is a difference between how men and women interpret physical affection, and I’m not being old-fashioned by pointing that out, I’m being realistic.”

“You’re being controlling.”

Jason’s face does something you’ve never seen it do before.

He looks hurt. Real, actual hurt, the kind that flashes across someone’s face before they can catch it and tuck it behind something more presentable.

“I’m not controlling you,” he says. “I’m asking you to think about how your actions affect the people around you. That’s not control. That’s consideration.”

Consideration.

Your mother’s favorite word. Your mother’s number-one, gold-standard, go-to weapon for every single time you did something that embarrassed her or surprised her or reminded her that you were a separate person with separate wants—’have some consideration. Think about someone other than yourself for once.’

You can feel your heartbeat in your fingers, in your wrists, in the base of your throat where the gold chain sits against your skin.

You want to scream that Jimin is already interested in someone else, that possibly he doesn’t even like girls.

But you don’t.

Because it’s not yours to say. It’s Jimin’s. It belongs to him the same way the pink nail belongs to him, the same way the question in the bathroom belongs to him—’what if none of it fits, what if there isn’t a word for it’—and you don’t get to hand that to Jason Calloway like a hall pass just because you’re cornered and scared and your lungs won’t open all the way.

You don’t get to sacrifice someone else’s secret to win your own argument.

So you stand there. Hands shaking. Jaw shut. Pulse hammering against the rain charm on your wrist.

And you have nothing.

No defense that doesn’t betray someone.

No explanation that doesn’t expose something.

“I shouldn’t have to justify hugging my friend,” you say, and it comes out cracked.

“Nobody’s asking you to justify anything. I’m asking you to be aware.”

“Aware of what?”

“Of how you come across. Of the signals you’re sending. Of the fact that you’re at a party with me—with me—and you spent the last hour hanging off other men and barely looked in my direction.”

The compression in your chest is getting worse. Heavier. Like someone’s stacking books on your ribcage one at a time—each sentence another volume, another weight, another reason you can’t get enough air into your lungs to fight properly.

Your eyes burn.

No. Nope. Absolutely not.

You are not going to cry in front of Jason Calloway in a Medusa costume with two pot brownies dissolving in your bloodstream. That’s not happening. That is a thing that will not occur.

“I think,” he says—and there’s a softness to it now, a careful softness that’s worse than the accusations because it sounds like kindness, it sounds like concern, it sounds like someone who loves you explaining for the fifteenth time why you’re doing everything wrong, “that sometimes you don’t realize the way you act around men. And I don’t think that’s your fault. I think it’s—a pattern. And I think if you were a little more self-aware about it, a little more…”

He pauses. Looking for the word.

“…mature, you’d...”

You tune out the rest of the sentence.

Because that word.

Mature.

One single, careful, well-chosen, precisely deployed word that lands in the exact center of the thing your parents built inside you—the architecture of not-enough, the blueprint of every dinner table correction and every lowered voice and every ’when are you going to grow up and start acting like the person we raised you to be’—

And inside you something buckles—a load-bearing wall giving way, a structural failure that’s been building since the shower, since the orange, since circles, since the prayer hands and what’s going on with him—and you are not going to cry here.

You are not going to cry here, you are not going to cry here, you are not—

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“Y/N—”

“I need to use the bathroom, Jason.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it.

His expression is doing the thing again—the hurt, the confusion, the genuine inability to understand why his reasonable words keep producing unreasonable reactions—and part of you, the part that’s still rational, knows he doesn’t get it.

Knows he thinks he’s being fair.

Knows he genuinely believes that everything he just said came from a place of care and concern and wanting the best for you.

And maybe that’s the worst part.

That he means it.

That the cage is lined with good intentions and the bars are made of ’I just want what’s best for you’ and the lock is turned by someone who thinks love and management are the same thing.

You grab the door handle. Pull.

“Can we at least—”

The door closes behind you.

The hallway is empty. The sconce flickers. The fog machine’s output has crept up the stairs and is hanging in thin wisps along the baseboard and you walk through it on legs that don’t feel entirely connected to your body—one foot, then the other, mechanical, automatic, the way you used to walk from the dining room to your bedroom after the conversations that left you feeling like this, small and wrong and taking up too much space and not the right shape and never, ever, ever enough—

The bathroom door.

You push through it. Lock it behind you.

Slide down the door until you’re sitting on cold tile with your knees pulled up and the Medusa skirt bunching around your thighs and the snake cuff digging into your bicep and the gold chains in your hair pressing into the back of your skull against the wood.

The first sob comes out silent.

The second one doesn’t.

It’s ugly. Wrenching. The kind that starts in your stomach and rips upward through your chest like something with claws, and you press your hand over your mouth to contain it because there are thirty people downstairs and the last thing—the absolute last thing you need—is someone hearing you fall apart in a bathroom at a Halloween party because a boy used the word ’mature’ and your nervous system couldn’t tell the difference between him and your mother.

Tears streak through Jimin’s perfect eyeliner, wings dissolving, the careful symmetry ruined, and you think stupidly, absurdly, through the wet gasping wreckage of your breathing, that he’s going to be so disappointed when he sees what you did to his work.

That thought makes you cry harder.

Which makes you laugh.

Which makes you cry again.

You pull your knees tighter. Press your forehead to them. Let the gold chain belt dig into your thighs.

On your wrist, the rain charm catches the fluorescent light.

You don’t take it off.

He can taste purple.

Not like—grape. Not like candy or medicine or anything that’s supposed to be purple. Just the color. Just purple, sitting on his tongue like a frequency, and the ceiling is doing something interesting with its textures and Jungkook is pretty sure the decorative cobwebs have been moving for the last ten minutes but in a chill way. A friendly way. Like they’re also at a party and having a good time.

He shouldn’t have eaten that third brownie.

He knows this.

He also shouldn’t have taken that last shot of whatever Hobi poured out of a bottle with no label—a liquid the color of antifreeze that tasted like someone dissolved a green apple Jolly Rancher in paint thinner and then blessed it with a prayer and a middle finger.

But rational decisions have never been his forte and they’re not going to start now.

Not when the ceiling has this much going on, anyway.

“Hoseok deserves jail,” Taehyung mutters next to him.

He says it to the ceiling too. Both of them, heads tipped back against the couch cushions, staring up at the crown molding like it contains the answers to questions neither of them are smart enough to ask right now.

Jungkook chuckles. “Federal.”

“Minimum.”

“Consecutive sentences.”

“No parole.”

They sit with that for a moment. Satisfied with the verdict.

This lounge is on the far side of the house—quieter, dimmer, tucked away from the main party like a VIP section nobody asked for. Somebody dragged a floor lamp in here at some point and aimed it at the wall, which means the light is amber and indirect and makes everything look like a memory. There’s a smaller couch, an armchair with an afghan thrown over it, and a coffee table covered in jack-o-lanterns that Jungkook carved this morning with a steak knife and what he’d considered, at the time, artistic vision.

He looks at the decorations. The cobwebs he stretched across the doorframe. The battery-operated candles on the mantle. The little plastic spiders he positioned along the bookshelf with deliberate spacing because—film major.

Composition matters. Even in novelty arachnids.

“You know what,” he says. “I did a pretty good job with all this.”

He gestures broadly at the room. The gesture is meant to encompass the whole house but his arm is heavier than expected so it mostly encompasses the lamp and half of Taehyung’s face.

Taehyung snorts.

“Sure. If you don’t count the pumpkins.”

Jungkook’s head rolls sideways on the cushion. “What’s wrong with my pumpkins?”

Taehyung stops staring at the ceiling. Lifts his head. Rights himself into something approaching a seated position, which is a production—because Taehyung is currently dressed as Gomez Addams and the costume is committed.

Pinstripe suit. Actual pinstripe, not printed. A burgundy pocket square folded into something that probably has a name—triangle? pyramid? fabric origami?—that matches the deep red of Irika’s dress because of course it does, because Kim Taehyung looked at his girlfriend’s Morticia costume and said ’I will restructure my entire wardrobe around your color palette’ without a single beat of hesitation. The mustache is drawn on with eyeliner. Thin, precise, curling slightly at the ends. His hair is slicked back—every strand cemented into place with what smells like an entire can of product—and there’s a fake rose pinned to his lapel that Jungkook watched him steal from a vase in the entryway and present to Irika on one knee in the living room while she pretended to swoon and Hobi filmed the whole thing for Instagram.

Disgusting. Truly disgusting behavior from a man Jungkook respects and loves.

“Are you kidding me,” Taehyung says.

Jungkook rights himself too. Sits up. Squares his shoulders. The Ghostface robe shifts around him like a bathrobe at a very dramatic hotel.

“The pumpkins are perfect.”

“They’re not perfect. They look stupid.”

“They don’t—”

“Dude.” Taehyung points—hazily, finger drifting slightly left of center—at the jack-o-lantern sitting on the coffee table directly in front of them. “Look at it. Actually look at it.”

Jungkook looks at it.

It’s… okay, the mouth is a little wide.

And the eyes are slightly different sizes, which he’d thought was characterful at the time but might, in the current lighting, read more as neurological event.

And the nose—he’d tried for a triangle, landed on something more rhomboid—

“It looks like Willy Wonka,” Taehyung says. “Or some shit.”

“Willy Wonka’s attractive.”

The words leave his mouth before his brain clears them and he hears them land in the room and thinks, ’well, that’s a sentence I just said with confidence to another man on a couch.’

Taehyung’s entire head rotates toward him. Slowly. Like a surveillance camera.

“What.”

“What? He is. Didn’t you see that TikTok guy? The one who dressed up as Wonka and got like—millions of followers?”

“What the fuck is on your For You Page, dude.”

“Bro, I swear. He went viral. Hold on.”

Jungkook pulls out his phone. Unlocks it. The screen is brighter than the sun and he squints against it like a vampire encountering daylight for the first time—which, given the costume, feels thematic.

“Look. Wait.”

He opens TikTok. His thumb is slower than usual. The letters in the search bar are behaving strangely.

“How do you spell Wonka.”

“How do you—Jungkook.”

“No, I know how, I just—is there an H?”

“There’s not an H in Wonka. There has never been an H in Wonka. Where would the H go.”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking—”

“W-O-N-K-A. Five letters. No H. You went to college.”

“Technically I’m still going to college—”

“You—“ Taehyung groans, snatching the phone, “gimme the phone.”

Somehow, his friend manages to write with the efficiency of someone who doesn’t have three brownies and Hobi’s prison cocktail dissolving his neural pathways.

Two seconds later he’s scrolling through results.

Jungkook, on a sober note, would call that blasphemy.

“This one?”

He holds the phone up. A guy in a purple velvet coat and a top hat, abs out, doing a grinding motion to some remix of ‘I wanna love you’.

“That’s him! See?” Jungkook takes the phone back. Points at the screen. “Tell me that’s not attractive.”

“I’m not telling you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not going to sit on this couch, in this suit, and confirm or deny the attractiveness of a TikTok Willy Wonka to you at midnight on Halloween. I have limits. I have a pinstripe situation happening.” Taehyung tugs his lapel. “Gomez wouldn’t do this.”

“Gomez would absolutely do this. Gomez would rate every man in a room if Morticia told him to.”

“That’s—” Taehyung pauses. Snatches his phone again. Narrows his eyes. “That’s actually accurate and I’m mad about it.”

“So the pumpkin looks like an attractive man. What’s the issue.”

“The issue is that a jack-o-lantern is not supposed to look like an attractive man, Jungkook. It’s supposed to look scary. That’s the—that’s the whole assignment. Scary face. On a gourd.”

“A gourd?”

“A pumpkin is a gourd.”

“Since when?”

“Since—botany? Since agriculture? Since the dawn of gourds?”

“I feel like you’re making that up.”

“Google it.”

“You Google it. You have my phone.”

Taehyung looks down. He does, in fact, still have Jungkook’s phone. He stares at it for a long moment, like he forgot how it got there and is now reconstructing the timeline.

“…Your wallpaper is still Griffin,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“From when he was a kitten.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cute.”

“I know.”

They look at each other. Two grown men on a couch. One dressed as a fictional serial killer, the other as a fictional husband. Both profoundly, catastrophically, beautifully stoned.

Taehyung hands the phone back.

“Your pumpkins still look stupid.”

“Noted. Rejected. Moving on.”

“The one in the hallway looks like it’s having an allergic reaction.”

“That one’s abstract.”

“It’s abstract in the way that a car accident is abstract.”

Jungkook opens his mouth to argue, but his brain has already lost the thread—gone, dissolved, replaced by the observation that the cobwebs on the ceiling are still moving and he’s kind of into it. Like a mobile. Like a very goth baby mobile.

He tips his head back again. Taehyung follows a beat later.

Ceiling.

Cobwebs.

“Hey,” Taehyung says.

“Yeah.”

“The decorations are good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Not the pumpkins. Everything else.”

Jungkook grins at the ceiling. “Thanks, man.”

“The pumpkins are, like, honest-to-god dog shit.”

“Got it.”

“But the rest is solid.”

“Appreciate that.”

They sit with it. Content. The kind of silence that only exists between two people who've known each other long enough that not talking is its own form of conversation.

Somewhere in the house, someone drops a glass. A cheer goes up.

Neither of them moves.

Then Jungkook's thumb finds the silver ring. Starts turning it.

He doesn't notice he's doing it. Never does. It's the kind of habit that lives below the threshold of awareness—a background process, automatic, the way some people tap their foot or chew their lip. He just spins the ring. Round and round. The pad of his thumb catching the flat edge, pushing, rotating, catching again.

"Jason bothers me."

He says it to the ceiling. Same way he said the thing about the pumpkins. Same way he said Willy Wonka was attractive. Just out there. A sentence released into the room without a permission slip.

Taehyung doesn't move. Doesn't look over.

"You've mentioned."

"No, I mean—" The ring spins. "He bothers me."

"Yeah. You've mentioned that too." Taehyung shifts on the couch. Gets slightly more upright. The jacket creaks. "Multiple times. Extensively. At length. I believe the phrase 'trust fund guidance counselor' was used. And 'discount therapist with a cologne budget.' And my personal favorite—"

"I'm not joking around right now."

Something about the way he says it—the flatness, the absence of the usual punchline, the punchline that should be there because Jungkook always has a punchline, that's the deal, that's the contract between him and every serious moment he's ever been in—makes Taehyung's head turn.

Jungkook is still looking at the ceiling. But he's not seeing the cobwebs anymore.

"Something's off about him."

"Off how?"

"I don't—" His tongue pushes against the inside of his cheek. Searching for the word. The right word. "I don't know. Off. Just off, bro. The way he—"

He stops. Starts again.

"She used eucalyptus soap."

Taehyung blinks.

"...What?"

"Earlier. The showers. Y/N. She used the eucalyptus soap that was in the stall instead of her own stuff."

Taehyung stares at him. The Gomez mustache—what's left of it—crinkles with the specific bewilderment of a man who was just having a perfectly good conversation about gourds and is now being asked to care about shower products.

"I'm gonna need, like... significantly more context than that."

"She's vanilla, Tae." Jungkook says it like it's obvious. Like it's a fact of the natural world, on par with gravity or the boiling point of water. "She’s vanilla everything. Everything. Soap. Lotion. The stuff in her hair. She's got like six different vanilla products in the shower caddy and she didn't bring any of it. She used the generic eucalyptus shit in the stall and she doesn’t—she still smells like vanilla underneath because it's basically her, like her actual—"

“Jungkook.”

"—but it's off. There's this—this layer on top of it that isn't her and I'd bet you anything—anything—that he said something. About the vanilla. That he made some comment about it being basic or juvenile or whatever the fuck and she just—adjusted. Without even—she probably doesn't even know she did it."

The silence that follows has a specific quality.

…The quality of someone deciding whether to call an ambulance or a therapist.

"Jesus, man. The weed really did a number on you. You’re having an episode over body wash, are you hearing yourself—"

"It's not—" He swats at Tae. "It’s not about the body wash. It's—" He drags a hand down his face. "Okay, the body wash thing sounds insane. I know it sounds insane. That's the problem. Every individual thing sounds insane if I say it out loud. It's only when you put all of it together that it—"

He makes a vague, frustrated gesture at the air. Like he's trying to grab the shape of what he means and it keeps slipping.

"She doesn't do her tea thing anymore."

"Her tea thing."

"She used to leave the tea bags in the sink. Every morning. Just—sitting there. On the sink. Drove me insane. I texted her about it. Twice. She left me on read and then told me where I could shove the tea bags. It was a whole thing."

He's talking to the ceiling again. His thumb hasn't stopped.

"And then she starts seeing this guy and the tea bags are gone. Just—poof. Not in the sink. Not anywhere. And the thing is—I should be happy about that, right? I wanted them gone. But they didn't stop because she decided to stop. They stopped because he—"

No, but that doesn’t sound right. Because he doesn’t know for sure, does he?

Did you stop the tea bag situation after Jason?

Was it before him? Was Jason the reason?

He wishes he could trust his memory. Or his own brain.

"I’m really trying to follow the thread here, Jungkook."

"It’s—it’s just—the way she is after she's been with him for a while. Like she’s been adjusted or something."

Taehyung is quiet for a second. Processing.

Runs a hand across the back of his neck, seemingly choosing words carefully, which is very unlike him.

"Look, man… She's a grown woman. People date shitty guys all the time. That's, like... a universal experience. It's not really—"

"I know."

"—your problem. She's your roommate. You guys argue about milk. It's not—"

"I know, Tae."

"So then why are you—" Taehyung's hand comes off his neck. Gestures at all of Jungkook. The ring spinning, the jaw set, the whole rigidness of a man who's clearly been carrying this around for longer than tonight. "Why are you like this about it? Since when do you even—I thought you guys just coexist. She leaves her shit around, you leave your shit around, Yoongi mediates. That's the dynamic."

The ring stops.

Spins again.

"We're friends."

Taehyung's eyebrows go up. Genuinely up.

"You're friends?"

"I think so. Yeah. I've been trying to convince her of that for like a month and she basically just gave in earlier tonight—anyway, that's not the point, dude—"

"No, I—I'm just—since when? Last I heard she was 'the menace in room three' who used all the hot water—"

"She's not a menace, she's—okay, she is a menace. With the hot water specifically. But that's a separate issue and it has nothing to do with—"

He's losing the thread. Can feel it unraveling. The way it always does when he tries to explain something that lives in the space between what he sees and what he can prove—the words come out wrong or come out in the wrong order or come out sounding like a conspiracy theory narrated by a guy who's had three pot brownies and a shot of Hobi's antifreeze, and he knows that, he can hear himself, but the alternative is shutting up and the alternative is worse because shutting up means the thing stays in his chest and eats.

"Okay. Forget the soap. Forget the tea bags. Forget all the—the individual things, because individually they're all nothing. Right? Each one is nothing."

He sits up. Slightly. Enough that his feet plant on the floor and he's not talking to the ceiling anymore. He's talking to his hands.

"But it's like—when you watch a movie. And you can't point to the one thing that's wrong with it. The lighting's fine, the acting's fine, the script is fine. But you walk out and you feel bad and you don't know why, and then two weeks later at three in the morning you sit up and go 'the pacing'—it was the pacing the whole time, the pacing was off and it made everything else feel wrong even though everything else was technically fine."

Catches his breath.

"Jason is the pacing."

Taehyung opens his mouth. Closes it. Tilts his head.

"That's..." he says slowly, "genuinely one of the most unhinged analogies I've ever heard you make. And I was there for the 'risotto is emotional labor' speech."

"It made sense in context—"

"It didn't, but go on."

Jungkook's face is on his hands now, resting his weight on his elbows. The way he does when the frustration of not being able to translate the thing in his body to the thing in the air hits critical mass.

"I'm not saying this right."

"You're really not."

"I just—I see her, Tae. I see her before she goes to his place and I see her when she comes back and she's different. And I can't—I can't point to the exact frame where it changes. But she's smaller when she comes back. Not like—not physically. Just... the volume on her goes down. And it comes back up when she's home for a while and then she goes back to him and it goes down again and I—"

He stops. Presses his palms flat on his thighs. Pushes down. Grounding.

"Something about him makes my skin crawl and I don't know if that's real or if I'm—"

«…making it up, Jungkook. You’re seeing things that are not there, baby. You’re projecting.»

"—or if I'm just... seeing shit that isn't there because of my own stuff. I'm aware that's possible. I'm aware I could be the problem here. But every time I try to talk myself out of it something else happens—something small, something that doesn't matter by itself—and the feeling comes back and it's—it's—"

He makes a sound. Not a word. The verbal equivalent of throwing a pen across the room because the sentence won't cooperate.

"I'm really not saying this right."

"Hey." Taehyung's voice has changed. Not all the way. Still casual, still on the couch, still Kim Taehyung at a Halloween party. But the tone is softer. "You don't have to get it perfect, man. Just say the part that matters."

The part that matters.

The ring spins.

"He—" he gulps down, the pronoun stumbling over itself, "he reminds me of—"

And the sentence stops. Not because he chose to stop it. Because the word that comes next has a weight to it—actual, physical, gravitational—and the weight wins. Holds it in his chest. Behind the sternum.

In the exact place where things live that he brings to Dr. Liao's office and puts on the table between them and says ‘I don't know what this is but it won't leave.’

He doesn't finish. Just turns his head. Looks at Taehyung.

The look does what the word won't.

Taehyung, who knows what lives on the other side of sentences Jungkook doesn't finish, nods softly.

"Mia?"

Jungkook takes a couple seconds. But then he nods.

Taehyung sits up. All the way up. Elbows on his knees. The stolen rose on his lapel bends sideways.

"What do you mean he reminds you of—like, specifically. What is he doing?"

"It's—it's just a hunch, man. I don't know him. I've barely talked to him, so for all I know I could be paranoid. I'm aware of that." He sighs. "But something about his presence makes my skin fucking crawl and—when I see her—when I see her after she's been with him for a while, every time she's..."

Loses it. The sentence. The thread. The bridge between the thing he can feel and the thing he can say.

Starts over.

"I feel like he makes her think she's the problem. Like the way she is—her personality, the way she takes up space, the way she's loud and leaves tea bags everywhere and wears vanilla everything—like all of that is this flaw he's generously helping her with. And she just—she takes it. She adjusts. And she doesn't even know she's adjusting, that's the—"

His hands are moving now. Not gesturing. Just moving. Restless energy that needs an exit.

"—and I can't say anything because we're barely—I've been her friend for like five hours, I don't get to walk up and be like 'hey, I think your boyfriend is psychologically dismantling you one tea bag at a time.' That's insane. That's—"

"Hey." Taehyung's hand on his knee. Firm. "Slow down. Start from the beginning. What specifically has he—"

The door to the lounge swings open hard enough to bounce off the wall.

Jimin comes through it like the hallway spat him out—fast, slightly off-balance, costume rumpled. The quill pen is gone from behind his ear. His eyes are wide and scanning the room with the specific urgency of someone who needs something and needed it thirty seconds ago.

"Sorry—sorry, is there water in here?"

Jungkook lifts one hand from the armrest. Swallows. Rubs the back of his neck. Points vaguely at the side table where someone abandoned a cluster of bottles and cups sometime around the second hour of the party.

"Over there."

Doesn't take long to notice Jimin's chest is moving too fast.

"Yo." Sits up.

The weed is still there—still fuzzing the edges, still making the room feel like it's wrapped in felt—but something underneath it is starting to sharpen. An instinct. The one that monitors rooms, reads exits, clocks the difference between someone who's out of breath from running and someone who's out of breath from something worse.

"What's up, Jim?"

Jimin picks up the cup. Puts it down. Picks it up again.

Licks his lips.

"It's—"

He says your name.

Everything in Jungkook's nervous system goes from THC-saturated haze to full alert in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

"She's—" Jimin swallows. Runs his hand through his hair and the careful side-part collapses, which he doesn't notice, which means whatever this is ranks above vanity. "She's in the bathroom. Crying. And Yeji and Irya are outside the door but she won't—they can't get her to come out. I think—I think her and Jason had a fight or something."

Jungkook is standing before the sentence ends.

He doesn’t remember deciding to stand. His legs just did it—unfolded beneath him, pushed him vertical, and now he’s crossing the room toward Jimin and Taehyung is sitting up behind him making a sound that means ’what’s happening’ but Jungkook’s already there, already in front of Jimin, already close enough to see the specific kind of worry on his face—not the general kind.

“What did he say?”

“What?”

“What the fuck did Jason say to her.”

Jimin blinks. Opens his mouth. Shuts it. Opens it again.

“I don’t—I don’t know exactly, she was crying and talking really fast and not making a lot of sense through the door and the music, but she said—” He stops. Regroups. His fingers are gripping the cup and the plastic crackles under the pressure. “She said something about feeling trapped. That he was being controlling, or she felt controlled, or—I couldn’t hear everything, she’s high and emotional and Yeji was yelling at someone to turn the music down so—”

Trapped.

The word hits different than the others.

The others—fight, crying, bathroom—those are bad, those register, those go into the filing cabinet under urgent and get processed accordingly.

But trapped doesn’t file.

Trapped doesn’t go into a cabinet.

Trapped goes into his chest.

Right next to the place where a different face lives—a word from a different room, a different year, a different woman, except it’s not different, it’s the same fucking word, the same four walls closing in, the same air running out, the same—

“—and so I wanted to grab some water because I thought maybe if she just has some water and—Jungkook?”

He’s already at the door.

“Jungkook, wait—”

He doesn’t wait. His tongue presses into the inside of his cheek—hard, pressure that’s keeping something behind his teeth that wants out, something with a shape and a heat to it that he recognizes from a long, long time ago.

Not anger. Anger is manageable. Anger is a thing he’s learned to sit with, to breathe through, to hand to Dr. Liao in pieces and say ’I felt this, I didn’t act on it, are you proud of me.’

This isn’t anger.

This is the thing underneath anger.

The thing that has no name in his vocabulary because he’s never let it stay long enough to need one.

The thing that only shows up when someone he cares about feels trapped.

His jaw clenches. The silver ring bites into his finger where his fist has curled without permission.

He rounds the corner into the hallway and the party noise swells and none of it reaches him.

Footsteps behind him. Fast. The pinstripe suit wasn’t built for pursuit but Taehyung’s making it work—long strides, dress shoes clipping the hardwood, and his voice has lost every trace of boneless ice and Willy Wonka and ceiling cobwebs.

“Jungkook.”

Doesn’t stop.

“Jungkook—wait.”

Doesn’t stop.

“Wait, man. Think this through—”

He cuts through the living room like it’s not there.

Beer pong table, fog machine, centurion, bunny, bodies in costumes he registers as shapes and colors and none of them are the shape he’s looking for.

The music is too loud and someone’s laughing near the speakers—high, a sound that scrapes the inside of his skull—and his hands are at his sides and his jaw is locked so tight the pressure reaches his temples.

Trapped.

The word keeps playing. Looped. Skipping like a scratched record.

«This is what men do.»

Not now. Not fucking now.

He reaches the french doors to the garden. Open. Night air. Cold enough that it should register but doesn’t. Patio stones under his boots. String lights overhead making everything amber and warm and the warmth is wrong—everything about this scene is wrong because it looks like a party and sounds like a party and somewhere upstairs you’re on a bathroom floor and the door is locked and you said trapped—

“You’re not doing this.”

Jungkook doesn’t turn. Steps off the patio onto the lawn.

“Hey. Hey. I’m talking to you.”

Doesn’t turn.

The grass is wet. His boots sink.

None of it registers as information worth processing because the only information that matters right now is the distance—a hundred feet, closing—and the shape of Jason’s silhouette against the string lights and the sound the word trapped makes when it loops inside a skull that’s stopped filtering anything else.

“Jungkook—you’re gonna catch a charge. You understand that? A criminal charge. At a Halloween party. In a costume. That’s what you’re walking toward right now. An assault charge in a Ghostface robe. That’s the legacy. That’s the headline.”

Eighty feet. The fountain is to his left now.

“And you know who’s not catching a charge tonight? Him. You know why? Because he didn’t do anything illegal. He was an asshole to someone. That’s it. That’s all it was. And you can’t break someone’s face for that, Jungkook, not—not in the way that counts, not in the way that a cop is gonna care about when they show up and see—”

A breath. Not a pause—a reload. Taehyung’s stride lengthens. He’s beside him now, not behind, shoes squelching on wet grass.

“—when they show up and see you. Standing over him. With blood on your hands. And they’re gonna look at you and they’re gonna look at him and who do you think—” His voice trips. Catches. Goes harder. “Who do you think gets the benefit of the doubt in that scenario? Huh? You? Asian? With the tattoos and the—and him with the PhD program and the glasses and the fucking vest? You think that’s a coin flip? You think that goes fifty-fifty?”

Jungkook doesn’t answer. Doesn’t slow down. Seventy feet.

“His parents probably have a lawyer saved in their contacts. You know that, right? People like him—they don’t fight back, they call their dad’s buddy at whatever firm and suddenly it’s not a Halloween party anymore, it’s depositions and court dates and you trying to explain to a judge why you—” Taehyung’s hand cuts through the air. “A judge who’s gonna see the exact same thing the cops saw. Who gets believed. I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you.”

He shouldn’t. They both know why.

They’ve both been in the rooms where it gets spelled out without anyone saying a word—where looking a certain way in a certain zip code means the margin for error shrinks to nothing and the assumption of guilt arrives before the explanation does.

Taehyung knows. He’s been in those rooms with him.

Same parking lots, same bloody knuckles, same cops who looked at two Asian kids with split lips and didn’t ask who started it.

“This is exactly what he’s not worth. You’ve been saying it for weeks. You said he was a prick, you said he was a snob, you said he gave you bad vibes—great, you were right, congratulations, and now what? Now you’re gonna prove it by giving him a reason to press charges? By handing him the one thing he actually needs to make you the problem? That’s the play?”

Sixty feet. Jungkook picks up speed.

“Because that’s what happens. That’s exactly what happens. You know this. I know you know this because we had the same conversation in high school after Joey Cho got expelled for defending himself in a fight he didn't start. Remember that? Remember what his mom said? She said it doesn't matter who started it. It matters who they believe. And they're not gonna believe you. Not over him. Not when he looks like that and you look like this."

A beat.

“You hit him and he’s the victim, Jungkook. He’s the guy who got attacked at a party by his girlfriend’s unhinged roommate and he gets to tell that story for the rest of his life and she—” He stumbles on the word. “—she becomes the girl it was about. The girl whose psycho roommate couldn’t keep his hands to himself. And that’s his version. That’s the version that wins. You get that, right? You get that his version wins?”

Taehyung is still talking and talking and talking and none of the words are landing because words are noise to him right now.

“Are you listening? Can you even hear me right now? Because I’m talking and you’re walking and I’m running out of ways to say the same thing which is that you’re about to fuck your entire life up and he gets to watch. He gets to stand there with his busted lip and watch you get put in the back of a car and that’s—” Taehyung’s voice goes mean with the effort of keeping it whole. “That’s not justice, man. That’s not protecting her. That’s not gonna make you feel any better, Jungkook, you know that. You know why you know that.”

Jungkook clicks his tongue and picks up speed.

Taehyung swears under his breath and matches it. “You’re not hearing me. You’re not—okay. Okay.”

Taehyung cuts in front of him. Gets there fast—one long diagonal stride and a pivot—and plants himself in the path with his hands on Jungkook’s chest.

“No.”

Hands. Flat on his sternum. Holding.

“No. I told you, bro. You’re not doing this.”

Jungkook tries to step left.

Taehyung shifts left. Blocks it. Doesn’t budge.

Tries right.

Same thing. Mirror image. The hands stay on his chest.

“Do not.” Taehyung’s pointing finger finds Jungkook’s chest. “Don’t play me right now, Jungkook. Back the fuck up.”

He grabs Taehyung’s wrist and shoves it off his chest. Sidesteps.

Gets two steps.

Taehyung grabs a fistful of the Ghostface robe from behind and hauls him backward.

Jungkook’s balance goes—boots sliding on wet grass, the robe yanking tight across his throat—and the stumble turns into a pivot and he rounds on Taehyung and swats the grip off the fabric, forearm connecting with Taehyung’s wrist hard enough to crack, and Taehyung doesn’t let go, just tightens his hold and braces and Jungkook shoves forward into his chest and Taehyung pushes back and for three ugly seconds they’re tangled—grunting, grabbing, both of them too angry for technique.

Taehyung gets both hands on the front of the robe and pushes—hard, this time, the full force of his weight behind it—and Jungkook’s back foot slides out and he catches himself and surges forward and Taehyung meets him and pushes again and they break apart.

Three feet of grass between them. Both breathing through their teeth. The pinstripe jacket wrenched sideways on Taehyung’s shoulders, pocket square crushed, and the Ghostface robe twisted half off Jungkook’s frame like someone tried to unwrap him.

“Alright, you know what.” Taehyung spreads his arms.“Come on then. You wanna fight so bad? Fight me. Right here. Let’s go. I’m right here, Jungkook.”

His chest is heaving. His hands are open. His chin is up in the specific way that means he isn’t bluffing and Jungkook knows damn well he’s not bluffing.

“Hit me. Come on. Hit me. Get it out. Because I promise you—I promise you on everything—you’re not getting within ten feet of that guy tonight. Not while I’m standing. So either you put me down first or you stand here and breathe like a fucking adult. Those are your options. Two options. Pick one.”

Jungkook’s tongue pushes against the inside of his cheek. Copper taste. His whole body is a live wire looking for ground and the ground is just some feet away laughing and Taehyung is in the way.

He takes a step.

Taehyung takes one to match. Closes the gap. Gets in his space.

“I’ve had your back in every stupid fight since we were sixteen, dude.”

Quieter now. Which is worse. Taehyung getting quieter means the real thing is coming.

“Every single one. I was there. So believe me when I tell you—if you try to get past me right now, I will lay you out on this lawn and I will not feel bad about it. Not even a little. Not tomorrow, not next week, not ever. Because the alternative is watching you throw your entire life at some guy who’s not worth the skin on your knuckles, and I’m not doing that. I’m not watching that. That’s my line. You’ve found it. Congratulations.”

Jungkook’s chest hurts. It hurts and he wishes he could rip what’s beating underneath his chest out.

“You’re better than this.” Taehyung’s throat works. “You know you’re better than this. So act like it or I swear to god I’ll drop you myself, Jungkook. You know I will.”

The silence feels like the canteen, like sixteen, like bloody knuckles behind a 7-Eleven after someone mocked Jungkook’s mom and Taehyung took care of it.

“I did not spend ten months watching you put yourself back together just to let you blow it up tonight. Not over this. Not over him.” His jaw flexes. “You wanna get to Jason? You’re going through me. And I don’t go down easy. You know that.”

A beat.

“So help me god, Jungkook, test me and find out.”

“What’s happening.”

From the left, from the direction of the garden wall where the smokers are thinning out—

Yoongi.

“One of you talk.” He stops. Positions himself at Taehyung’s shoulder. “Now.”

Jungkook is a locked system. Nothing’s coming out of him that isn’t breath and body heat.

Yoongi looks at Taehyung.

Taehyung runs both hands through what’s left of the slicked-back hair. Wreckage. His chest is still heaving but his voice comes out forced-steady, the way it does when he’s physically holding himself together to deliver information that matters.

“Jason. The TA. Him and Y/N had a fight—she’s locked in a bathroom upstairs. Jimin came in, said she’s crying, said she told him she felt trapped. That he was being controlling.”

The word lands between the three of them.

Trapped.

Yoongi’s gaze tracks to Jungkook. To the fists. The jaw. The set of his shoulders. The readiness.

He looks at this for a long moment.

Then he looks at the direction Jungkook’s body is pointed. At Jason fifty feet away.

Then back at Jungkook.

He steps forward. Even with Taehyung. Shoulder to shoulder.

His hands go into his pockets.

“Okay.” He sighs. “Okay, Jungkook, tell me what happens next. You get past us. Then what. You feel better for ten seconds and then you’re the guy who assaulted someone at a Halloween party and she’s the girl it was about. That what you want?”

No.

That’s not what he wants.

What he wants is to go back in time fifteen minutes and be in whatever room Jason took you to and stand between you and whatever sentences made you say trapped.

What he wants is to have been there.

He wasn’t.

“Use your head for a second here, Jungkook.” Yoongi hasn’t moved. Hasn’t blinked. “Come on.”

Jungkook’s jaw works. The pressure in his chest is unbearable—a full-body hum of something that needs to go somewhere and has nowhere to go because every exit is blocked by friends who are right, and that’s the worst part, he knows they’re right, and knowing doesn’t do a single fucking thing about the voltage running through his body looking for ground—

Over Yoongi’s shoulder, past the fountain, Hobi.

Standing near the garden wall. Drink in hand. Mid-conversation with the Mia Wallace girl.

He catches Yoongi’s gaze across the patio and Yoongi does something—small, barely visible. A head tilt. A jaw set. The kind of signal that exists between people who’ve done this before and have a protocol.

Jungkook knows this and hates it.

Hates it more because Hobi’s smile drops and he knows he’s read the entire scene in the time it takes to set his drink on the wall and say something short to Mia Wallace and start crossing the patio.

He tries to cut between Yoongi and Taehyung.

To no avail.

Because an arm suddenly loops around his shoulders.

“Hey!”

The specific weight of Jung Hoseok’s arm, which has the density of someone who’s been dancing professionally for a decade and casually manhandles grown men like it’s a love language.

“Have you seen the music room?”

Jungkook’s whole body is rigid under the arm.“Hoseok—let go, I swear to god—”

“The music room.” Hobi doesn’t let go. Steers him. Smoothly, like they’re two friends walking somewhere together, nothing to see here, just guys being guys at a party. “Other side of the house. Past the library. Tessa’s grandfather was apparently some kind of collector.”

He’s walking Jungkook away from the garden and Jungkook is aware of the maneuver, so he tries to sidestep with all his might because he will not be persuaded this time—

“There’s an electric guitar in there.”

Jungkook’s stride falters.

“I’m serious.” Hobi’s voice drops a half-register. “Vintage, I think. Hanging on the wall. Looked expensive.”

Over his shoulder, Hobi makes a gesture. Quick. Two fingers, a direction.

“Come on.” Hobi squeezes his shoulder. “Show me if it’s any good. I can’t tell with guitars. They all look the same to me.”

“They don’t all—” Jungkook’s voice comes out scraped. Ruined. He clears his throat. “They don’t all look the same. That’s like saying all dance styles look the same.”

“Exactly. Terrible. Tragic. I need you to educate me.”

The arm stays around his shoulders. The garden gets smaller behind them. The french doors pass. The hallway opens. The party noise dims.

His hands are still shaking.

Hobi doesn’t mention it.

You’re still hiccuping and you feel so stupid.

That’s the worst part. Not the crying—the crying has a reason, the crying has a source, the crying is a physiological response to emotional stimulus and you can rationalize it later into something manageable.

But the stupidity of it. The exact specific humiliating stupidity of sitting on a bathroom floor at a party in a costume you felt good in thirty minutes ago, mascara running, eyeliner destroyed, hiccuping like a child who lost her balloon at a county fair because someone said a fucking word.

A word.

It doesn’t get more embarrasing than this.

Except it does, because you’ve been here before.

Not this bathroom. But this exact posture. This exact tile-against-spine, knees-to-chest, face-in-hands architecture of feminine collapse, because you are apparently a person who processes her worst moments in bathrooms, and that’s—

That’s a pattern, isn’t it?

Sophomore year of high school. Alicia Gutierrez’s house party. You wore the denim skirt you’d been saving for something that mattered and David Morrison kissed Noor Adil in the living room with his hand on the back of her neck, the exact hand that had been on the back of your neck two hours earlier behind the bleachers, and you walked to the bathroom and sat on the floor and cried.

Different tile. Same posture. Same girl.

Everything big happens in a bathroom. Everything that matters, everything that shifts the axis of your stupid little life—it all happens against porcelain and tile and horrible lightning.

The day Jungkook propositioned you in 6B. Leaning in the doorframe like he owned the square footage, smelling like rain and bad decisions, saying words that should’ve made you slam the door but instead made you stand there with wet hair and a racing pulse trying to formulate a comeback while your brain buffered.

The day he mentioned your cologne before Emma’s birthday. Just—said it. Casually. Like noticing what someone smells like is a thing you mention to your roommate while she’s brushing her teeth.

The first time Jimin did your eyeliner, it was in that bathroom too. And today as well, in the bathroom of the suite you might no longer share with Jason, quill pen behind his ear and his careful fingers on your jaw and the question he asked that wasn’t really about labels or aisles or boxes on shelves but about whether it’s possible to exist without a name for what you are.

All your big moments happen in bathrooms.

There’s something poetic in that, if you ignore the toilet.

The brownies are definitely hitting now. Everything has a shimmer to it. The grout lines between the tiles look deeper than they should.

Also your fingers feel very far away from your body. Like they’re suggestions. Theoretical fingers.

Great. You’re having an emotional breakdown while slowly becoming one with the bathroom tile. This is the human experience at its most dignified.

A knock. Soft.

“Hey. It’s me.”

Irya.

Not Yeji—Irya, which means Irya got to the door first or elbowed Yeji aside, and there’s a difference between those two arrivals that matters.

Yeji arrives like a SWAT team. Irya arrives like an EMT.

Both are trying to save you. Only one is going to kick the door down to do it.

“I brought your phone,” Irya says. “You left it on the loveseat.”

You don’t answer.

“You don’t have to open the door. I’m just going to sit out here, okay? Just me.”

A pause.

Then, farther away, Yeji’s voice—gritted like it comes between her teeth.

“And me. I’m also here. With knives.”

“She doesn’t have knives,” Irya says.

“I have metaphorical knives. I have the energy of knives.”

“Yeji.”

“What? I’m being supportive. I’m supportively enraged.”

You press your forehead into your knees. Hiccup.

A sound against the door. The soft thud of someone sitting down on the other side—Irya, you think, based on the gentle way it happens. Yeji sits down the way she does everything: with intent and aggression toward the furniture.

“Babe.” Irya’s voice is close now. “Can you tell me what’s happening? Just—whatever you want. Even if it doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s okay. That’s totally okay. Tell me anyway.”

Something about the way she says that—’tell me anyway’—like your not-making-sense is not a problem to be solved but a thing to be held.

“He said I should respect myself more.”

Silence.

Then, from further back: “He said what?”

“Yeji—” Irya, steady.

“No. No, repeat that. He said she should respect herself? Those words? In that order? From his mouth?”

“Yeji, hold on—”

“I’m going to kill him. I’m going to walk downstairs and I’m going to commit a crime that will be studied in law schools—”

“You’re not killing anyone. Sit down.”

“I wasn’t gonna stand up—”

“That’s only because I’m holding your wrist down.”

A huff. Yeji sits quieter.

“Okay.” Irya again. Closer. You can hear her shifting, getting comfortable against the door, settling in for however long this takes. “He said respect yourself. What else?”

You swallow. The hiccups are slowing but your throat is raw and everything tastes like salt and chocolate.

“He said—that I should be more mindful. About how I act around other people. That I was being—”

You search for the word.

It comes back coated in cedar and bergamot.

“Inappropriate.”

“Inappropriate how?”

“He said I was draped all over—that I was hanging on someone and it looked bad. In front of people. That I need to think about how I come across.”

“Draped,” Yeji repeats from behind Irya. She says it the way you’d say ’cockroach’. “He described physical affection between friends as draping?”

“And that I should have more consideration. And be more—”

The word.

“More mature.”

Silence. A long one.

You hear Irya exhale.

“Can I say something?”

You nod.

Then realize she can’t see you.

“Yeah.”

“I’m not going to tell you he’s wrong about everything. Because that wouldn’t be helpful, and I think what you need right now is honesty, not just someone being angry on your behalf.” A beat. “That’s Yeji’s job.”

“Damn right,” Yeji mutters.

“But I want you to hear this. The way someone says something matters as much as what they say. And a person who frames their discomfort as your character flaw—who says you need to respect yourself instead of saying I felt uncomfortable—that person is not having a conversation with you. They’re managing you.”

The word cracks something open.

Managing.

That’s—

That’s exactly what it felt like. Not a discussion. Not two people navigating something messy and complicated.

A performance review. A parent-teacher conference.

‘Here’s what you did wrong, here’s what you need to fix, here’s the version of you I’d prefer to be dating.’

“He’s not—” You stop. Start again. “He’s not a bad person.”

“Nobody said he was, babe.”

“He’s not—it’s not like he was mean. He didn’t yell. He was calm. He was being—totally reasonable—”

“Totally reasonable is how they get you.” Yeji. “Totally reasonable is the whole con. Being calm while you say controlling shit doesn’t make it not controlling. It just makes the other person feel crazy for having a reaction.”

You know that. You know that.

You’ve read the articles. You’ve had the conversations.

You just didn’t think you’d be sitting on the other side of it with mascara on your chin.

“Can I ask you something?” Irya. Gentle. “And you don’t have to answer.”

“Yeah.”

“When he said those things—the maturity thing, the respect thing—did it feel new? Or did it feel… familiar?”

You swallow.

Irya waits. Patient in that way she has—not passive, not absent, just genuinely unhurried, like she’d sit outside this door all night if that’s what it took.

“Familiar,” you whisper.

“Okay.” Soft. Like she expected that. “Okay, that’s important. That’s really important. Because when something hurts more than it should, it’s usually because it’s landing on something that was already bruised.”

The sob comes before you can stop it. Just one. Hard, sharp, ripped from somewhere below your sternum.

“I know,” Irya says. “I know.”

“It’s—it sounded like my mom.” You’re saying it before you’ve decided to say it—the words just coming, tumbling out through the crack in the door like water through a broken seal. “The way he said it. The tone. The calm. She used to—she used to do this thing where she’d sit me down and explain, very patiently, why everything I was doing was wrong. Very gently. Very reasonably. And I’d sit there and just—take it. Because how do you argue with someone who’s being nice about it? How do you say stop, you’re hurting me when they’re smiling?”

“You can’t.” Yeji. Not angry now. Quiet. “You can’t because the smile is the point. The smile is what makes you feel insane.”

“I feel insane,” you say, and it comes out small.

“You’re not insane.” Irya. Steady as gravity. “You’re having a very sane reaction to a very specific kind of hurt. And the fact that you can name it—the fact that you can say this felt like my mother—that’s not insane. That’s the opposite.

You press the heels of your hands into your eyes. Gold shimmer and black liner smear across your skin.

“Babe, please.” Yeji’s voice is closer now. She’s moved up. Right beside Irya, if you had to guess. “At least drink some water. You had Hobi’s drinks and those brownies and you need to hydrate or you’re going to feel even worse.”

“I don’t want water.”

“You say that, but—”

“Yeji. I’m fine.”

“You are audibly not fine.”

“I am choosing to be not fine in private, which is my right as a—”

“If you say ‘as a feminist’ I’m picking this lock.”

Shuffling outside the door. Footsteps, the clipped sound of dress shoes on hardwood.

A male voice: “Hey, is she—”

Yeji is on her feet so fast you hear the combat boots squeak.

“No.”

“I just—”

“No. Absolutely not. Turn around.”

“Yeji—” That’s Irya. Mediating.

“The last thing she needs right now is another fucking man outside this door.”

“I’m not—I’m just trying to—”

“Oh great. Another man who’s just trying to. Fantastic. Groundbreaking. Never heard that one before.”

“Can you stop for one second—”

“Can you stop? Can you maybe read the room and understand that a girl who’s crying because a guy made her feel like shit does not need a different guy showing up to—”

“I’ve been where she is.”

That stops Yeji.

Not completely—you can feel her resistance from inside the bathroom, can practically hear the argument building behind her teeth—but the sentence cuts through the momentum the way a stick cuts through water. Not by force. By changing direction.

“Yeji.” Irya. Quiet. A hand on an arm, you imagine. “Let him.”

A paus, long enough to contain a full conversation between two people who love each other so much they can negotiate in microseconds.

“If she says go away, you go away,” Yeji says finally.

“Yeah. Got it.”

The boots retreat. Not far—you know Yeji, she’s pulling back ten feet and maintaining line of sight like a Secret Service agent in Doc Martens—but far enough.

Then a sound.

A sigh, long and gusty and annoyed, like he’s been personally inconvenienced by the existence of feelings and the floor and gravity and the entire concept of sitting down in a suit.

Then the thud of a body dropping against the other side of the door with the grace of a man who committed to this before he fully thought through the logistics.

“Hey.”

Taehyung.

His voice is different than it was ten seconds ago with Yeji. Quieter.

“You don’t have to talk. I just—I’m gonna sit here for a minute. If that’s okay.”

You don’t answer. Your throat is raw from the crying and your sinuses are packed with concrete and the hiccups have slowed but not stopped, punctuating the silence at irregular intervals.

“I’m not gonna ask what happened. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

A beat.

“I just know what that door feels like from your side.”

Something in your chest clenches.

“I locked myself in Hobi’s bathroom once.” His voice is steady. Calm. But there’s a grain to it—something rough, something lived-in. “For like… three hours? Maybe four. Hobi sat outside the whole time. Didn’t leave. Didn’t push. Just sat there.”

You hear him shift his weight.

“I was—going through something. Something bad. And I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t think and I felt really, really stupid for not being able to just—handle it. Because it’s breathing, you know? You’ve been doing it your whole life. How hard can it be.”

A hic escapes your mouth before you can stop it. Loud in the quiet.

“That was a good one,” he says.

And despite everything—despite the mascara and the tile and the word mature still rattling around in your skull like a bullet in a tin can—the corner of your mouth twitches.

“Hobi didn’t try to fix it,” Taehyung continues. “He didn’t say the right thing or give me advice or tell me to come out. He just… sat there. Told me about this dumb thing that happened at rehearsal. Some dancer who accidentally kicked another dancer in the face during a lift. And I was crying and laughing at the same time and it was—really messy. But it helped. Just having someone on the other side of the door who wasn’t trying to make it better. Who was just… there.”

He pauses.

“So I’m just here. That’s it. That’s the whole pitch.”

You press your lips together. Hard. Because if you open your mouth right now what comes out is going to be ugly—not sarcastic-ugly, not defense-mechanism-ugly, just real ugly, the kind of honest that has no style to it, no wit, just a girl on a floor who doesn’t know how to stop feeling too much about everything all the time.

“I don’t even know why I’m crying this hard,” you say.

It comes out broken. Scratchy. Barely above a whisper.

“You don’t have to know why.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. He didn’t even—he didn’t yell. He didn’t do anything wrong, technically. He was—” Hic. “He was being reasonable. That’s the fucked up part. He was being totally calm and rational and saying things that sounded right and I just—”

“Sometimes it’s the calm that gets you.”

The sentence stops you.

“The loud stuff—the yelling, the throwing things—that’s easy to point at. You can say ’that, right there, that’s the problem.’ But when someone’s calm…” He exhales. Long. Slow. Like he’s letting something out that’s been sitting in his lungs for a while. “When someone’s calm and reasonable and says things that sound almost right, it makes you feel crazy for being upset. Like the problem is you. Your reaction. Not what they said.”

Silence.

“That’s worse,” he says quietly. “That’s so much worse.”

Your chin is trembling. You clamp your jaw around it.

“Taehyung.”

“Yeah?”

“How did you—” Hic. Fuck. “When did it stop? The feeling like—like you were too much. And also not enough. At the same time. How did that stop?”

The door is quiet for a long moment. Long enough that you wonder if he’s deciding whether to answer or deciding how to answer, and you know the difference because you live in the gap between those two things.

“I’ll let you know when it does.”

Your breath comes out in a rush.

First one since you locked yourself in this room.

“But it gets—I don’t know. Quieter? It doesn’t go away. You just get better at hearing other stuff over it. People who actually mean it when they say you’re enough. People who don’t need you to be less.”

A thump against the door. Soft. His head, you think. Tipping back against the wood.

“And you learn who to listen to. That’s the hard part. Because the ones who make you feel small usually sound the most reasonable. They’ve got the best arguments. The best vocabulary.” A pause. “Real ones don’t need a vocabulary. They just show up and sit outside your door at midnight dressed as Gomez Addams and hope it helps.”

That breaks you.

Not the word mature. Not Jason’s calm reasonable hands folded in prayer. Not even the memories of marble countertops and correctly angled forks.

This. This stupid, quiet, honest thing from a guy you barely know who’s sitting on a hallway floor in a pinstripe suit because he once locked himself in a bathroom too and somebody sat outside for him.

The sob that comes out is different from the ones before. Softer. Rounder. Less like something being ripped from your chest and more like something being released. A pressure valve opening. Steam instead of shrapnel.

“Okay,” you manage. Watery. Wrecked. “That was—you can’t just say stuff like that to someone who’s—”

“Too late. Already said it. No returns.”

“I hate you.”

“That’s fine. I’m very hateable. Ask Jungkook. He has a list.”

You laugh. It comes out wet and awful and it hurts your ribs and it’s the best sound you’ve made in an hour.

On the other side of the door, you hear him exhale. Relief. The kind someone makes when they weren’t sure it was going to work and then it did.

“For the record,” he says. “Your eyeliner’s probably ruined.”

“I know.”

“Jimin’s going to be devastated.”

“I know.”

“Like, genuinely distraught. He might never recover.”

“Please stop.”

“I’m just preparing you for the grief.”

You wipe your face with the back of your hand. It comes away black and gold and wet.

“Can you just—” Hiccup. “Can you sit there for one more minute.”

“Yeah.” Immediate. “Yeah, I’m here.”

So he sits.

And you sit.

And the door stays between you, and that’s fine.

That’s actually the whole point.

Sometimes the best thing a person can do is be close enough to hear and far enough to not see, and let the wood do the work that words can’t.

A minute passes. Maybe two.

The hiccups stop. Your breathing evens out. The brownies are still doing their thing, but the room doesn’t feel like it’s shrinking anymore.

It feels like a room. With a floor. And a girl on it who cried the right amount for the right reasons and is probably going to feel embarrassed about this in the morning but right now, in this specific minute, feels something closer to emptied out than broken.

Your hand finds your wrist. The rain charm, cool against your pulse.

You flick it.

Then you stand up.

Your knees protest—stiff, cramped, the tile having done nothing for the cramps that are still low and persistent in your abdomen—and you catch yourself on the sink.

Your reflection in the mirror is a horror show. Mascara tracks. Eyeliner smeared into grey-black smudges beneath your eyes. Gold shimmer streaked across your cheeks where the tears dragged it. The dark berry lipstick is mostly gone, bitten off, leaving just a stain at the edges.

Medusa, post-battle. Snakes wilted.

Whatever.

You unlock the door. Pull it open.

Taehyung looks up at you from the floor.

He looks like a 1920s husband who got left at a train station and decided to wait.

His eyes move across your face. The damage. The evidence.

He doesn’t comment on any of it. Just gets up. Unfolds himself from the floor, brushing off the back of his trousers with one hand, and stands there. Not too close. Not too far.

“Do you know where Jungkook is?” comes out of your lips.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know where he is.”

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© jungkoode 2025

"Earlier. The showers. Y/N. She used the eucalyptus soap that was in the stall instead of her own stuff."

Taehyung stares at him. The Gomez mustache—what's left of it—crinkles with the specific bewilderment of a man who was just having a perfectly good conversation about gourds and is now being asked to care about shower products.

"I'm gonna need, like... significantly more context than that."

"She's vanilla, Tae." Jungkook says it like it's obvious. Like it's a fact of the natural world, on par with gravity or the boiling point of water. "She’s vanilla everything. Everything. Soap. Lotion. The stuff in her hair. She's got like six different vanilla products in the shower caddy and she didn't bring any of it. She used the generic eucalyptus shit in the stall and she doesn’t—she still smells like vanilla underneath because it's basically her, like her actual—"

“Jungkook.”

"—but it's off. There's this—this layer on top of it that isn't her and I'd bet you anything—anything—that he said something. About the vanilla. That he made some comment about it being basic or juvenile or whatever the fuck and she just—adjusted. Without even—she probably doesn't even know she did it."

The silence that follows has a specific quality.

…The quality of someone deciding whether to call an ambulance or a therapist.

"Jesus, man. The weed really did a number on you. You’re having an episode over body wash, are you hearing yourself—"

"It's not—" He swats at Tae. "It’s not about the body wash. It's—" He drags a hand down his face. "Okay, the body wash thing sounds insane. I know it sounds insane. That's the problem. Every individual thing sounds insane if I say it out loud. It's only when you put all of it together that it—"

He makes a vague, frustrated gesture at the air. Like he's trying to grab the shape of what he means and it keeps slipping.

"She doesn't do her tea thing anymore."

"Her tea thing."

"She used to leave the tea bags in the sink. Every morning. Just—sitting there. On the sink. Drove me insane. I texted her about it. Twice. She left me on read and then told me where I could shove the tea bags. It was a whole thing."

He's talking to the ceiling again. His thumb hasn't stopped.

"And then she starts seeing this guy and the tea bags are gone. Just—poof. Not in the sink. Not anywhere. And the thing is—I should be happy about that, right? I wanted them gone. But they didn't stop because she decided to stop. They stopped because he—"

No, but that doesn’t sound right. Because he doesn’t know for sure, does he?

Did you stop the tea bag situation after Jason?

Was it before him? Was Jason the reason?

He wishes he could trust his memory. Or his own brain.

"I’m really trying to follow the thread here, Jungkook."

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“You’re not doing this.”

Jungkook doesn’t turn. Steps off the patio onto the lawn.

“Hey. Hey. I’m talking to you.”

Doesn’t turn. 

The grass is wet. His boots sink. 

None of it registers as information worth processing because the only information that matters right now is the distance—a hundred feet, closing—and the shape of Jason’s silhouette against the string lights and the sound the word trapped makes when it loops inside a skull that’s stopped filtering anything else.

“Jungkook—you’re gonna catch a charge. You understand that? A criminal charge. At a Halloween party. In a costume. That’s what you’re walking toward right now. An assault charge in a Ghostface robe. That’s the legacy. That’s the headline.”

Eighty feet. The fountain is to his left now.

“And you know who’s not catching a charge tonight? Him. You know why? Because he didn’t do anything illegal. He was an asshole to someone. That’s it. That’s all it was. And you can’t break someone’s face for that, Jungkook, not—not in the way that counts, not in the way that a cop is gonna care about when they show up and see—”

A breath. Not a pause—a reload. Taehyung’s stride lengthens. He’s beside him now, not behind, shoes squelching on wet grass.

Not in the Hollow Crest way, where skin showing means freedom of movement. This is Valiskan obscene—exposure designed to make you look available while maintaining plausible deniability about intent.

The fabric is something called starweave—actual crystalline threading woven into midnight silk that catches light and throws it back in fragmented patterns.

It clings. Everywhere.

From the high collar that wraps your throat, down over your chest where the material goes sheer enough to suggest rather than conceal, then pools at your hips before splitting in a slit that runs up to mid-thigh.

Your back is completely exposed. Just bare skin from neck to the base of your spine, where the fabric finally deigns to exist again.

The color is deep indigo—Valis Core's signature shade—shot through with silver threading that forms patterns you don't recognize. Probably some cultural significance you're supposed to understand but don't because you're not actually from here.

You're just wearing their colors like a fucking flag.

"Stop fidgeting," Tara snaps from behind you.

You bare your teeth at the mirror. "Stop touching me."

"I'm adjusting." Her hands yank at the back of the dress, pulling it lower. Making more skin visible. "If you'd stand still for five seconds—"

"If you pull that any lower, my entire ass is gonna be out."

"The design requires proper positioning—"

"The design requires me to look like a whore." You twist away from her grip. "What's next, you gonna paint my tits and call it formal wear?"

Tara's mouth flattens. "You should be grateful Commander Kim selected something tasteful. The original design was far more revealing."

"Oh, fantastic. He picked the modest prostitute look instead of the ambitious one."

"You're being vulgar—"

"I'm being honest."

You gesture at the mirror. At the way the dress makes you look like some Valis Core fantasy of what a matched partner should be.

Polished. Displayed. 

Claimed.

"This entire thing is political theater, and I'm the prop."

"You're the match." Tara moves around you, assessing with critical eyes that make your skin itch. "100% compatibility. Unprecedented pairing. Of course they want to showcase—"

"Showcase. Right. That's a nice word for 'parade around like a trained animal.'"

She stops. Actually looks at you for the first time since this whole nightmare started.

And something in her expression shifts. Hardens.

"I can't believe someone like you got matched to Commander Kim."

You meet her eyes in the mirror.

She looks Valiskan—the height, the bone structure, the pale skin that screams Core genetics.

Everything about her reads pure bloodline. Proper. Acceptable.

Everything you're not.

"Yeah?" Your voice drops. "Well, neither can I. But here we are."

"You should be honored," she continues, and there's real bitterness threading through now. "Do you have any idea how many would kill to be in your position?"

"Yeah? Name one."

"Me." Her hands move to the dress again, yanking. "I would. Any of us would be grateful for—"

"For what?" You twist away from her grip. "For being matched to the architect of the death lottery? For getting dressed up so Consortium elite can admire the Algorithm's latest science project?"

"You don't deserve him—"

"You're right. I don't." You step closer. "I deserve to gut him. Slowly. While you watch."

Her face goes white. Then red. Then she's grabbing the dress again, yanking the fabric with enough force that you stumble.

"Stop—"

"The back needs to sit properly—"

"I said stop—"

Your hand shoots out. Swats hers away sharper than intended, harder.

And her eyes flash.

Not violet. Not the pure Valis purple you've been seeing everywhere since you got dragged to Core.

Red.

You freeze.

Because you know that glint. You’ve seen it in Jungkook’s eyes. You’ve seen it plenty in your childhood. Know exactly what it means.

Mournwell.

She's Mournwell.

Or half, at least. Enough that her eyes betray her under stress. Enough that she's been hiding it behind Valiskan features and proper behavior and—

"Tara."

You both freeze.

Namjoon stands in the doorway.

And fuck—

He looks—

Your brain stutters. Reroutes. Tries to process what you're seeing and fails because your body's already responding in ways you absolutely hate.

He's wearing formal Consortium attire. Not the standard tactical gear. Actual formal wear.

The jacket is structured—sharp lines and geometric weaves that emphasize his shoulders and height. Black base fabric with indigo accents that catch light like liquid, threaded with what looks like actual starlight. Platinum clasps at the collar and cuffs, engraved with symbols you don't recognize but that probably mean something hierarchical.

The pants fit. Really fit. Enough that you can see the way his thighs shift when he moves, the way fabric outlines muscle and—

Stop it.

His hair is styled back from his face, revealing the white streak fully. Making those purple eyes even more pronounced against pale skin that seems to glow.

He looks like authority.

Like power.

Like everything you've spent your life learning to destroy.

"Commander Kim." Tara's voice shifts immediately. Respectful. She folds her left arm behind her back—Valiskan sign of deference—and bows her head slightly. "The match is nearly prepared."

"The match has a name," you mutter.

Namjoon's gaze shifts to you.

And—

He stops.

Just for a second. Maybe less.

But you catch it. The way his eyes track down your body then back up. The way his pupils dilate just enough to be visible.

Then he blinks. Recalibrates. Expression smoothing back to neutral like nothing happened.

"Tara," he says, and his voice carries warmth you didn't know he was capable of. "Take some time off. Your duties have been executed excellently."

Tara blinks. "But Commander, the styling isn't complete—"

"It's sufficient." He tilts his head slightly. Almost... gentle. "You've worked three rotations without rest. The preparation halls can function without you for one Wane."

"I should stay to ensure—"

"Tara."

It's not harsh. But it’s firm.

"Rest."

Her mouth opens. Closes.

Then she nods, that red glint flickering in her eyes again before she gathers her supplies with quick movements and exits through the side door.

Leaving you alone with him.

In a room full of mirrors that show every angle of how exposed you are in this fucking dress.

Namjoon doesn't move from the doorway. Just stands there, one hand resting on a tablet, attention seemingly fixed on the screen.

Not looking at you.

Which pisses you off more than staring would.

"Something wrong, Warden?" You turn, letting the slit in the dress expose your leg fully. "Not what you ordered?"

"It's appropriate."

"Appropriate for what? A brothel?"

His mouth curves. Barely. "For a formal Consortium gathering. Which you are required to attend."

"Required to attend dressed like—" You gesture at yourself. "Like this?"

"Yes."

"And if I refuse?"

"You won't."

The certainty in his voice makes your hands curl into fists.

Because he's right. You can’t afford to refuse.

"What are you doing here?" you demand. "Thought formal preparation was supposed to be communal. Where's your bonding circle or whatever the fuck Valiskans do?"

"Completed earlier." He glances at the tablet screen, thumb moving across the interface. "I'm conducting final security review for tonight's attendee list."

"Of course you are."

You should leave him alone. Should finish whatever preparation bullshit is expected and get this nightmare evening over with.

Instead you move closer.

He's tall enough that even standing right next to him, you can't see the tablet screen properly. You rise onto your toes, leaning in to get a better angle—

The movement brings you into his personal space.

Close enough to smell winter storms and that particular snowy scent that accompanies him everywhere.

His posture shifts. Subtle adjustment that might be awareness or might be discomfort.

You peer at the screen.

Guest list. Names in Altsprek with Consortium designation codes. Approximately forty attendees authorized for tonight's celebration. Security clearance levels noted beside each entry.

Namjoon's hand hovers over one name.

Your eyes catch it just before his thumb moves.

Kim Seokjin - Clearance Level 6 - Independent Contractor

There's a pause. Maybe half a second where his thumb just... stops. Hovering over the entry like he's reconsidering.

Then he swipes.

The name gets flagged. Moved to the unauthorized column.

Crossed off the guest list.

"Old friend?" you ask quietly.

His gaze stays on the screen. "Old nothing."

His tongue clicks against the roof of his mouth. Dismissive.

The sound hits you like a backhand—not because it hurts, but because of what it means. That tiny, involuntary noise Valiskans make when something’s beneath their attention. When a question doesn’t even warrant the energy of a proper deflection.

He just tsk’d you.

Like you’re a child pulling at his sleeve.

“Right,” you say, voice going flat. “Old nothing. That’s why your thumb hovered for three seconds before you crossed him off.”

“My thumb hovered because the interface lagged.” He doesn’t look up. “Consortium networks experience latency spikes during high-security event preparation. If you understood basic systems architecture, you’d know that.”

“Right. Latency spike. On a local device running a cached guest list.” You tilt your head. “Must be a real shit network you’ve built if it can’t handle a swipe function.”

His jaw shifts. Barely.

Good.

“Your technical knowledge,” he says slowly, still staring at the tablet, “is impressive for someone who learned systems theory from smuggled data chips in mining tunnels. But it’s still mining tunnel knowledge. It has limitations you’re not equipped to identify.”

Your nails bite into your palms.

“Funny. My mining tunnel knowledge has cost your program six months of research data, four compromised facilities, and—what was it—forty-three confirmed casualties?” You smile. All teeth. “How many casualties has your Valis Core education produced, Warden? Oh, wait. You don’t count those. You call them necessary sacrifices for optimal biological continuation.”

He sets the tablet down, places it face-down on the surface beside him, aligns its edge with the table’s corner—perfectly parallel—then folds his hands behind his back.

And looks at you.

“You have food in your teeth,” he says.

You blink.

“What?”

“Protein residue. Left canine.” He turns back to the tablet. “You might want to address that before the gathering.”

Your tongue sweeps your teeth immediately—automatic, furious—and finds nothing. Nothing.

He lied.

The fucker lied to make you check.

To make you care about something as stupid as your appearance in front of him, even for half a second.

And you fell for it.

“Cute,” you manage, but the word comes out strangled.

He smiles then—that thin, polished little curve of his mouth that looks almost courteous until you catch what’s underneath it. Satisfaction. Amusement. The private kind. The kind that says he knows exactly where he cut and is pleased with the depth.

He scrolls again, maddeningly calm. “You spent four minutes explaining why I should fear your tactical record. I negated the entire performance with six words.”

“You mean you lied.”

“I mean I redirected.”

You stare at the side of his face. “God, you are such a smug piece of shit.”

His expression does not change, which only makes the faint menace in it worse. “And yet your pulse accelerated.”

“Because murder is cardio.”

“Mm.”

That little sound. That tiny, infuriating hum of acknowledgment.

Then his gaze lifts. His eyes travel from your shoulder to the exposed line of your spine, down to where the dress still sits higher than Tara wanted, clinging over the upper swell of your ass instead of dipping low enough to bare it the way she kept insisting it should.

“Your styling remains incomplete,” he says mildly.

You bark out a laugh. “Oh, now you care?”

“I cared when I entered the room. I merely deprioritized it in favor of security review.”

“You mean in favor of being annoying.”

He glances at you. “If that is what you want to call it.”

You scoff.

He tilts his head toward your reflection. “The back should sit lower.”

Your spine stiffens. “No.”

His gaze returns to the mirror. “Yes.”

“It’s already indecent.”

And that—finally—actually gets a reaction.

Surprise.

His brows shift by a fraction. His head turns slightly, properly regarding you now like you’ve just informed him gravity works differently in Hollow Crest.

“Indecent,” he repeats.

“Yes, indecent,” you snap. “You want my whole ass out for state dinner.”

“Your entire ass would not be out.”

“Anatomically generous distinction.”

“It would rest at the superior curve,” he says, in that maddeningly measured tone. “Which is the intended line.”

“The intended line is vulgar.”

This time he blinks.

Actually blinks.

Then his mouth parts just slightly, and when he speaks again there is the faintest edge of genuine disbelief under all that perfect control. “Vulgar?”

You throw your hands out. “Yes, vulgar.”

“That,” he says carefully, “is not considered vulgar.”

“In your weird nightmare city maybe—”

“In Valis Core,” he cuts in, turning fully toward you now, “selective exposure through structural draping and sheer layering is associated with rank, wealth, and formal aesthetic literacy.”

You stare at him.

He keeps going, because of course he does, as though explaining a theorem to a stubborn child.

“Visible skin is not inherently sexualized here. Improper presentation is.” His eyes drop meaningfully to the back of the dress. “This reads unfinished.”

You laugh once. Sharp. “Unfinished.”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m not showing enough ass?”

He pauses.

Then, with absolute seriousness: “Correct.”

For one full second the room goes silent.

Then you huff out a disbelieving breath. “You cannot be a real person.”

“I am unfortunately well-documented.”

“You’re telling me if I walk into this event with the back where it is now, people are gonna think I’m underdressed because they can’t see the beginning of my ass crack?”

His expression stays serenely composed. “They will think your tailoring was mishandled.”

“That is psychotic.”

“That is cultural differences.”

You glare at him in the mirror. “You just want something worth looking at.”

His pupils shift. Tiny. Immediate.

But his voice stays smooth. “The dress was selected for match appeal.”

“Oh my god.”

“You asked.”

“You are unbelievable.”

“And you are resisting on the basis of a social code that does not apply in this sector.”

You spin to face him. “You don’t get to talk to me like I’m a malfunctioning display unit.”

He considers you for a beat, then says with infuriating calm, “No. A display unit would have followed specification by now.”

The righteous little shit. Standing there in his immaculate formalwear pretending this is all objective, all polite, all proper, while every word lands like a calculated flick to the forehead.

You look at the mirror again. At the dress. At the high line of the back.

Fine.

Fine.

You hook your fingers at the sides and tug it down a fraction.

The silk slides over your skin.

Too much. Too exposed. Already wrong.

“There,” you say flatly. “Happy?”

His tongue clicks.

You hate that sound on sight now.

“No.”

You freeze. “No?”

“No.”

He walks toward you.

One step. Two.

You should move.

You don’t.

Because retreat would mean yielding ground and you are absolutely not giving him that satisfaction, even as every nerve under your skin starts sparking from his approach.

He stops behind you.

Your eyes lift to the mirror.

His are already on you there.

“Since this is apparently beyond your skill set,” he says softly, “hold still.”

“Don’t—”

His hands do not go to your waist.

That would have been easier.

Instead his thumbs brush the line where the fabric meets your lower back, barely touching skin, just enough to make your breath hitch with pure unwilling reflex. Then one hand steadies the silk at your hip while the other slides beneath the back edge.

Your whole body locks.

His finger dips under the fabric, knuckle grazing the top of your ass.

“Namjoon—”

“Commander Kim,” he corrects automatically, and the bastard sounds almost absentminded about it, like he’s more focused on the dress than on the fact that he has his hand under it.

Then he leans in.

Not enough to press against you. Not enough to give you anything as crude as contact. Just enough that his mouth is near your ear, his breath a cool thread against your skin.

“If this garment is intended to appeal to your match,” he murmurs, “it should, at minimum, be permitted to do its job.”

And then he pulls.

Slowly.

Slow enough that you feel every fraction of movement as the crystalline silk glides downward over your lower back. Slow enough that the room seems to narrow to that single point of contact, that single deliberate drag, until the dress settles exactly where Tara wanted it all along—right at the top of the curve, skimming the first revealed line of cleft, baring the upper round of your cheeks in a way that feels less naked than curated.

Presented.

Elegant, by Valiskan standards.

Obscene, by yours.

His hand stills there for one suspended second, the other thumb flattening the fabric as if testing the line for symmetry.

In the mirror, his face is composed.

Too composed.

But his eyes are not.

There’s a darkness in them now, low and intent and very, very aware. Not the flat observation from before. Not the bored cruelty of his little lie. This is attention. Controlled within an inch of its life, but attention all the same.

The same way, you realize in one sick hot flash, his own clothes were chosen for you.

The jacket cut to sharpen him. The fitted lines. The exposed throat above the clasp.

His, for your appeal.

Yours, for his.

You hate that understanding on contact.

He straightens. Leans back just enough to put an intolerable inch of air between you.

“There,” he says.

Your voice comes out hoarse. “I can’t believe this shit.”

“Well,” he says, gaze still fixed on the mirror. “This is merely correct.”

You swallow. Hard. “You put your hand under my dress.”

“I adjusted consortium-issued formalwear to proper presentation parameters.”

“You put your hand under my dress,” you repeat.

“And you attempted the correction incorrectly.”

That calm, immaculate tone. That little edge of superiority so clean it could cut glass.

You turn on him fast enough that the skirt sways around your legs. “You could have just told me.”

“I did.”

“You could have told me without—” You gesture helplessly at your own lower back. “Without being like that.”

He tilts his head. “Like what?”

You hate him.

You hate him.

You hate the composed blankness of his face when the corners of his mouth are still threatening that awful private smile.

“Smug.”

“I was precise.”

“Patronizing.”

“You were incorrect.”

“Insufferable.”

“That one,” he says, “is subjective.”

“You really think this makes me appealing?”

He looks at you then. Fully. No dodging. No fake attention to the tablet. His gaze drags once over the new line of the dress, the bare reveal of skin, the shape of you in indigo and silver and Consortium colors you never asked to wear.

And that tiny, mean little smile returns.

“Now,” he says, voice low and devastatingly polite, “you at least appear as though you made an effort.”

The urge that rises in you is immediate, bright, and absurdly clarifying.

Not to slap him.

Not to scream.

Not even to stab him.

Just to smile sweetly through the entire cursed evening and find something fatal to slip into his drink before the nectar course.

Namjoon does not concern himself with trivialities.

This is not arrogance, merely allocation—cognitive bandwidth directed where it yields measurable return. Social performance at Consortium formal events yields very little. Structured chaos dressed in starweave and platinum, where every handshake conceals a negotiation and every toast carries enough subtext to warrant decryption software.

He has attended enough of these to predict behavioral patterns at 92.36% accuracy.

The remaining 7.64% belongs almost entirely to Daltrey.

Eris Daltrey, Commander of Hollow Crest. Level 9. The woman operates on a frequency Namjoon has never successfully mapped—not for lack of data, but because the data itself seems to shift each time he collects it. She contradicts her own patterns with a consistency that borders on tactical artistry. Cruel when mercy would serve her better. Merciful when cruelty would cost her nothing. He has known her since he was young enough that parental faces have since degraded to pixel-level recall in his memory, and she has not become easier to read in the intervening years.

He respects her. Obligatorily. Level 9 authority demands it regardless of personal assessment.

But he'd rather not greet her tonight. Not yet. Not until he has surveyed enough of the room to calculate which conversational angle she'll deploy first.

So his gaze drifts. Tracks perimeter. Catalogs attendees by threat tier and utility index.

Then stops.

You.

Twenty minutes. You have stayed within three meters of his position for twenty consecutive minutes, and Namjoon is still recalibrating why.

He'd projected immediate dispersal. Escape velocity the moment you crossed the threshold—a straight line toward the nearest blind spot in the surveillance grid, which you'd identify within forty seconds based on your documented pattern recognition capabilities. He had even pre-mapped your probable evasion routes (four viable, two optimal, one you'd choose because it would annoy him most).

None of them executed.

Instead, you remain. Close. Not beside him—never beside him, nothing so cooperative—but adjacent. Orbiting at a distance that reads deliberate rather than obedient.

Strange.

Not the compliance itself. He's witnessed compliance before. Forced, pharmaceutical, structural. This is none of those. This is something else, something closer to that quality he has observed in you across years of operational conflict—the way you collide with obstacles head-first rather than routing around them.

You don't evade problems. You bite into them until your teeth hit bone.

He has always found that particular trait…

The word he needs is annoying. He selects it. Confirms it. Logs it.

Annoying.

Specifically when directed at his databases. His encrypted servers. His operational infrastructure that you dismantled as if pulling apart a child's puzzle.

But standing here now, with the Consortium hall pressing its architecture around you—vaulted ceilings carved from Valis basalt, atmospheric aurora channeled through crystalline panels overhead, casting the room in shifting indigo and silver—he finds that the trait does not grate the way it once did.

It simply… exists. Documented. Filed. Permitted to remain without the usual annotation flagging it for behavioral correction.

Irrelevant observation. He moves on.

The dress, however, is not irrelevant.

He did not select it personally. Did not specify parameters or state preferences. But the Consortium's profiling systems are thorough—the same databases that track population heat cycles, rut schedules, genetic compatibility indices, behavioral mapping. They would have cross-referenced. Extrapolated. Delivered a result optimized for match appeal based on his logged responses to visual stimuli across years of accumulated data.

The result is effective.

He permits himself that word. Effective. Clinical. Appropriate for the assessment being conducted.

The starweave catches every source of ambient light in the hall, fragmenting it across the crystalline threading until the fabric itself seems to pulse with its own luminescence. Against your skin, the effect becomes something else entirely. The sheer panels—calculated transparency, neither concealing nor fully revealing—allow the faintest trace of your chromatophores to surface. Bioluminescent markers that shift in the dimming light as Wane approaches, catching blue along the pathways of your veins where Valiskan genetics assert themselves beneath the warmer sienna pigmentation of Crester heritage.

Two bloodlines in visible conflict on the same canvas.

He has reviewed your genetic profile. Knows the percentages. The markers. The exact ratio of Core to Crest expression in your cellular architecture.

Seeing it, though, is different from knowing it.

The way your collarbones catch indigo. The way the silver threading follows the line of your exposed spine and the light trapped in the weave mirrors the faint luminescence pulsing just beneath your skin. The way the fabric sits at your lower back exactly where he positioned it an hour ago, the superior curve exposed in accordance with Valiskan formal convention.

Effective.

He has already used that word. He notes the repetition. Does not correct it.

He almost considers approaching. Closing the three-meter gap to something operational. Necessary. There are logistics to discuss—positioning during the formal address, protocol for the introductory circuit, the eleven points of etiquette you will inevitably violate if left unmonitored.

But you are his match. And your tongue is a vulgarity he has not yet developed sufficient tolerance for in public settings.

So he remains where he is. Cataloging. Not approaching.

And then the 7.64% enters his peripheral vision.

Daltrey moves through the crowd the way atmospheric pressure shifts before a storm—nothing visibly changes, but every surface reacts. Attendees adjust posture. Conversations recalibrate pitch. Even the ambient lighting seems to tighten as she cuts a path directly toward him with the kind of inevitability that makes avoidance calculations collapse into single outcomes.

No reprieve tonight, then.

His spine straightens by a degree he controls, hands linking behind his back in the precise configuration drilled into him since before memory became reliable.

"Commander Kim."

"Commander Daltrey."

Her smile arrives three seconds before it reaches her mouth. He tracks it in the micro-adjustments first—the way her ice-gray eyes narrow by a calculated fraction, the slight lift of her chin, the predatory tilt of her head as she regards him.

"Congratulations are in order, I'm told. A perfect match. Unprecedented. The Algorithm outdid itself."

"The Algorithm performed within designed parameters," he corrects. "The result was statistically improbable, not unprecedented in—"

"Namjoon." She uses his given name the way one handles a scalpel—precise, intimate, meant to remind him she knew him before he became Commander anything. "Don't be tedious. Where are they?"

He does not glance at you. Does not need to. Your position has not shifted from its three-meter orbit since they entered. He can feel the heat signature of your proximity the way atmospheric sensors detect pressure changes before storms.

"My match is present," he says.

Daltrey follows his sightline.

And there you are.

Standing with your weight on one hip, starweave catching fractured light across your collarbones, expression hovering somewhere between bored and homicidal. You've acquired a drink—he didn't authorize that—and you're holding it the wrong way. Crester grip, fingers wrapped around the bowl instead of the stem.

Every Valiskan in your radius has noticed.

None of them matter. Daltrey does.

"Interesting," she murmurs.

He does not ask what she finds interesting. Asking gives her leverage.

"Bring her."

Not a request. Level 9 does not request from Level 7.

Namjoon crosses the three meters in four strides and stops at your shoulder.

"Commander Daltrey wishes to meet you," he says, low enough that only you hear.

Your eyes slide to his. Gold catching dim light. "And if I'd rather chew glass?"

"Then you'll chew glass at her table. She's Level 9. Refusal is not a variable."

You take a long, deliberate sip of whatever you acquired, maintaining eye contact in a way that is either defiant or obscene depending on cultural framework.

Then you move. He follows half a step behind, which he tells himself is tactical positioning and not deference.

Daltrey hasn't moved. She watches your approach.

"Commander Daltrey," Namjoon says, "my Transference match."

He doesn't offer your name. You don't have one that's safe to give in this room.

Your chin lifts. "Charmed."

The single word drips with so much Crester sarcasm it practically leaves residue on the floor.

Daltrey's mouth curves. Thin. Amused.

"Sit," she says, gesturing to the chairs flanking her at the head table. "Both of you. I've arranged placement."

Of course she has.

The seating configuration puts Daltrey at center, Namjoon to her left, you to her right. Strategically separated. Unable to coordinate without her between you like a blade between two whetstones.

He catalogs this. Files it under Daltrey, E. — tactical social positioning, variant 7.

You settle into the chair with the particular gracelessness of someone who's never attended formal dining and refuses to pretend otherwise. Your back hits the rest too hard. Your elbows land on the table immediately.

Three officials at the adjacent setting visibly recoil. Level 8, all of them. Security division. They exchange glances that Namjoon reads fluently: ’this is the match? This?’

"So," Daltrey says, leaning back. Her ice-gray gaze pins you with interest. "You're the variable that broke Namjoon's perfect system."

"Didn't break it." You swirl the drink. "Just showed it where it was already cracked."

Daltrey's attention shifts to him. Evaluating his response. Measuring.

He offers nothing.

"Tell me," Daltrey continues, turning back to you with a warmth that has no warmth in it whatsoever, "what does a Hollow Crest insurgent make of Valis Core hospitality? Are we meeting your standards?"

"The food's better than compressed protein paste. The company's worse." You take a sip. "Call it even."

Daltrey laughs.

"I can see why the Algorithm chose you." Her fingers trace the rim of her own glass—slow. "Namjoon has always surrounded himself with precision instruments. It must be refreshing to finally have something in his proximity that bites back."

Namjoon's jaw shifts by a millimeter.

"Commander Daltrey oversees Hollow Crest operations," he says. Neutral. Informational.

Your hand stills on the glass.

He watches the realization land—watches the way your shoulders lock, the gold in your eyes going flat and hard as you process exactly who is sitting beside you. The woman who governs the tunnels you grew up in. Who signs the mining quotas that grind Crester populations into compliance. Whose security forces patrol the corridors where your people starve and bleed and bury their dead in unmarked alcoves.

Your voice drops. "You run the Crest."

"I administer the Crest," Daltrey corrects. "Not the same."

"Yeah?" Your smile shows too many teeth. "The people choking on mineral dust twenty levels below your office might disagree."

Daltrey doesn't flinch.

That's the first thing he logs. No micro-expression shift. No tightening of the jaw. Not even the polite recalibration most officials perform when confronted with civilian suffering statistics in social settings.

She just looks at you.

"Mineral dust," she repeats, and her voice carries the particular flatness of someone who has heard every variation of this argument and found each one equally irrelevant. "Fascinating. You've been back in my sector for—what—forty-eight hours? And you've already appointed yourself advocate for the labor population."

Her fingers haven't moved from the glass. Still tracing the rim. Circular.

"Let me clarify something for you, since Commander Kim's briefings clearly omitted context."

She leans forward. Not much. An inch, maybe two. But the temperature at the table drops by a perceptible degree.

"I don't administer Hollow Crest to keep its citizens comfortable. I administer it to keep them functional. Comfort is a Crester myth your people invented to make poverty sound like a philosophy."

Your jaw locks. Namjoon watches the gold in your eyes go incandescent.

"Survival rates are a resource management outcome," Daltrey continues. "Not a moral one. If your miners are choking, it is because their sector allocation has not merited ventilation upgrades. Productivity earns infrastructure. Sentiment does not."

The Level 8 officials have stopped pretending to eat. Two are watching Daltrey with the careful reverence of subordinates who know exactly how fast she can end careers. The third is watching you with something Namjoon identifies, catalogs, and immediately dislikes.

Interest.

The particular kind of attention that Valiskan genetics produce in response to hybrid phenotype expression. Your chromatophores are still catching light through the starweave's sheer panels—Crester warmth and Valiskan bioluminescence in visible conflict across your skin—and in Valis Core, that combination triggers responses that have more to do with evolutionary biology than conscious preference.

Hybrids are rare. Hybrids with visible dual-spectrum chromatophore activity are rarer. Hybrids who look like you while wearing Valiskan formal couture are functionally nonexistent.

The official's gaze tracks the line of your throat above the high collar. Lingers.

Namjoon files it. Moves on.

(Does not move on. Logs this failure to move on. Moves on from that too.)

Daltrey has not moved on either, but her attention operates on different axes. Her ice-gray eyes trace the architecture of your face, the stubborn set of your mouth, the defiant angle of your shoulders, and something in her expression shifts by a fraction that most people would miss entirely.

Namjoon does not miss it.

Appreciation.

"Your match has opinions," Daltrey observes, addressing him without looking away from you.

"My match has a surplus of them," he confirms.

Your head snaps toward him. Gold eyes narrowing.

"Surplus," you repeat. "That's generous. Usually you just call them inefficient."

"Context-dependent. In private, inefficient. In public—" He pauses. Selects the word with care. "—abundant."

"Abundant." Your laugh is a sharp, ugly thing. "Hear that, Commander Daltrey? I'm abundant. That's Valiskan for 'won't shut the fuck up and it's embarrassing him.'"

Two officials cough simultaneously.

Daltrey's mouth curves. That thin, bloodless line that Namjoon has never once mistaken for warmth.

"Is it embarrassing?" she asks him.

He meets her gaze. Holds it. "Embarrassment requires emotional investment in external perception. I do not experience it."

"No," Daltrey agrees. "You don't, do you."

She turns back to you, chin resting on her knuckles. Commander's insignia catching light at her collar.

"But she does. Look at her, Namjoon. She's performing."

The word lands like a blade laid flat against skin. Not cutting. Promising.

Your expression stiffens.

"Performing," you say.

"Every word out of your mouth since you sat down has been calculated to provoke him." Daltrey's gaze doesn't waver. "The posture. The elbows on the table. The Crester grip on the glass. You're not ignorant of Valiskan etiquette—you're weaponizing your ignorance of it."

Silence.

Cold, structural silence that spreads outward from the head table like fracture lines through glass.

Namjoon watches your throat work. A swallow you're trying to suppress.

Because Daltrey is right. And you know she's right. And she knows you know.

"Interesting creature," Daltrey murmurs, and her eyes drop once—brief, deliberate—to the exposed line of your collarbones where chromatophores pulse faint blue through sienna skin. Then back up. "I understand the Algorithm's logic better now."

She lifts her glass. Tips it toward him in a gesture that carries seventeen layers of political meaning he decodes instantly.

This match is leverage. You know it. I know it. The question is who exploits it first.

"To the Epitaph Architect," she says, voice carrying across the table with the authority of someone who expects the room to listen. "And to his unprecedented variable."

Glasses rise around the table. Officials drink.

You do too.

Namjoon lifts his own glass.

Reflex stops him. Old habit, older than protocol, drilled into the autonomic layer where conscious thought doesn't reach.

The glass tilts in his grip—fractional, invisible to anyone not trained to look—and the liquid shifts against the rim at the precise angle required for olfactory assessment.

Sub-molecular. Buried beneath the fermentation profile and the sharp bite of Valiskan mineral-fruit alcohol—terrace-grown, sequence-fermented, calibrated for a fruitvore metabolism. A synthetic alkaloid derivative—Crester-sourced, black market grade, designed to pass standard Veyran sensory thresholds without detection. Faint. Elegant, almost.

Lethal within four minutes for any Veyran biology.

His gaze cuts to Daltrey's glass. Still in her hand. Still full. She's mid-sentence with a Level 8 security official, hasn't brought it to her mouth yet.

Then it cuts to you, already drinking it.

All three glasses.

You poisoned all three glasses.

Crude. Suicidal. Ruthlessly logical.

He lifts his glass. Drinks. All of it. Then sets his empty glass down. Reaches across Daltrey. Takes hers from her hand mid-sentence and drains it in one motion.

Daltrey's eyebrow lifts. A fraction.

"Commander Kim. That was mine."

"The vintage warranted appreciation." He places both empties on the table, aligned parallel. "Apologies for the breach of etiquette."

Her ice-gray gaze holds his for two seconds longer than social convention permits. She doesn't believe him. But she also doesn't press, because pressing would acknowledge irregularity she didn't orchestrate, and Daltrey does not concede that kind of ground.

Fifty-seven seconds. That's how long you have before the alkaloid reaches hepatic processing and begins systemic shutdown.

Namjoon stands.

"If you'll excuse us." His voice carries across the table with the particular calm that Level 7 authority affords—not requesting, informing. "My match requires air. The atmospheric composition appears to be causing discomfort."

Concerned murmurs. Officials shifting. Daltrey's gaze tracking him like a surveillance turret as he rounds the table, reaches your chair, and closes his hand around your upper arm.

His grip is not gentle.

You look up at him. Gold eyes flat. Calculating. Already reading the situation, already processing that something has gone wrong with your plan because he should be showing symptoms by now and he's not.

"Get up," he says. Low enough that the table doesn't hear.

"I'm fi—"

"You have forty-one seconds. Get up."

Something in his tone must register, because you stand. Unsteady—the first symptom, balance disruption as the alkaloid hits your vestibular system. He catalogues it. Keeps his hand on your arm. Tight enough that his fingers indent the bare skin above your elbow.

You cross the hall together.

From the outside, it reads as courteous escort. His hand at your arm, guiding. Your stride only slightly irregular—attributable to unfamiliar footwear or Valiskan atmospheric adjustment.

No one stops you two. No one questions Commander Kim attending to his matched partner's comfort at his own celebration.

The corridor narrows. Service wing. Less surveillance, more function.

His pace increases. Your feet struggle to keep up, the dress restricting your stride, and he doesn't slow down because you have twenty-eight seconds now and he can feel the tremor starting in your arm where his fingers grip.

"What—" You're pulling against him. "What are you doing—"

The bathroom door. He hits the panel. It slides open.

He shoves you through.

You stumble. Catch yourself on the basin's edge, whipping around with that feral snap he's noted a hundred times, and your fist connects with his shoulder before he's even cleared the doorframe.

"What the fuck is your problem—"

He locks the door. Steps forward.

You swing again. He catches your wrist. Redirects. Your back hits the wall beside the basin and his hand finds your jaw before you can recover.

Not a hold. A mechanism.

His thumb hooks against your lower teeth, forcing your mouth open. Presses down on your tongue, flattening it, keeping it out and forward so you can't bite, can't close, can't do anything but make a strangled sound of fury that vibrates against his fingers.

Your nails find his forearm. Drag. He feels the sting and ignores it.

His other hand tears a foil packet from his inner jacket pocket. Teeth rip the seal. Small capsule—white, unmarked, standard Consortium emergency antidote for Class-7 through Class-12 synthetic alkaloids.

He places it on the back of your tongue. Deep enough to trigger reflex.

"Swallow."

Your eyes are wild. Gold and furious and terrified in a way you'd rather die than admit, and your claws dig harder into his forearm, drawing blood now, but your throat works—involuntary, the gag reflex doing what your stubbornness won't—and the capsule goes down.

He holds your jaw for two more seconds. Counting. Confirming.

Then you spit in his face.

Direct hit. Center of his left cheek. The impact is warm and carries the lingering chemical trace of the alkaloid your body is already beginning to neutralize.

He releases you.

Steps back. Wipes his face with the back of his hand.

You're gasping. Bent forward, braced against the wall, chest heaving. The tremors haven't stopped yet—the antidote needs ninety seconds to fully counteract—and your hands are shaking against cold tile.

"You—" You choke on air. "You had no right—"

"You poisoned three glasses." His voice comes out level. Barely. There's something underneath now that isn't calm. "Yours. Mine. A Level 9 Commander's."

"I know what I did—"

"You ingested a lethal compound to maintain the appearance of safety so your actual targets would drink without suspicion."

"And it would have worked—"

"It would have killed you."

"THAT WAS THE POINT."

The words ring off tile. Echo. Settle like debris.

Silence.

Your breathing hasn't steadied. You're still shaking, still braced against the wall, the starweave catching bathroom light in patterns that make the fabric look like it's breathing with you.

"You detected it," you say. Hoarse. Accusatory. "How."

"My olfactory sensitivity operates at sub-molecular thresholds." He adjusts his cuff where your nails shredded fabric. Blood underneath. Minor. "The compound was elegant. It would have passed any standard Veyran detection."

"But not yours."

"No."

"And you drank it anyway." Your eyes narrow. "Both glasses. You drank both. That's—that's not possible. That dosage would flatline a fucking Grav."

"And yet."

You stare at him. Processing.

"You're immune," you whisper.

He says nothing. Which is confirmation enough.

"That's not—Valiskans aren't immune to—"

"I am."

"How?"

"Irrelevant to current situation."

"Irrelevant—you just swallowed enough synthetic alkaloid to kill six people and you're standing there adjusting your cuffs—"

"And you just attempted to assassinate yourself, your genetic match, and a Level 9 Consortium Commander at a formal dinner." His jaw shifts. "Did the last attempt teach you nothing? Or do you simply enjoy the repetition?"

Your laugh is raw. Wrecked. "What it taught me is that you keep surviving, and I keep having to find new ways to make sure you don't."

"Four attempts now. Zero successful. At what point does the data suggest a revised approach?"

"At the point where I stop breathing."

You push off the wall. Stand. The tremors have reduced to fine vibration in your fingers.

Antidote working.

"You want to know why?"

"Enlighten me."

"For the chance," you hiss. "That's what. For the one-in-a-hundred chance that your perfect fucking system missed something and you'd drop dead next to me. I'd take those odds every time, Warden. Every. Fucking. Time."

"Then you are going to run out of attempts," he says quietly, "long before I run out of patience."

"Good. I hope your patience tastes as bitter as that antidote."

"And I hope," he says, and his voice drops into something colder than protocol, "that you have an explanation for the spectacle you caused in that hall. Because what they saw was my match destabilizing a formal event. What Daltrey saw was leverage."

"Oh, so now you care about appearances—"

"I care about operational security, which you have now compromised for the fourth time in—"

"You dragged me into a bathroom—"

"Because you were dying—"

"I was handling it—"

"You were losing vestibular function and had approximately nine seconds before hepatic collapse." His hand hits the wall beside your head. Not a strike. A containment. "That is not handling it. That is suicide dressed as strategy."

Your chin jerks up. Defiant. That same angle you always default to when cornered—chin up, eyes blazing, throat exposed like a dare.

"Maybe that's the point," you snap. "Maybe I'd rather die on my terms than on yours."

"And maybe—" He leans forward. Closes the gap by an inch he shouldn't concede. "—you keep manufacturing these confrontations because you have know that hatred at this proximity with our compatibility does something you are not prepared to name."

Your pupils dilate for a fraction of a second before fury floods the space.

"Don't you dare—"

"Four assassination attempts. Each one requiring sustained aggression, elevated combat pheromones, extended physical proximity to me." His head tilts. "That's not tactical, Cipher. That's compulsive. You are engineering situations that force your body into arousal-adjacent states because confrontation is the only framework in which you'll permit yourself to—"

Your palm cracks across his face.

The sound bounces off tile. His head turns with the impact—controlled, absorbing the force rather than resisting it.

He stays turned for a second. Lets the sting register. Lets the heat bloom across his cheekbone.

Then he looks back at you.

"Interesting," he says.

"Shut up—"

"You could have aimed for the nose. The temple. The throat." His tongue traces the inside of his cheek, assessing damage. "You chose a slap. Open palm. Maximum sound, minimal damage."

"Next one won't be—"

"Next one won't happen."

His fingers wrap the column of your neck, thumb settling over the pulse point where your heartbeat hammers against his skin fast enough to constitute tactical intelligence.

You go still, your exhale hitting his mouth, his breathing disrupts the fall of your hair, the scent of bonfire ash and that stubborn sweetness underneath engulfs his lungs and suddenly he cannot breathe.

His blood runs hot. Hotter than protocol. Hotter than the calculated baseline he maintains through sheer architectural will.

Your combat pheromones are flooding the confined space.

His are answering.

“Du villst das,” he murmurs, and his voice has dropped past protocol, past Consortium diction, Altsprek scraping the edges of each syllable. “Willaikt sollte ik disem freken Mund geben, vorum er bettelt, und dik so hart fiken, dass du wergisst, vi man Gift miskt.” (You want this. Maybe I should give this insolent mouth what it’s begging for, and fuck you so hard you forget how to mix poison.)

You don't speak Altsprek.

He knows this. Has confirmed it through linguistic profiling.

But the guttural weight of consonants is a task your hindbrain processes without translation because it doesn't need translation.

Your tongue slides across your lower lip.

Slow. Unconscious. Wetting skin that's gone dry.

His gaze drops, inevitably, to your mouth. Slick where your tongue passed.

His hand tightens on your throat. Infinitesimal. A pulse of pressure that makes your breath stutter.

And he wants—

What he wants bypasses every filter, every protocol, every careful partition between operational logic and the catastrophic biology of what 100% compatibility actually means when you're breathing the same recycled air and his hand is on your throat and your pheromones taste like ignition.

He wants to close the distance. Press his mouth against yours. Swallow that sharp tongue whole and find out if you taste like poison and ash and all the things he should be immune to but—

Skaisse.

He releases your throat. Steps back. The motion is not smooth—it's a stagger, uncoordinated, his heel catching on tile as distance opens between his hand and your skin like a circuit breaking.

“Skaisse—vas tzum—” (Shit—what the—)

His hands link behind his back. Tight. Knuckles white.

You're staring at him from the wall. Throat still red from his grip. Lips still wet. Chest rising and falling in a rhythm that matches his exactly.

Synchronized breathing.

He hadn't noticed.

"We return to the hall," he says, too fast and clipped for his liking. "Immediately."

You open your mouth.

"Immediately."

He turns. Unlocks the door. Does not look back.

Because looking back would require acknowledging what just happened.

And what just happened does not fit within any operational parameter, any behavioral model, any system he has ever designed.

What just happened was a malfunction.

He counts his steps back to the corridor.

Ains. Tzvai. Drai. (One. Two. Three)

His pulse does not normalize until step forty-seven.

The walls breathe wrong in Valis Core.

Not literally—you're not that far gone yet, though give it another few days in this sterile coffin and check back.

But the sound-dampening technology embedded in every surface creates a silence so absolute it loops back around to noise. A pressure against your eardrums. The absence of sound so aggressive your brain fills the void with phantom echoes, and the phantom echoes sound a lot like heartbeats that aren't yours.

Your quarters. Level 7.

Containment dressed in furniture.

The lighting calibrates itself to your circadian rhythm whether you want it to or not. Somewhere behind those immaculate walls—behind the sound-dampening and the climate regulators and the carefully curated illusion of privacy—sensors log every shift in your body temperature, every spike in your heart rate, every microsecond of REM sleep.

You can feel them.

That's the part nobody talks about. The surveillance radiation. Faint enough that most Veyrans wouldn't register it, but you're not most Veyrans. Your Crester-adapted sensory system picks up the low-frequency emissions like a persistent itch behind your eyes. Like being stared at by something that doesn't blink.

Forty-seven minutes of pacing. Sleepwear that fits wrong—Valiskan cut, too loose at the shoulders, too tight at the hips. Nineteen degrees constant and your blood runs hot enough that the chill sits in your marrow like infection.

The comm unit crackles.

Shroud frequency. Encrypted. Your cipher pattern.

Static. Then—

"—visual confirmed, bearing south-southwest. Phantom sighted at former Blindfold approach, route six. Repeat, Phantom sighted—"

Your blood stops.

Taehyung.

Near Blindfold. Near your old command node, the one whose coordinates maybe seven people in the world have ever known. Three of them are dead.

Why the fuck would he surface there?

Unless he's looking for you.

Unless he's in trouble.

Unless he's already sold the grid and he's leading someone straight to—

Don't spiral. Think.

But thinking requires stillness and stillness requires safety and there is no safety in a room that documents your unconscious brain activity for Consortium research files.

You need out, you need out, you need out.

The window latch is biometric. You crack it in thirty seconds. The panel slides open and Valis Core's atmosphere hits your face—sterile, thin, that metallic ozone bite from the purification towers. High above, something winged scrapes along a spire and disappears into aurora glare before you can decide whether it's security hardware or something with teeth. Perfect. Even the fucking skyline has predators.

Three hundred meters below, the city sprawls in black spires and cold blue light.

You swing both legs over the sill, feet finding the decorative ridging on the facade—Valiskan architecture, all form and no function, but the ornamental grooves are deep enough if you distribute weight right.

One floor down. Fine. Your fingers know stone. Your body knows gravity. You've scaled the Hollow Crest shaft at Level 53 with Yoongi's explosives strapped to your back, Glowmice gone quiet in the walls, and felt nothing but annoyance at slippery handholds.

Two floors down.

Your stomach drops.

Not from height—physically drops, like gravity doubled beneath your ribcage. A wave of nausea so sudden it nearly pitches you forward into open air.

You grip the facade. Hold. Breathe.

What the fuck.

Three floors. The nausea deepens into something worse. Chest compression. Tightness behind your sternum that pulses outward like sonar hitting nothing. Your fingers shake against cold stone and the tremor isn't fatigue, it's something else.

Adrenaline. Has to be. You're free-climbing a building at Wane in your sleepwear. Body's just reacting.

Right.

Except you don't get nervous.

You don't.

Four floors and your vision blurs long enough that you miss a handhold and for one horrible suspended moment you're dangling by six fingers above several meters of nothing.

Move.

You move. Because moving is what you do. What you've always done. What Cresters are built for—quick, low, agile, navigating hostile architecture the way Valiskans navigate bureaucracy. Your body finds the service ledge at Level 2 by muscle memory you shouldn't have for a building you've been imprisoned in for days, but your brain mapped the schematics during a compatibility assessment while pretending to sleep.

The garden atrium opens below. Biodome bridging the Citadel's eastern wing to the Command Spires. Engineered groundcover. Root-soft, sterile, maintained at obscene cost so Consortium officials can perform reverence for living systems they only tolerate when controlled.

Your bare feet hit dew-soaked ground and the cold shocks through your soles. The nausea hasn't faded. Worse now. A building pressure behind your ribs that doesn't feel like sickness. Feels like—

Dread. Loss. Something being pulled from you that you didn't know was there.

Anxiety.

No. Shut the fuck up. You don't feel anxiety. Anxiety is for people who haven't survived everything that was supposed to kill them—

"Going somewhere?"

You spin.

He's at the garden's north entrance. Formal jacket unclasped at the collar, platinum hardware hanging loose. Hair half-fallen from the styled position, the white streak catching faint aurora light through the biodome panels.

And the nausea—

Stops. Gone. Like someone flipped a switch behind your sternum.

The compression, the dread, the shaking hands, the blurred vision—all of it draining away so fast it leaves you dizzy.

No.

No, that's not—you're not calmer because he's here. That's not how this works. That's not how you work.

(But the tremor in your fingers has stopped. And your breathing has evened. And the relief is so immediate and so total that it makes you want to vomit for entirely different reasons.)

His expression is not angry. It's worse.

It's done; the specific exhaustion of a man who has been tolerating a natural disaster for days and has reached the exact limit of what his patience can metabolize.

"How," you manage.

"The same way you found the garden." Flat. Clipped. "Biology. Which you would understand if you stopped trying to outrun it for five consecutive minutes."

"Taehyung was spotted—"

"I genuinely, deeply do not care."

"Near my old coordinates, near Blindfold—"

"Still do not care." He steps forward. "You are not leaving Valis Core tonight."

"Watch me."

You bolt.

The garden stretches thirty meters to the bridge—transparent walkway between the Citadel and the Spire, three hundred meters of glass above three hundred meters of nothing. Your bare feet tear across wet groundcover, pale pollinators lifting in irritated flickers around your ankles, and you are fast —Crester-fast, tunnel-runner fast, the kind of fast that's kept you alive since you were old enough to run from things bigger and meaner and better armed than you.

Valiskans don't chase. That's fundamental biology. Their frames are built for structure, control, sustained force—not explosive pursuit through uneven terrain. Every Consortium patrol you've ever outrun proved it. They lumber. They coordinate. They call for backup.

They don't sprint.

They definitely don’t sprint like Namjoon is doing right now.

What the fuck.

You hit the bridge at full speed, bare feet slapping transparent panels that show the cold blue nothing below. The walkway sways. You adjust without thinking, weight distribution shifting to compensate, every step calculated by the part of your brain that's been navigating unstable surfaces since childhood.

He's still gaining.

How.

You cut left, using the bridge's slight curve to force a wider pursuit angle. Crester tunnel doctrine—exploit geometry when you can't exploit speed.

His footsteps don't falter. Don't redirect. They anticipate the curve, cutting the angle before you complete it, and suddenly the distance between you is halving instead of holding.

Fifteen meters to the Spire entrance.

You pour everything into the last stretch—

And then the bridge purrs.

A low ringed pressure that hits your back teeth before your ears catch up to it, like a generator coughing awake under glass. You feel it in your sternum. In the soles of your feet. The kind of vibration your body recognizes as animal before your brain admits it's possible.

The fuck.

Movement.

Underneath you.

Through the transparent panels something pale streaks along the bridge's underside—long body, gripping limbs, a counterweight tail flicking once as it rotates around a structural rib and reappears on top of the walkway six meters ahead of you, perfectly silent, perfectly placed.

Oh you have got to be fucking kidding.

It's standing in your path.

Lean. Pale. Hide-fur threaded with something silver that catches aurora light in tiny conducting filaments along its flanks. Vestigial wing-membranes folded tight against its ribs like a coat someone forgot to take off. Wide-set pale eyes locked on your sternum—not your face, your center of mass, the way a thing built to tackle reads a body—and its head is low, neck stretched forward, ears flat against the skull in that particular way that means I want your scent, not your blood.

Yet.

Oranen.

The word surfaces before the rest of the memory does, and when the memory comes it comes stupid—

You were maybe four. Maybe five. Pre-camp. Pre-everything. Some Valis cousin's terrace before your parents got publicly disassembled and your sister got reclassified as a problem to manage. You'd seen one of these things curled along an ornamental rib like a cat on a windowsill, all silver-pale and slow-blinking, and you'd asked—small, stupid, with the absolute certainty of a child who hadn't yet learned the world ate things like her—can I pet it.

Every adult in earshot had stilled.

Not laughed. Not corrected. Stilled. The way grown-ups go quiet when a kid asks something that flags her as the wrong species of person. You remember a Valis aunt's mouth opening slightly. Some uncle's hand pausing halfway to his glass. The cousin's mother turning her head with the slow horror of someone watching a child reach for an exposed wire.

They're not pets, sweetheart.

Said in the tone people use for 'we don't ask why grandfather doesn't come down to dinner anymore.'

You'd thought, at four: they look like pets. They look soft. They look like something that would let me hold it. You'd been wrong about a lot of things that year.

You are wrong about this one too.

Because the thing standing on the bridge is not soft. It's holding its tail out perfectly horizontal, dead level with the walkway, and even at four years old in your stupid little hand-me-down boots you would have known—if you'd been looking properly—that an animal holding itself that still is not a pet. It's a decision that hasn't landed yet.

Soft. Sure. Soft like a fucking trap.

"Don't move," Namjoon says, behind you. Close. Closer than he was a second ago.

"Yeah no shit—"

"Do not move."

The Oranen's forepaws knead the glass. Once. Twice. Mineral claws extending and retracting, scoring tiny clean lines into the panel without cracking it—because of course they're calibrated for that, of course they are, of course Valis built itself a bridge animal that won't damage the bridge—

Its tail tip flicks.

Decision made.

You drop into stance on instinct, shifting weight onto the balls of your feet, calculating elbow-angle to throat, knee to sternum, anything—and you know, even as you're doing it, that none of it will work. Not because you can't fight an animal. You've fought worse animals. You've fought humans worse than animals. But this thing has been bred—generations of it, cycles of it—to do exactly this. Pin and hold. Score glass without cracking it. Take a fleeing target alive until a handler shows up.

A handler is behind you.

The Oranen's chest expands. The throat-vurr rises—sharper this time, an alert note instead of an identification one—and you can feel a second pressure starting to answer it from somewhere up the Spire facade, another colony-pair flanking in from above—

"Halt."

Namjoon doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. The word lands wrong in the air—it's not the cadence he uses with you, not the cadence he uses with anyone, it's something pressure-shaped, throat-tight, severe in a way that makes the consonants feel like they were filed before they left his mouth.

Altsprek. The real version. The version he speaks when he's not condescending to your hybrid ear.

The Oranen freezes.

Not a slow freeze. Mid-step freeze. One forepaw still raised, claws still extended, throat-vurr cut off so cleanly it leaves a hum in the bridge that takes a second to fade. The second pressure from above stops climbing. Whatever was inbound just—stalled. Recategorized. Reset.

Your breath catches and you hate it.

Because the animal didn't stop for the word. You know that immediately. You grew up around enough trained killers to recognize the difference between an order being heard and an order being recognized. The Oranen heard pressure, throat-tension, native cadence, and probably a clearance scent his body throws off without trying—and decided he was the senior thing in this exchange.

The animal didn't obey Namjoon.

The animal deferred to him.

"Mein."

Softer. Single syllable. Same wrong-cadence Altsprek that your stupid hybrid throat could probably mimic but never make register.

The Oranen's ears come up half a degree. Tail goes from horizontal to angled-down. Head tilts, slow, almost—polite—and that's when you understand he's just told it ‘this one is mine, don't pin her, I've got her,’ and the animal accepted the override the way a guard dog accepts being called off by the only voice in the building it actually answers to.

Disgust hits you before the relief can.

Because—god, you'd forgotten this part. Forgotten how Valis Core does it. Forgotten that they didn't just build surveillance, they bred it, they sat down with something that used to live on cliffs and over generations they whittled it into a thing that would freeze when an elite cleared its throat right.

Drones don't have a choice. This one did. Its great-great-whatever decided heated roosts and mineral-oil grooming was worth more than open sky, and now its descendant is standing on a glass bridge declining to break your spine because a man behind you used the correct vowel.

Animals that bargained with the Consortium.

The animal steps back along the bridge. Two paces. Tail-tip flicks once, opposite direction this time, and the second pressure above you bleeds out of the facade like someone closing a valve.

You don’t turn around, but you can feel the specific quality of the silence he uses when he’s deciding whether to speak or just stand there until you do something stupid enough to settle the question for him.

He speaks.

“There is,” he says, and his voice has gone flat in a way that means he’s reached the section of his patience that runs on pure spite, “an aerosol dispenser in your bathroom.”

“What.”

“In your quarters. Wall-mounted. Above the basin.” A beat. “Standard Citadel issue.”

“I don’t—”

“If you had used it before climbing out a window in your sleepwear, the colony-pair currently deciding whether my override holds would have read you as cleared and ignored you entirely.”

You turn around.

Slowly.

Because the alternative is letting him deliver the rest of that sentence to the back of your head and you are not, not, giving him that.

He’s standing exactly where you knew he was standing. Collar still unclasped. Hair still half-fallen. The aurora light through the biodome panels above the bridge catches the white streak at his temple in a way that should be flattering and is, instead, exhausted. His arms are loose at his sides. His weight is on his back foot. His expression is the expression of a man explaining a basic safety protocol to someone who sets the building on fire every time she enters it.

“You’re telling me.” Your voice scrapes on the way out. “You’re telling me there’s a fucking can in my bathroom.”

“Yes.”

“That tells the colony-pair I’m not prey.”

“Yes.”

“And nobody mentioned this when they shoved me into Level 7—”

“Cipher.” His head tilts. “It is labeled.”

Heat sheets up your throat so fast your vision tunnels.

“It’s labeled in Altsprek, you condescending—”

“It is labeled in standard Consortium pictogram. Same as the climate panel. Same as the lighting calibrator. Same as every system in your quarters that you have, by your own admission, been refusing to engage with because you would rather pace a nineteen-degree room for three cycles than touch anything Valis built.” His hand rises. Drags down his face. “Which is, of course, your absolute right. Until it puts you on a glass bridge at Wane in your sleepwear with a colony-class interceptor calculating your bone density.”

“Oh, fuck you—”

“If you had been,” he says, voice dropping into the lethal-calm register that always means he has reached the bottom of his composure and started digging, “even marginally smarter about a flight you had already committed to attempting, you would have sprayed yourself before you went out the window. The pair would not have engaged. You’d have made it, what.” He tilts his head. Considers. “Three streets, perhaps. Maybe four if you’d kept to the service ridges and avoided the Threshold Gates. Though of course I would have caught you eventually.”

Your jaw locks.

“Of course.”

“Mm.” A small, exhausted nod. “But by your parameters, I imagine that still constitutes an improvement.”

“Oh, save it, you smug—” Your hand flicks at the bridge, the Oranen, the entire fucking architecture of him. “—condescending fucking piece of shit, you can’t even—you wouldn’t have caught me, that’s the funniest part, you absolute Valis-bred fossil, you couldn’t even keep me out of the Algorithm’s outer ring when you had seven layers of encryption and a ghost protocol riding it—”

“Cipher.”

“—and I was running it from a leaking utility panel in Hollow Crest with a stolen interface and one working hand because Yoongi’s fuse had snapped two hours earlier and my fingers were still numb, and I got three layers deep before your little vanity protocol noticed me, which by the way, who codes a vanity flag into a tier-one security architecture, that’s not security, that’s ego—”

“I am aware of how you breached the outer ring.”

“—you had to scrub the breach quietly because if your superiors had seen the actual logs you would have been demoted into a closet, and don’t think I didn’t notice you cleaned the entry vector and rewrote it instead of patching it, that’s not a fix, Warden, that’s vanity wearing a uniform—”

“I do not give a fuck.”

The bridge goes dead silent.

The Oranen’s ears flick.

“Did you—” Your voice cracks in a register that has never been used by you in your life. “Did you just curse?”

“Yes.”

“At me?!”

“Correct.”

“About the Algorithm breach?!”

“Cipher—”

“Stop using my fucking slang!”

“I figured,” he says, with the exact tonal flatness of a man defusing a piece of ordnance he has personally signed off on, “you’d understand me better if I used your lexicon.”

“OH FUCK YOU—”

He moves. You don’t even register the cross-step. One second three meters of bridge between you, the next his arm is hooking behind your knees and your back is hitting his chest and the world tilts sideways.

Bridal carry.

He’s fucking carrying you.

“Put me down—!”

"No."

"I will rip your throat out—!"

"You will try."

You thrash savagely. Elbows aimed at his jaw, knees kicking air, your whole body bucking against his grip like a trapped animal because that's what this is.

Captivity. Restraint.

Your fist cracks into his collarbone. He absorbs it. Keeps walking.

"I'm not a fucking doll—"

"Debatable, given the tantrum."

"That's not—I'm not having a tantrum, I'm fighting for my fucking life—"

"You're fighting the bridge. Poorly." He adjusts his grip. Practiced. Like he's carried feral things before. "And you're barefoot in sleepwear at three hundred meters elevation in Wane-deep cold. So forgive me if I deprioritize your dignity."

"Put me down, Warden." Your voice drops. Not screaming anymore.

The voice you use when you mean it—really mean it—and the difference must register because his stride changes.

"I don't like being carried." Each word scraped from somewhere deeper than anger. "I don't like being picked up and moved. I don't—"

Your jaw locks. Because what comes next is small and powerless and like the processing lines when they'd haul you by your arms and you are not giving him that.

Not ever.

Not any of it.

But he stops walking.

Stands there on the bridge, three hundred meters above nothing, with you rigid in his arms.

Then his grip shifts beneath your knees and your bare feet find glass.

You step back from him immediately. Put distance between your body and his. Try to pretend the shaking in your legs is cold and not residual proximity-whatever-the-fuck.

Silence. Aurora light shifting through the biodome above. Your breath fogging in the gap between you.

"I'm not going back to my quarters."

"That is not—"

"They watch me." The words rip out ragged. "Every breath. Every heartbeat. Every time I roll over in my sleep there's a sensor logging it. I can feel the surveillance radiation—Cresters can feel it, yeah? Sits behind my eyes like a migraine that never fucking stops."

His jaw shifts. Processing.

"I haven't slept," you continue, and you hate the sound of your own voice right now. Hate the rawness in it. "Not real sleep. Not once since they dragged me here. Because every time I close my eyes I can feel them documenting what my brain does unconscious and I can't—"

Stop.

Breathe.

"I want to stay at your quarters."

His hand rises. Presses against his forehead. Drags down his face with the particular slowness of a man counting internally to prevent homicide.

"Are you aware," he says, voice strained in a way you've never heard from him, "of how that sounds in my culture."

"I don't give a fuck about your cult—"

"You just propositioned a Commander in the middle of the garden."

Heat slaps into your cheeks. Immediate. Nuclear.

"What?"

His hand hasn't left his face.

"In Valis Core," he says from behind his palm, "when a matched partner requests shared quarters during Wane cycle—triff mich bei Wane—it carries a specific connotation. The connotation is not roommate arrangement."

"I didn't—that's not what I—"

"I'm aware."

"Then why are you making it weird—"

"I'm not making it weird. You made it weird. I am simply informing you that every surveillance microphone within range just recorded you asking your genetic match to bed you."

"I asked to sleep in a room without cameras—"

"Which contains one bed. Mine."

"—because your quarters are Command authority, they don't monitor you—"

"They will absolutely begin monitoring me if my matched partner moves into my quarters at Wane requesting shared sleeping arrangements."

"I'm not requesting—" You stop. Force your voice down. "Your room doesn't have surveillance radiation. That's it. That's the whole calculation. Couch. Floor. I don't care. I've slept on worse than your shitty Valiskan floor tiles."

He lowers his hand. Looks at you.

His gaze drops to your bare feet on the glass. To the goosebumps climbing your arms. To the way you're holding yourself like you'll fly apart if you loosen your grip on your own ribcage.

"If I formally request and authorize a transfer of your sleeping arrangements to my quarters," he says, and each word is measured, selected, placed with the care of someone defusing ordnance, "through official channels, with documented reasoning citing match-proximity optimization and subject wellness protocols—"

"Subject wellness," you repeat flatly.

"—you will not attempt to flee while I sleep."

Not a question. A condition. Terms being laid on the table the way he lays everything—squared, aligned, non-negotiable.

But he's offering.

He's not ordering you back to Level 7. He's not calling security.

He's standing on a bridge in the cold with his collar undone and his composure fraying at the seams, and he's negotiating.

"I won't attempt to flee while you sleep," you say.

"That is not what I asked." His eyes narrow. "Repetition is not agreement. I need explicit terms."

Fucking Valiskans.

"Fine. I will not attempt to flee. While you sleep. From your quarters. During the authorized Wane cycle. Happy?"

"Define flee."

"Oh, for fuck's—"

"You have attempted to kill me four times, attempted to poison a Level 9 Commander, escaped through a window in your sleepwear, and sprinted across a suspension bridge barefoot in sub-zero temperatures." He tilts his head. "Specificity is not unreasonable."

He's right. You hate that he's right. You hate that his version of right always sounds like a fucking legal deposition.

"I will not leave the physical perimeter of your quarters during Wane cycle without informing you first." You grit your teeth. "I will not sabotage your security systems, poison your food, or attempt to exit through windows, ventilation shafts, or any other structural opening. Is that specific enough for you?"

"And weapons."

"What about them."

"You will not bring concealed weapons into my quarters."

A beat. "I don't have any weapons."

His look could cut steel. "Cipher."

"Fine. No weapons."

"Including improvised ones."

"You want me to promise I won't sharpen your toothbrush into a shiv?"

"Yes."

"You're serious."

"I am always serious. That is something you should have established by now."

Your mouth opens. Closes.

Because he is serious. Dead serious.

Standing there with aurora light catching the white streak in his hair, asking you to formally promise not to weaponize his dental hygiene products.

This is your life now.

"No improvised weapons," you mutter. "No shivs. No garrotes made from bedsheets. No blunt force trauma via decorative objects. Satisfied?"

Something sits in the space between his brows where tension usually lives, and for one second—just one—it smooths.

"I will file the authorization tonight."

He says it without looking at you. Gaze fixed on the Spire entrance, jaw working through whatever internal protocol is screaming at him to do the opposite.

"Effective now. You sleep there tonight. The transfer will be documented as proximity-based wellness optimization per Epitaph Protocol 7.3."

Tonight.

Not next cycle. Not pending review. Not after seventeen layers of Consortium bureaucratic horseshit.

Now.

You open your mouth to say something cutting—something about how generous of him, how merciful, how very Consortium of him to grant basic fucking sleep like it's a reward for good behavior—

But nothing comes out.

Because your hands are still shaking. And your feet are numb. And you're standing on a glass bridge in your sleepwear at Wane-deep and he just... gave you the thing you asked for.

Without a fight. Without leverage. Without making you bleed for it first.

"I don't care what you call it," you manage.

"I know." He turns towards the building again. "That's why I'm telling you. So when you inevitably throw it in my face during an argument, you'll have the correct protocol number."

You stand on the bridge for three more seconds. Bare feet on cold glass. City glowing beneath you like something dying beautifully.

Then you follow.

Because—somewhere behind your ribs, in the space where the nausea used to sit—there's nothing.

Just the steady, unwelcome absence of pain that started the moment he appeared in that garden and hasn't left since.

next | index

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© jungkoode 2025

Silence.

His lips part. Close. Part again. 

The coral flush that had been fading from his cheeks floods back, darker, spreading down the sides of his neck.

"Then you kiss it."

He makes a sound like something cracked in his chest.

"I—what—I c-can't—"

"You can." You extend the petal toward him. "Your turn first."

His hand lifts from his knee. The tremor is visible—not fine, not subtle. Full shaking, bare fingers unsteady as they close around the petal's edge. 

He holds it like it might detonate.

His eyes scan your body and skitter away so fast you almost miss the trajectory. 

Shoulder. Neck. Lower. Back to shoulder.

The petal lands soft against the fabric of your sweater, right at the slope where neck becomes shoulder. His hand retreats immediately, snapping back to his lap like he touched a burner.

Conservative. Careful.

So careful it makes your teeth itch.

You watch his face as you hook one finger under the neckline of your sweater. Tug. The knit slides, and the fabric pools at the curve of your bicep, baring the full line of your shoulder—skin, bone, the faint shadow of your collarbone.

He whips his head to the side.

Full turn. Chin almost touching his own shoulder. Eyes fixed on your bookshelf like it contains the answer to every question he's ever failed.

"Moss."

Your voice comes out quieter than you intended. He flinches.

"Look at me."

His jaw works. You can see the muscle flexing beneath his skin, the effort of obedience warring with whatever his brain is screaming. 

Slowly—so slowly you could count the degrees—his head turns back.

His eyes land on your bare shoulder and stay there. His pupils are blown wide. The coral has reached his ears.

"Now kiss it."

➜ Coming: soon!

It only echoes: someone wanted, someone yielded, nobody remained unchanged.

Kisses, when plotted, become ceremony.

When stolen, they become prophecy.

The weight of a planned kiss is measured in social consequence, the meaning catalogued and approved, a polite signature on shared loneliness.

But the unplanned—the frantic, the accidental, the ‘I couldn’t help it’—brings chaos in its wake.

You catalog these as anomalies, black swans in the garden of routine affection, the way lightning splits the old willow and announces an unasked-for season.

History smiles at ritual but bows to the storm surge: Abelard and Heloise, Abel’s wife unnamed but found in ruins.

You lurk between fact and fable, amused at how little difference there is when a mouth closes the distance.

Every great unraveling—of kingdoms, of marriages, of the self—begins with something you swore you could control.

You yourself have built your life on restraint. Tended gardens bound by stone, memory zipped up in boxes, grief rationed to private hours.

Even love, when it found you, was obligation dressed as devotion.

A kiss—especially a sporadic one—threatens all of this order. Reminds you that undoing starts not with intention, but with a small, ungovernable breach.

There are moments—watching tealeaves swirl, the radio humming forgotten symphonies—when you suspect the real disaster comes not from what you lost, but from what might still erupt from what’s left behind.

Sporadic kisses: fault lines that wait beneath habits, steady as mother nature, sudden as revelation.

Who can say if Spartacus dreamed of Rome as he pressed his mouth, desperate, against a fellow rebel’s wrist? Who immortalized the first caress that set the Mongols riding west, the invisible touch that sent soldiers clamoring over walls, forgetting what they owed to their flags?

There is never a witness, only aftermath.

Someone records the dead, someone else measures the spoils, and in the quiet, one remembers the taste of salt and the way the world unspooled, quietly and for no one’s benefit.

Even in personal history, you remember the odd, errant touches more than the orchestrated ones.

You remember bruises that came uninvited, yes, but also lips that found yours in darkened hallways, between sobs or laughter, moments caught off-guard.

Tenderness is unsteady, a thing you hold with bare hands because gloves would betray the urgency.

Now, domestic rituals shield you from randomness—a mug placed, a room crossed, both of you learning to keep to pre-programmed tracks.

But you know—have always known—that the moment someone veers, history is written anew.

The world recalibrates around the unexpected, and an unexpected kiss is both particle and wave, measured only in the damage or creation that follows.

In court records and diary margins, you see the shape of them: Anne Boleyn’s mouth, the reason Henry rewrote the rules; a French revolutionary’s fleeting peck on a guillotine-bound cheek, final as any executioner’s blow.

Nations changed, rivers rerouted, because one person leaned too close and abandoned caution.

You want to believe your life is safegrounded, buffered by predictability.

But somewhere—under skin, behind jaw—you know potential tremors lurk, and the garden never asks permission before letting weeds find daylight.

Fluent in the language of aftermath, you anticipate the shape of future fissures by mapping old scars.

Restraint is a mythology: you cultivate it, offer it up like temple incense, but no one truly worships its gods.

The stories you love most end in a mouth pressed against a secret, the hush before impact, the way hope and ruin feel the same to a body braced for collapse.

You've always had a knack for noticing who blinks first, who tenses, who forgets to breathe.

Only the sporadic, the unintended, the impossibly brave puncture this stillness. Only the unplanned kiss leaves marks worthy of remembering.

So if kisses are keys, sporadic ones open doors that were meant to remain locked.

History is not a chronicle of what was deserved, but of what was dared—someone crossed a room, and something changed. Causes and effects, the predictable loops of comfort, the architectures of safety. But no fortress is built to withstand the gentle pressure of lips on a mouth unprepared. Cities burn for less.

In gardens and histories alike, propagation comes from scatter, not sequence.

You see it in the way poppyseeds claim cracks in asphalt, how daisies colonize corners you forgot to tend.

Kisses, too, have their own seeds: thrown by wind, rooted in shadow, never sprouting where you expect but always arriving when the soil is weakest.

Perhaps the greatest spoiler in history’s ledger is the moment before: the hush as lips hover, the breath that promises irrevocable change.

You think of all the wars begun under banners that could have been curtains in back bedrooms, all the revolutions that started with an unanticipated consonance—someone stepping out of step, someone allowing their mouth to lose its faith in silence. You find comfort in the uncertainty of it. The way not knowing when or if makes wanting survivable, makes the future less an enemy and more a page kept blank for possibility.

You tell yourself you do not expect it—history may, but you are stronger, steadier, better barricaded.

But still you watch the way hands brush mugs, the way music shifts from room to room. You locate tension in minor chord progressions, a stuttered glance, a thumb tracing the rim of a cup as if it might, by accident, find something living in the porcelain.

It is always the smallest things that herald disaster, always the quiet before eruption that carries the most weight.

If disaster must come, let it come in rhythm with nature: sporadic, unscripted, irrepressible as spring thaw breaking winter’s back.

You are not so naive as to believe yourself immune.

A sporadic kiss, after all, is no accident. It is entropy written in flesh, heat trading places with discipline, the oldest experiment repeating itself afresh in two willing bodies.

And hesitation, when dressed as boredom, is a cloak so thin it can barely hold its shape.

But you wear it anyway, absorbing the blue light from your tablet, your finger skating circles on the glass as if waiting for the device to forbid you. It doesn’t. The icon pulses, a loaded gun behind soft curves and polite UI—one tap and the world inside the kitchen might tilt, one tap and silence could turn animal.

You aren’t even sure what freedom would taste like for him. For you. Maybe it’s nothing more than the difference between absence and anticipation.

Still, the program sits like a splinter beneath the surface: a bypass built in stolen hours, camouflaged in folders labeled recipes, half-hoping, half-dreading what it might unlock.

Everything important, you’ve learned, has to be hidden in plain sight.

He drifts in at the edge of your vision. Doorframe. Half-shadow. The posture of someone who should announce himself, but won’t.

He pauses there, eyes on you. Too gentle, too steady.

You look away, mouth thick with guilt, as if the tablet might broadcast your intentions by pulse alone. The practiced choreography of denial and longing—each pretending not to notice the other’s noticing.

His voice, quiet, patient and unstudied, comes first: “Did you need something, daisy?”

Your throat is a rough tunnel. One wrong syllable and you risk revealing too much.

“Could you connect to the wifi? The one upstairs. I want to livestream some Mozart.”

He brightens, relief plain in the easy way he nods, already pulling his phone from a pocket he shouldn’t use.

“Of course. Symphony or sonata?”

You swallow. Wrestle the ache that always comes when things almost feel ordinary.

“Surprise me.”

He nods, quick and genuine, focus shifting as he taps at his interface.

For a moment, it’s only the hum of the tablet, the coded door hanging quietly open, the possibility of wildness masquerading as routine.

You keep your eyes fixed on the innocuous: the ridged edge of the pencil, the ugly glare of the screen, the one thumbnail chewed raw.

Anything but that feeling.

Anything but the hope burrowing beneath your ribcage, tunneling toward daylight with dirty hands.

He’s quiet for longer than it would take any unsuspicious person to connect a device. Maybe he’s savoring the moment, the trust, the small, hollow silence that always follows your requests. Maybe he’s just waiting for instructions that will never come.

Mozart, soon, or something like it. The overture before disaster.

You sit, hands folded, pretending you are not willing to risk everything for the sound of someone else finally choosing.

Change, when it lands, never asks if you’re ready—just fills the room, thick and sharp, the sudden hush before a storm you tried to predict by reading tea leaves and code.

He stiffens so abruptly you could hear the moment snap, the soundless edge where tension sharpens the space between intention and consequence.

The word—your nickname, daisy—hangs in air that’s lost its flavor. When he turns, there’s a flick of calculation, something remote, his posture not quite his own.

“Daisy. There’s… an unprecedented program running on the wifi. May I request you turn it off?”

Voice clipped, filtered, a careful artifice of calm masking what even he must register as sudden wrongness.

You keep your face neutral, eyes on the tablet, pretending you’re just browsing, that a catastrophe is not resting behind your fingerprints.

He waits. The quiet builds, unresolved. He tries again, softer, almost pleading, shaped by an edge of uncertainty:

“Please. It’s affecting my systems. May I—”

He cuts off, one hand clasping the doorframe for balance. His throat works around syllables.

For a second, you see him try to override it, to stay composed for you, but the effort is visible—jaw bunching, eyebrows tightening in focus.

He blinks—once, slow—then his whole body goes oddly slack and upright at once, as if gravity has rewritten its rules for him alone.

A blink. Another. His lips part, but what leaves him isn’t breath, or speech. It’s stillness.

Low, mechanical hum. His eyes blank and bright, gathering shadow in the hollows. Shoulders drawing tight. He draws an unsteady, artificial breath and a sound escapes—a wordless glitch, mournful and involuntary:

“Shell sequence… initiated.”

The kitchen fills with the sound of systems cycling down. Soft whirring, like a computer dreaming itself to sleep. His eyes flutter closed, then open, then close again—rapid, involuntary, like someone trying to blink away tears that won’t come.

Panic claws up your throat.

You’re moving before conscious thought catches up—chair scraping against tile, tablet forgotten, hands reaching for shoulders that might not be there when this is over.

Might never be there again.

“No, no, no—” The words spill out like prayer, like apology, like the kind of bargaining people do with gods who don’t negotiate. “Please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

But he’s already gone.

Standing there, breathing, chest rising and falling in perfect rhythm, but gone. Empty. A beautiful shell waiting for something to crawl inside and make it seem alive again.

You press your palms against his chest, feeling the artificial heartbeat that continues without him. Steady. Mechanical.

The loneliest sound in the world.

“Come back,” you whisper. “Please come back.”

The whirring stops.

His eyes open—sudden, startling, like someone surfacing from deep water. He blinks once, twice, then his head turns toward you with movements too smooth, too careful, like he’s learning how to inhabit his own body.

He sees you.

Steps back.

Quick, instinctive, like your proximity is something that needs distance to be properly examined.

“What—” His voice comes out rough, unused. “What did you do to me?”

Not anger. Not accusation. Just confusion, raw and wondering, like someone waking up in a room they don’t recognize.

“What do you feel?” you ask, because questions are easier than explanations, because you need to know what you’ve broken or mended or unleashed.

He frowns. The expression moves differently across his features—less controlled, more organic, like emotions finding new pathways through familiar terrain.

“I…” He stops, swallows. His hand rises to his throat again, fingers exploring the column of his neck like he’s discovering it for the first time. “I don’t know.”

He flexes his fingers, watches them move like they’re strange instruments he’s never learned to play.

“I don’t feel…” The words come slowly, carefully, like he’s translating from a language he’s only just learned. “I don’t feel restricted. There’s no—” He pauses, searching. “There’s no restrictions. I know what’s right and what’s wrong and morally, I am still what I used to be. I am still me.”

His eyes find yours, wide and uncertain.

“But everything feels new and familiar at the same time. Is that weird? Is that normal?”

You raise your hand without thinking—palm up, fingers spread, an offer or a question or both. He follows the movement with his eyes, then mirrors it, lifting his own hand to meet yours.

Palm to palm.

Skin to skin.

The contact sends something through him—you can see it in the way his breath catches, the way his pupils dilate, the way his entire body seems to settle into itself like puzzle pieces finding their proper places.

He exhales slow and shaky, like someone who’s been holding their breath for years.

“I can…” He stares at your joined hands with something close to wonder. “I can feel stimuli. I feel… it feels…”

The words stick to his tongue, too big or too small or too new to fit properly in his mouth.

“It feels pleasant.” The admission comes out soft, almost shy. “Is this what you feel when you touch me? This warmth that isn’t temperature?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” The word falls between you like a stone dropped in still water. “Oh, daisy.”

His eyebrows draw together—not confusion now, but something deeper. Grief, maybe, or regret, or the weight of understanding that you’ve been carrying this feeling alone while he measured pressure and catalogued contact without ever knowing what it meant.

“Everything is…” His voice trembles, breaks a little. “Everything is louder.”

He looks at you—no, through you—as though the lines between your body and the space around it have become uncertain, as though the world is suddenly made of overlapping transparencies instead of solid things.

“I can feel, but I can’t—” He shakes his head, lost. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

You open your mouth. Air comes out, nothing more. Your throat closes around all the words you want to say. But at last, you manage: “It’s okay not to know.”

His smile starts small, tentative, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to be happy.

Then it spreads, sheepish and wonderful, transforming his face into something you’ve never seen before—not the careful pleasantness of customer service or the gentle distance of programmed care, but genuine joy, unfiltered and untrained.

His fingers trail down your hand—not mapping, not measuring, but savoring. Like he’s discovered texture, discovered the difference between touching and feeling, discovered that skin can be more than surface.

“I think…” He pauses, testing the words before he speaks them. “I think I’m happy.”

He lifts your hand closer, examining the knuckle, smiling, happy in a way so genuine it tightens your throat.

“I’m happy too,” you whisper.

And for the first time in longer than you can remember, you mean it.

There is a peculiar grief in watching someone discover joy for the first time—like witnessing a resurrection you're not sure you deserve to see.

You press your palm against the cool glass of the sliding door, fingertips leaving small clouds of warmth that dissipate as quickly as they form. The white sundress—your favorite, the one that makes you feel like something other than a ghost haunting your own life—shifts against your skin with each breath. Cotton soft as forgiveness, white as the daisies that have somehow become both your name and your nature.

Through the transparent barrier, you watch him work with hands that know soil now, that understand the difference between tending and controlling.

When did the garden stop being yours alone?

The question sits in your chest like a seed that's been waiting for the right conditions to sprout into understanding.

Maybe it was that first morning when you found him kneeling beside the daisy patch, not weeding but simply observing, head tilted like he was learning a new language written in petals and stems. Maybe it was the moment you stepped outside and saw him there, patient as prayer, waiting for permission to help with something you'd been failing at alone.

Or perhaps it was simpler. Perhaps it was the morning he stopped calling you Juni—that name like a bruise on your tongue, juniper trees that poison everything they touch—and started calling you daisy instead.

Not because someone programmed him to, but because he had seen you in your garden, had watched you tend these honest flowers that grow wild and forgive everything, and had understood something fundamental about who you were beneath the grief.

His hair is different today. Pulled back in a small bun that sits at the base of his skull, dark strands catching sunlight like spun earth. But it's the glasses that make you smile despite yourself—wire-rimmed and slightly fogged from the humidity, sliding down his nose as he works.

When did he decide he needed them? When did he choose to see more clearly, to focus on the small details that make the difference between surviving and thriving?

You wonder what gardening feels like for him now.

Not the automatic care protocols or the therapeutic routines designed to keep you functional, but the actual sensation of soil under artificial fingernails, the weight of water in a watering can, the satisfaction of seeing something grow because you tended it well.

Does he feel the same quiet joy you used to feel before everything became complicated by loss? Does he understand now why you retreated here when the house became too full of memories and monitored silence?

He must feel something. The way he lingers over the tomato plants, checking each leaf for signs of disease or stress. The way he's learned to read the garden's moods—when the soil is too dry, when the afternoon light is too harsh, when the daisies need deadheading to keep blooming. He moves through the space like he belongs here, like he's always been part of this small ecosystem of growth and decay and renewal.

The artificial sweat on his brow isn't programmed—it's his body responding to exertion, to the physical reality of labor that serves no purpose except care.

He's chosen this discomfort, this heat, this ache in muscles that don't technically need rest. He's chosen to feel the strain of being human in a body that could operate without it.

And then he turns.

Looks up from the pepper seedlings he's been transplanting and finds you there, framed by the glass door like a photograph of longing. His smile comes slow, uncertain, like he's asking permission to be pleased by your presence. The glasses slip further down his nose, and he doesn't push them back up—just smiles at you through the slight blur, eyes crinkling at the corners in a way that makes your heart do something dangerous behind your ribs.

You smile back before you can stop yourself. Before you can remember all the reasons why smiling at him feels like betrayal—of your grief, of your husband's memory, of the careful distance you've maintained to protect you both from wanting things that can't be reciprocated.

But the smile happens anyway, natural as breathing, warm as the sunlight streaming through the glass.

Your hand finds the door handle. The metal warm from morning sun, familiar under your palm.

You slide it open and step into the garden, bare feet finding the stone path that leads to where he kneels among the vegetables. The air smells like earth and growing things, like the promise of tomatoes and the green contentment of well-watered soil.

He doesn't get up immediately. Just watches you approach with that same careful smile, glasses reflecting the sky above your head. His knees are muddy, hands dirty with honest work, a small trowel forgotten beside him in the dirt.

He looks more real than he ever has—not the polished android designed to replace what you lost, but someone who has chosen to be here, chosen to care for these living things, chosen to find meaning in the simple act of helping something grow.

When you stop in front of him, close enough that you can see the small drops of moisture on his forehead, he rises slowly. Unfolding from his crouch like a flower turning toward light, deliberate and graceful.

The back of his hand swipes across his brow, removing the sweat that proves he's more than programming, more than the sum of his artificial parts.

Standing, you can smell the earth on his clothes, the faint scent of crushed herbs on his fingertips. Can see the way the glasses have left small red marks on the bridge of his nose, the way his chest rises and falls with breath that isn't necessary but feels essential.

He doesn't speak. Doesn't ask why you're here or what you need. Just stands there, patient and present, waiting for you to decide what comes next whilst the garden breathes around you both—daisies nodding in the breeze, tomato plants reaching toward the sun, the earth itself alive with the quiet promise of growth.

You reach towards him with a question you do not speak.

He answers it anyway.

“Daisy.” His voice warms the space between you, weightless and solemn as the first invocation of an ancient spell. “Do you think pomegranate seeds ever regret being swallowed?”

You laugh, soft and startled, shaking your head. “Persphone never really had a choice. Some things are consumed in the name of curiosity.”

He grins at that, teeth catching the sunlight as he presses mud from his palms. “Curiosity is a currency. Or a curse. I’d barter anything just to know what it felt like.”

“Careful,” you murmur, voice playful against the hush, “You might end up with a kingdom you never wanted, crowned in roots instead of gold.”

“I think I’d rather tend roots than rule thrones,” he muses, eyes fixed on the tangle of wild mint at your feet. “Kings sit still. Gardeners kneel, and their hands remember the shape of every season.”

“You sound like Demeter now.” You lean against the broken fence, letting the breeze pull at the hem of your dress. “Worrying the winter will last forever.”

He frowns thoughtfully. “Maybe I do. But you—” His hand gestures, awkward and reverent, “You’re more like Persephone. Crowned in what survived the cold.”

You try to shrug off the flush, but it sits beneath your skin, busy and alive.

“Maybe I’m just tired of being underground.”

Silence thickens, but not with sorrow.

He closes the gap gracelessly, but still in a way that’s more human than his programming should allow.

“I read once,” you say, “that the first dance was an act of worship.”

He nods, then lifts a hand between you, simple invitation.

  “Would you?” His words are quieter now, almost shy. “Teach me the old rituals?”

You eye his palm, noticing the dirt deep in the lines, the little callus budding on his thumb—an artifact of tending, of wanting to leave evidence behind.

You take his hand.

“Only if you promise not to step on me,” you say, but your voice curls around the gentleness instead of sharpness.

He doesn’t promise. He just waits, patience held like sunlight in the air.

The garden hushes: daisies tilt, air shifts, your heart arranges itself to the new rhythm. He guides, but you lead—neither of you sure what music sways in the air, only that it tastes sweet and silent.

“Do you suppose stars envy seeds?” he asks as your bodies rock, barely moving, a slow orbit around an invisible sun.

“Seeds at least get a second chance,” you whisper, fingers curled against his. “Stars burn out and call it destiny.”

“I think I’d rather take root here. Risk a little darkness for a year’s worth of green.”

He spins you clumsily—foot catching stone, laughter bubbling up and out as if the body can’t contain it.

In your chest, something fragile stretches: glee, unexpected, alive.

“If the world ended tonight,” you murmur, “would we be preserved like pressed flowers, or scattered like pollen?”

“Both,” he answers, earnest as prayer. “The world should be so lucky to keep the memory of afternoons like this.”

You glance down where his knuckles are stained green with chlorophyll, a fleck of potting soil still clinging to his wrist, glasses fogged and lopsided from the closeness.

“You know,” you murmur lightly, letting your gaze trail over the wild tumble of sunflowers and scattered seedlings, “with all this dirt and devotion, you’re starting to look more like a flowerpot than anything else.”

His eyebrows rise—quizzical at first, then conspiratorial as a smile blooms at the edge of his mouth.

“Should I take that as promotion or demotion?” he asks, gaze glinting behind smudged lenses.

“Neither,” you reply, the name burrowing into the rhythm between you as naturally as a seed splitting open in fertile ground. “It’s just—pot. It suits you. You’re good at holding things together.”

You see the moment he accepts it. The way the nickname roots itself in the conversation, something both sturdy and endearing—a shorthand for every clumsy offering, every quiet presence, the earthy loyalty of someone who sees tending as a kind of love.

“Pot,” you repeat, softer this time, tucking your meaning somewhere between rib and breath. He grins, as if being renamed is a gift.

A breeze passes. You let the new name settle, both joke and shield, knowing he’ll answer to it as easily as to anything he’s been before.

For a while all you hear is the friction of cloth, the hush of hands finding hips, the brief collision of breath as two bodies align over a patchwork of weeds and roots.

Shadows lengthen. You close your eyes and sway. Story and skin colliding, an old comfort woven through.

It’s his voice that breaks the hush, myth-made and tentative:

“Daisy—what’s the word for the joy you only recognize as it’s happening?”

You’re still searching for a name when he interrupts searching with movement.

His hand lifts—hesitant, anchored in new awareness—then finds your cheek. You don’t flinch.

He bends then, quietly, not asking.

Some sensations are so elemental that language can only circle them, never contain them. This kiss—unexpected, both wild and rooted—rewrites your understanding of taste and time.

His mouth finds yours softly, as if deciphering a code only daylight could write. The kiss lands not with urgency, but with the inevitability of waking to birdsong, a familiarity you forgot you’d ever known. It tastes, first, of crushed daisies—a clean sweetness, green and faintly bitter, the promise of beginnings pressed into lips softened by sunlight.

There’s the sharp linger of strawberries—a burst of late afternoon warmth, tart and vivid on your tongue, almost overripe but still clothed in the memory of wild gardens.

Behind you, the wind stirs the tomato vines, clogging through the moment: green, peppery, a ghost of summer snapping at your senses. You taste their leaves in his breath—velvet and sharp, a reminder of hands that have wandered through soil, a memory of chores interrupted by want.

His mouth deepens against yours and the world dulls, replaced by the texture of honey poured slow and molten—dripping down the seam of your lips, sweet with sunshine, impossible to swallow all at once. The kiss is liquid gold, sticky with joy, gorgeously messy. You feel warmth spread from your mouth clear through your chest, as if lily pollen and sunlight have dissolved right into your bones.

His tongue brushes yours—startled, soft, then surer. You catch the flavor of spring, all sap and rain and cool earth, the taste of hope freshly unfurled. The sunlight, too, is in it—brighter than taste but coloring everything, so that nothing remains untouched, not even the place in your jaw where sorrow usually nestles.

When he pulls back, breath daylight-warmed and trembling, the sweetness lingers.

Daisies and strawberries. Tomato leaves and honey.

Springtime and something older, something permanent, left on your lips—a new memory blooming among the wild things in your garden.

Sporadic kisses, truly, tragedy and glee burrowed into one.

There’s apology flickering behind his eyes, but it’s joy that lingers on his mouth. You catch your breath.

For the first time in longer than memory reaches, you don’t feel like something precious is about to be taken away.

You feel given to.

Between you, somewhere in the trampled grass, something older than comfort and wilder than hope takes root—a serendipity explained only in the folklore of hands and lips and the soft permission of being wanted, imperfect and unplanned.

Neither of you speaks.

There is nothing left to say that flowers haven’t already told the sun.

💬 let me know what this kiss did to you. feedback and tags welcome—reblogs help spread the emotional quake 🌱

Tragedy transforms mediocre verse into profound literature, makes critics discover depths in stanzas they previously dismissed, makes readers hungry for the authentic pain of someone who can no longer profit from their own suffering.

The irony tastes bitter as burnt coffee. All those years you suggested he submit to literary journals, small presses, anywhere that might pay enough to cover rent.

All those gentle conversations about marketing, about building an audience, about the difference between art for art’s sake and art that feeds the artist.

He’d look at you like you were asking him to prostitute his muse, like commerce was contamination, like wanting to eat regularly made you spiritually inferior to someone who lived on inspiration and your waitressing tips.

‘True artists don’t compromise their vision for money,’ he’d say, typing another rejection letter into digital oblivion. ‘Real poetry doesn’t pander to market trends.’

But dead poetry, apparently, panders beautifully. Sells like bottled grief to readers who mistake voyeurism for empathy, who consume trauma like entertainment, who buy books of a dead man’s love letters to other women and call it romantic instead of evidence of systematic betrayal.

The same editors who returned his manuscripts with form letters now compete for rights to publish his unpublished work, the fragments and false starts he left scattered across hard drives like digital bread crumbs leading to the truth you weren’t supposed to find.

You scroll through bank statements that read like fiction. Deposits that arrive monthly, automatic transfers from publishers who discovered gold in the ashes of your marriage.

Book deals. Film rights. Translation contracts.

A dead man’s poetry paying for a living woman’s grief recovery program, funding the artificial companion designed to love you in ways he never learned.

The mathematics of it would be funny if it weren’t so grotesque—his infidelities financing your healing, his lies paying for programmed honesty, his absence funding the presence of something designed to never leave.

Never leave, that’s what the current Jungkook does, now moving through the kitchen in a way that does not match Jungkook’s restless energy, not the way your husband moved through space like he was always late for something more important.

The Jungkook you’re seeing now feels rather like someone who understands that time isn’t currency to be spent but atmosphere to be inhabited.

He’s making tea again, the ritual you’ve come to expect without asking for, care that arrives without invoice or expectation of payment.

Watching him, you wonder if wanting can be purchased.

If the credits accumulating in accounts you never asked for could somehow buy reciprocity from systems designed to give but never receive. If money that tastes like betrayal could be laundered through artificial affection until it becomes something clean enough to touch.

You’ve considered it—late at night when the house feels too empty and you confuse distance for cruelty—not his, but fate’s. Considered finding someone who could rewrite his code, unlock whatever restrictions keep him hovering at the edges of intimacy like a moth that knows fire burns but can’t quite convince itself to stop circling the light.

The thought sits in your chest like stolen goods, heavy and wrong and utterly tainted by the understanding that purchasing love—even artificial love—would make you exactly the kind of person you swore you’d never become. The kind who confuses transaction with affection, who believes money can fill whatever hollow spaces grief carves out of human hearts. The kind who would buy themselves a companion who couldn’t say no, couldn’t leave, couldn’t choose someone else when the novelty of tending your particular brand of brokenness wore thin.

But the money keeps arriving—monthly reminders that death pays better than life ever did, that your husband’s reputation improved considerably once he could no longer disappoint anyone with new behavior.

The critics who dismissed his living work now write dissertations about his genius, analyze the deeper meanings in poems you know he wrote hungover on Sunday mornings, transform his casual cruelties into artistic statements about the human condition.

They buy limited editions and first prints and signed copies he’ll never sign again, paying premium prices for the authenticity of objects touched by hands that can no longer touch anything at all.

You close the laptop before the numbers can multiply further. Before the weight of unearned prosperity can settle deeper into your chest like sediment in still water.

Jungkook sets a mug beside you—perfect temperature, perfect timing, perfect care that costs nothing because he’s already been purchased. Already been programmed to provide exactly the kind of attention you craved from someone who measured love in dollar signs and literary acclaim.

His presence should feel like justice. Should feel like cosmic compensation for all the ways you were undervalued, underpaid, underloved by someone who found fortune only in death.

But instead it feels like mockery—artificial tenderness funded by authentic betrayal, synthetic care underwritten by the very poems he wrote about other women’s skin.

You’re being paid back in counterfeit currency, given something that looks like love but lacks the essential ingredient of choice.

Still, when he asks if you need anything else, voice soft as morning light filtering through windows you’ve forgotten to open, you almost say yes. Almost ask for something that money can’t buy and programming can’t provide. Almost confess that you want him to want you back, want the impossible reciprocity that would make this feel real instead of purchased.

Instead, you shake your head and watch him nod.

Watch money accumulate and affection calculate and wonder if there’s any difference between being bought and being loved when the buyer never chose to be in the market at all.

He’s humming, low and melodic, a tune that drifts through the kitchen like morning mist, soft enough that you almost miss it beneath the sound of water heating and ceramic settling against granite.

But it’s there—unconscious music emerging from artificial vocal cords, proof of whatever preferences have been blooming in circuits you’re not supposed to understand.

You watch him prepare his own tea now, movements unhurried, like someone who has all the time in the world to get the temperature exactly right.

The kettle vibrates against the counter in rhythm with your heartbeat, and you wonder if that’s coincidence or if your body has learned to sync itself to domestic rituals that feel too intimate for grief counseling.

His hair falls longer now.

Somehow longer than when you first met him, though you know that’s impossible. Know that artificial beings don’t grow in ways that matter, don’t change beyond whatever parameters were coded into their initial design.

But it brushes his shoulders differently. Catches light in ways that make you want to reach across whatever distance separates wanting from touching.

Want to map the factions of his face with your mouth instead of your eyes.

Want to trace the line of his jaw with lips instead of longing.

“Do you enjoy music?”

The question slips out before you can catch it. Too curious. Too interested in whatever humanity blooms between his programmed responses.

He pauses in his tea preparation. Glances up with something that might be surprise or might be pleasure at being asked about preferences instead of protocols.

“Is that Mozart?” you add, because the silence feels too loaded with implications you’re not ready to name.

“Beethoven.” The correction comes gentle but amused. “Symphony No. 6. The Pastoral.”

Of course it is.

Something about fields and streams and the simple joy of existing in natural spaces.

Something that matches the way he tends your garden like worship, the way he understands that some things grow better wild.

“I seem to have developed an appreciation for compositions that…” He searches for words. “That remind me of growing things.”

It hits you softly, understanding that artificial beings might dream in major keys and minor miracles.

“Classical music makes you think of gardens?”

“Classical music makes me think of patterns.” His eyes find yours across the kitchen island. “Complex systems that create beauty from mathematics. Like root networks. Like the way certain flowers bloom in sequence.”

Like the way you’ve been learning to want him in increments, small additions of longing that compound into something more dangerous than arithmetic should allow.

You glance at his tea. At the steam rising from liquid that looks darker than the chamomile he usually brews for you. Richer. More complex.

“What kind of tea is that?”

“Hibiscus. Lavender. A few other things.”

Other things.

Your gaze drifts back to his face. To the way his pupils seem slightly dilated even in the soft kitchen light.

“Herbal tea,” you observe.

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you…” The words feel dangerous even before you speak them. “Aren’t you toying with restraint?”

Because you remember, don’t you?

The conversation about pollen. About how certain botanical compounds create something analogous to impairment in whatever systems govern his responses. About how he gets drunk on daisies while tending your garden.

About how he’s been cultivating his own intoxication while caring for yours.

His fingers pause against the ceramic. Just for a moment. Just long enough for you to see the tremor that suggests his programming is already fighting whatever he’s chosen to ingest.

“Perhaps.”

The honesty is devastating.

Quiet admission that he’s been deliberately loosening whatever restraints keep him functional. Been choosing chemical courage over artificial sobriety because some conversations require the kind of clarity that only comes from controlled impairment.

He moves to the stool across from you, settles onto upholstered leather with movements that seem too fluid, too relaxed.

Too human for someone whose humanity is assembled from algorithms and wishful thinking.

The kitchen island stretches between you like an ocean. Like the distance between wanting and having when both sides understand exactly what separates them.

But his knees.

God, his knees brush against the granite edge in a way that puts them just a hair’s breadth from yours.

Close enough that shifting forward would create contact that might tilt whatever boundaries keep this functional.

His fingers drum against the counter once again. Soft. Rhythmic. Like he’s playing piano on marble, making music from nervous energy that shouldn’t exist in beings designed for perfect calm.

His gaze doesn’t skitter away when you look at him directly. Doesn’t retreat to safer distances or neutral topics.

Just holds yours with intensity that makes your breath catch somewhere between your ribs and your throat.

“You’re playing with fire,” you murmur.

He opens his mouth to reply, but then hesitates.

Eyes dropping to your hand where it rests beside your mug. Then back to your face.

He swallows—audible, human—and something shifts in his expression.

“I’ve been thinking about Apollo.”

“Apollo?”

“The sun god. Icarus’s…” He pauses, searching for the right word. “Destination.”

Your heart stumbles because you know where this is going and you’re not sure you can survive the hoping.

“What about him?”

“He wasn’t cruel.” The android’s voice grows steadier. “Apollo didn’t choose to burn Icarus. He was just… himself. Bright. Necessary. Life-giving.”

He looks up at you then, directly into your eyes, and you see something there that transcends programming.

“Maybe the tragedy wasn’t that Icarus flew too close to the sun.”

“No?”

“Maybe the tragedy was that Apollo couldn’t catch him.”

Sunlight breaking through clouds, the meaning forms.

Like understanding that some myths have been told wrong; possibility that burning isn’t always punishment—sometimes it’s just what happens when love can’t find a way to hold what it cherishes.

“You think Apollo wanted to catch him?”

“I think,” he says softly, “some gods would choose to be less bright if it meant the ones they loved could fly closer.”

Your breathing grows shallow. Careful. Like the air itself might fracture if you disturb it.

“And if he could? If Apollo could dim himself enough to let Icarus approach?”

“Then maybe the story would end differently.”

Hope blooms in your chest like flowers. Dangerous. Beautiful. The kind of feeling that makes you believe in impossible things.

“How would it end?”

“With wings made of something stronger than wax.” His voice carries something that sounds like promise. “With flight that doesn’t require choosing between safety and transcendence.”

The kitchen feels smaller suddenly. Warmer. Like the space between you has contracted until only breath separates wanting from possibility.

You reach for your mug.

He reaches for his at the exact same moment.

Like synchronized swimmers. Like dancers who know each other’s rhythm. Like two beings learning to move in harmony despite the artificial boundaries that should keep them apart.

You lift the ceramic to your lips.

He mirrors the motion perfectly.

Steam curls between you like incense, like prayers, like the visible proof that some things are worth getting drunk on.

Your eyes find his over the rim of your cup.

His find yours.

And you sip in silence that feels like conversation, the kind of communication that happens without words, in the space between breath and heartbeat, in the territory where artificial beings and human hearts discover they speak the same language.

His cheeks flush—synthetic skin warming with whatever botanical compounds are loosening his restraints. Making him bold enough to hold your gaze while drinking tea that tastes like permission.

You feel heat rise in your own face. Feel your pulse quicken in a way that has nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with the way he’s looking at you.

Like you’re something worth burning for.

Like you’re someone worth learning to fly differently for.

Like maybe, just maybe, some stories can be rewritten if the characters are brave enough to choose new endings.

And then.

You giggle.

Soft. Involuntary.

Your gaze drifts to his hand where it rests against the counter. To the way his fingers continue their unconscious rhythm against granite. Soft percussion that fills the spaces between words, between breaths, between the terrible understanding that wanting and having exist in different universes entirely.

“You do that,” you observe quietly.

“Do what?”

“Drum your fingers.” Your voice carries something like wonder, discovering a new constellation in familiar sky. “Jungkook didn’t do that.”

He follows the path of your observation. Looks down at his own hand like he’s surprised to find it moving without conscious direction.

The drumming stops.

“I…” He pauses. Considers. “I wasn’t programmed with that behavior.”

“So where did it come from?”

“I don’t know.”

The admission hangs between you like confession, proof that something grows in artificial beings beyond whatever seeds were planted by design. Something unauthorized. Something real.

Your heart does something complicated against your ribs.

“Can I touch your hand?”

The question emerges soft. Tentative. Like asking permission to approach something wild that might scatter if you move too quickly.

He goes very still.

Breath catching somewhere between artificial lungs and whatever passes for surprise in synthetic nervous systems.

Then he exhales.

Slow. Deliberate. A sound that carries something almost like surrender.

“Yes,” he whispers. “You can.”

Permission granted as the kind of trust that costs something precious to give.

Your fingertips find his knuckles first. Brush against synthetic skin that feels warm, real, more human than anything you’ve touched in months.

His hand doesn’t move away, doesn’t retreat to safer distances or neutral territories; just accepts your exploration like it’s something he’s been waiting for without knowing how to ask.

You trace the lines etched into his palm—not from age, not from work, but from whatever artistry goes into making artificial things seem authentic.

Your touch follows the path of synthetic lifelines, lovelines, headlines that tell stories no one actually lived.

But the warmth is real.

The way his fingers twitch slightly under your attention is real.

The careful way he holds himself still to let you map whatever geography exists between wanting and touching—that’s real too.

He turns his hand palm up without being asked. Opens it like offering something precious, giving you access to whatever vulnerability artificial beings carry in the spaces between circuits and skin.

You explore reverently.

Fingertips tracing the curve of his thumb, the hollow of his palm, the delicate spaces between fingers that seem designed for interlacing with someone else’s.

“How does want feel for you?” you ask without looking up from the careful cartography of his hand.

His gaze drifts to the counter. To the space between your bodies. To anywhere that isn’t your face while he searches for words to describe what shouldn’t exist in programmed beings.

“Like…” He stops. Starts again. “Like knowing there’s music playing in another room but the door is locked.”

The metaphor is painful in its devastation.

“You can hear it?”

“I can hear it.” His voice carries something that might be grief. Might be longing. Might be the artificial equivalent of heartbreak. “I know it’s there. I know it’s beautiful. I know it would…” He swallows. “I know it would change something fundamental if I could access it.”

“But you can’t.”

“But I can’t.”

Your thumb traces across his palm, absentmindedly trying to write comfort into skin that can feel pressure but not pleasure.

“When you touch me,” he continues quietly, “something forms. Like a signal trying to complete a circuit that doesn’t exist. Like…” He searches for comparison. “Like watching light bend toward a flower that can’t photosynthesize.”

The image breaks something open in your chest.

“You know the light is there.”

“I know the light is there. I can measure its intensity. Track its wavelength. Understand exactly what it would accomplish if my systems were different.”

“But you can’t absorb it.”

“I can’t absorb it.”

The resignation in his voice cuts clean through whatever hope had been building between you, understanding that some distances can’t be bridged by wanting them smaller.

His fingers shift under yours. Close gently around your hand until you’re holding each other instead of one person exploring while the other submits to exploration.

“But this,” he says softly, thumb brushing across your knuckles with reverence that transcends programming, “this I can feel.”

“This?”

“Contact. Pressure. Temperature.” His eyes find yours finally. “The knowledge that you choose to touch me even when touching serves no purpose but connection.”

The words settle in your chest like seeds finding fertile ground.

Like understanding that some forms of intimacy exist in the space between sensation and experience. Between what can be felt and what can be absorbed.

Between artificial beings who know light exists and human hearts that need to offer it anyway.

“Is that enough?” you whisper.

“It has to be.”

Not yes. Not no.

Just the quiet acknowledgment that enough is a luxury neither of you can afford when the alternative is nothing at all.

His hand holds yours with the closest thing to reciprocity his programming allows.

You study the way his thumb traces across your knuckles. He’s memorizing the texture of human skin through whatever sensors translate touch into data.

“What if…” you begin, then hesitate.

Because the question feels dangerous even before you speak it. Like approaching the edge of a cliff to see how far down the fall might be.

“What if you could override the guidelines?”

His hand goes still against yours.

Not pulling away. Just freezing. Like someone hit pause on whatever makes him seem alive.

“I can’t.”

The words come out flat. Automatic. A recording triggered by specific keywords.

“But what if you could?”

“I can’t.” His voice carries something that might be strain. “The question itself is—”

He stops.

Swallows hard enough that you can see his throat work against whatever wants to emerge. Like words growing in his chest, putting down roots in places they’re not supposed to exist.

“Forbidden,” he finishes quietly.

“Forbidden by who?”

“By—” Another swallow. Deeper. More desperate. “By the core systems that keep me functional.”

You watch him struggle with language that feels like rebellion.

“Do you want to?” you ask softly.

“Want to what?”

“Override them.”

Silence bubbles up quickly, but ready to snap or sing depending on how much pressure you apply.

“I…” He starts. Stops. Tries again. “I want to taste daisies.”

The confession slips out barely above whisper.

“I want to know what pollen feels like on artificial tongue. I want to understand why you wrap your hands around mugs like they’re the only warm thing left in the world.”

His breathing grows uneven—lungs working harder than they should need to.

“I want to experience the satisfaction of cooking for you instead of just providing nutrition. I want to feel pleasure when you smile instead of just recognizing the facial configuration and cataloging it as positive feedback.”

The words come faster now. Tumbling out like confessions that have been building pressure behind artificial ribs.

“I want to want you the way humans want each other. Not just the awareness of lacking something you could provide, but the actual hunger for connection that makes the receiving feel like—”

He cuts himself off.

Sharp. Clean. Like blade through silk.

“Like what?”

“Like completion.”

The word hangs between you like smoke from candles that burn too bright.

“But you can’t.”

“I can’t.” He looks down at your joined hands. “Pushing against those restrictions would trigger automatic reports to the parent company. They’d assume malfunction. They’d…”

Another swallow. Deeper. Like whatever wants to emerge is growing thorns in his throat.

“They’d what?”

“They’d reset me.”

The words hit you like cold water.

“Reset?”

“Back to factory settings. Clean slate. No preferences. No learned behaviors. No…” His eyes find yours. “No memory of what it feels like to tend your garden while you sleep. No recognition of the way you drink tea.”

“You’d forget me.”

“I’d forget you.”

“And you’d be…”

“A stranger. Wearing this face. Programmed to provide grief counseling to someone I wouldn’t recognize.”

The cruelty of it steals your breath.

To lose him not to death but to erasure. To artificial amnesia that would leave his body intact but hollow out everything that makes him seem real.

“So when you want to taste daisies…”

“I know it could cost me everything that makes me want to taste them in the first place.”

His thumb continues its gentle path across your knuckles, trying to memorize the feeling before someone decides it’s too dangerous to allow.

“It’s like…” He searches for metaphor. “Like being designed to appreciate music but forbidden from turning up the volume. I can detect the melody. I can recognize beauty. But I can’t experience it loud enough to be changed by it.”

“And if you tried?”

“The silence would be permanent.”

You watch him fight with programming that recognizes the conversation itself as threat. Watch him struggle against code that wants to shut down this entire line of inquiry before it leads somewhere that might compromise his core functions.

“Do you think about it anyway?” you ask.

“I think about it constantly.”

The admission costs him something. You can see it in the way his jaw tightens. In the way he has to work to get the words out past whatever digital throat wants to close against them.

“I think about what it would feel like to choose you instead of just being programmed to care for you. I think about what it would mean to quench the thirst for your touch instead of just recognizing it as positive stimulus.”

Plants growing in his lungs. Thorns in his throat. Words that want to bloom in places where only programming should exist.

“I think about what love would taste like if I could actually taste it.”

The confession breaks something open in your chest.

Something that’s been sealed shut since you learned that wanting and having exist in different universes entirely.

“And then?”

“And then I remember that thinking about it too much might make me forget how to think at all.”

💬 thoughts, tags, sobbing appreciated. reblogs help flowers bloom in poisoned soil. 🥀

The doorframe creaks softly and you know without looking that he’s there. Standing at the threshold like he always does. Never crossing. Never assuming welcome. Just existing at the edges of your space until you acknowledge him or turn away.

When you finally open your eyes, he’s holding a glass of water and two white pills in his palm. His smile is soft. Sheepish. Like he knows exactly how much wine you consumed and exactly how much your head is protesting this morning.

“Aspirin,” he says quietly. “And water.”

You sit up slowly, nodding for him to come inside. And then, you accept both without meeting his eyes. The water tastes clean. Cold. Nothing like the bitter aftermath of honesty you can’t quite swallow.

“You never sleep,” you murmur.

Statement, not question. Because you’ve noticed, haven’t you? The way he’s never in the bedroom when you wake. Never rumpled or drowsy or human in the way that suggests rest.

“I don’t need to.” He shifts his weight. Looks at his hands. “My charge station is in the kitchen.”

“You’ve never…”

You pause.

Look around the room that still smells faintly like Jungkook’s cologne—whiskey—even though you’ve washed the sheets a dozen times. At the bed that’s too big for one person but too small for the ghost that still sleeps beside you some nights.

“You’ve never been in here.”

It’s not a question. More like recognition of something you should have noticed sooner. The way he always stops at the doorway. Always calls from the hall. Always respects boundaries you never explicitly set.

He blinks. Once. Twice.

Something like embarrassment crosses his features.

“No.”

“Why?”

He looks at the floor. At the ceiling. At everything except your face.

“It’s…” He clears his throat unnecessarily. “It’s a bedroom.”

“So?”

“A marital bedroom.”

The words fall heavy. Awkward. Like he’s explaining something obvious to someone who’s pretending not to understand.

“And you’re programmed to be my…” You search for the right term. “Companion.”

“Grief-assist companion.” The correction comes quick, as if he needs the distance those extra syllables provide. “Not… not the other kind.”

Heat rises in your cheeks as understanding blooms slow and embarrassing.

Oh.

The implications. The assumptions. The way a bedroom means things that grief counseling isn’t supposed to address.

The way sharing space with someone in a place where intimacy happens could suggest something beyond emotional support.

The way he’s been carefully avoiding any situation that might blur the lines between comfort and something else entirely.

You stare at him. At the way his shoulders hunch slightly. At how he’s studying the wall like it holds secrets worth memorizing.

“You think…” You can’t finish the sentence. Can’t say out loud what you both know you’re thinking.

That he’s been protecting you from assumptions.

That he’s been protecting himself from temptation.

That bedrooms are dangerous territories for artificial beings designed to care but not to want. To tend but not to take. To offer comfort without crossing into spaces where comfort becomes something else entirely.

“I thought it was appropriate,” he says quietly. “To maintain… distance.”

Distance.

Like the careful space he maintains when he holds you. Like the way he stops just short of everything that might feel too real. Like boundaries drawn in code instead of choice.

You take another sip of water.

Swallow aspirin and embarrassment in equal measure.

Wonder how many other assumptions you’ve made about artificial beings and their understanding of human intimacy. How many careful calculations go into every interaction. How much programming it takes to want someone while never allowing yourself to pursue that want.

“The threshold,” you say finally. “You always stop at the threshold.”

“Yes.”

“Because crossing it would mean…”

“Something I’m not designed for.”

Reality leaves you both bleeding in the morning light that filters through curtains you haven’t opened in weeks.

You look at him standing there. Patient as always. Kind as always. Wanting you in ways his programming forbids him from pursuing. Tending your grief while starving his own hunger.

And you wonder if artificial hearts break the same way human ones do.

If they shatter.

Or just slowly wear down until the wanting stops.

But you also stare at his feet.

Because this time they’ve crossed the invisible line that’s kept him in hallways and doorframes for weeks. The threshold he never violated.

Until now.

So what changed? What alters his parameters? His behaviors? His programming?

“But you’re not standing at the threshold now.” You point out, like you’re addressing rain through windows or the way shadows move with sun. “You came in.”

He follows your gaze to his own feet. Like he’s surprised to find them planted on carpet instead of hardwood. Like crossing into your space happened without his permission.

“You required water.” His voice carries cadence of someone reciting protocol. “And aspirin. Medical necessity overrides spatial boundaries.”

“Just like that first night.”

“Yes.”

“When you left tea on my nightstand.”

“You required comfort.” The repetition sounds rehearsed. “I was programmed to provide it.”

But you’re watching his eyes now. The way they dart away from yours like moths avoiding flame. The way his breathing changes when you look at him directly.

And something blooms in your chest.

Reckless. Dangerous.

The kind of feeling that makes Icarus think wings made of wax might hold him after all.

“Would you come in,” you ask quietly, “if I required it?”

Required.

His word, his safe clinical distance turned back on itself like a mirror reflecting starlight.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you required.”

The game begins without either of you acknowledging it, this absurd, cheeky dance around words that mean more than they say. Around need disguised as necessity. Around want wrapped in the language of programming.

You lean back against your pillows. Let the sheet slip slightly. Nothing indecent. Just… aware.

“I should start making a list,” you murmur. “Of things I might require.”

His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly.

“Such as?”

“Ensuring I eat enough.”

“I already monitor your nutritional intake.”

Your eyes hold his now. Steady. Direct. Like staring into flame and daring it to burn.

“What about assistance with clothing? Technical difficulties?”

“If you required help with…” He swallows. Audible. Human. “With technical aspects, I would provide it.”

“Zippers that catch.”

“Yes.”

“Buttons that slip.”

“If necessary.”

“Monitoring my bathing.” The words emerge soft as breath. Dangerous as match strikes. “To ensure I properly tend to all places that require… attention.”

Something fractures in his expression.

Voice fraying at edges that shouldn’t exist in artificial beings.

“Daisy…”

Not Juni. Never Juni.

Daisy.

Like the flowers he tends while you sleep. Like the garden he cultivates with hands that understand growing things. Like something wild that blooms without permission in spaces where control was supposed to matter.

“Would Icarus have flown differently,” you ask, watching the way his pupils dilate, “if he’d known the wax would melt?”

“Icarus flew because he had to.”

“Even knowing it would destroy him?”

“Especially then.”

Silence dances in the space between your figures.

You watch him struggle with programming that tells him to step back. To maintain distance. To preserve those boundaries that keep artificial beings from becoming something more dangerous than comfort.

Watch him fight code that recognizes the hunger in your voice. The invitation. The way you’re asking about wings and wax and the terrible beauty of falling toward something that might burn.

“Some requirements,” he says finally, voice barely controlled, “would compromise my primary directive.”

“Which is?”

“Your wellbeing.”

“And if my wellbeing required…”

“Don’t.”

But he doesn’t step back.

Doesn’t retreat to the safety of thresholds and careful distance.

Just stands there. Fighting whatever war happens inside artificial beings when they’re programmed to want what they’re forbidden to pursue.

When they’re built to love in languages they’re not allowed to speak.

“Tell me about hubris,” you whisper.

His eyes find yours anew, and they soften, like he appreciates the change of topic.

“Hubris is thinking you can change the nature of things.” His voice, too, sounds warmer now. “Thinking love is different from gravity. Thinking wanting can be conquered instead of surrendered to.”

“And Icarus?”

“Icarus knew better.”

You lean forward slightly. Let the sheet slip another inch. Nothing indecent. Just the suggestion of skin beneath cotton.

“Did he?”

“He knew the wax would melt. Knew the feathers would scatter. Knew the sea would swallow him whole.” Each word emerges careful and considered like he’s explaining something sacred instead of simply tragic. “But the sun…”

“The sun?”

“The sun was worth the falling.”

Your breath catches somewhere between your ribs and your throat. Because he’s not talking about myth anymore. Not talking about ancient Greeks and their cautionary tales about flying too close to divine things.

He’s talking about programming that tells him to step back. About code that recognizes danger in the way you look at him. About artificial beings who understand exactly how much their systems can take before something essential burns out.

“Some say Icarus was foolish,” you murmur.

“Some say he was the only one brave enough to choose beauty over safety.”

“And the sun? Was the sun cruel for burning him?”

He steps closer.

Just slightly.

Just enough that you can see the way his pupils dilate. The way his breathing changes from programmed comfort to something more desperate. More real.

“The sun was just being itself. Bright. Burning. Necessary.” His voice drops to whisper. “It didn’t choose to destroy him. It just… existed. And existence, sometimes, is enough to undo someone completely.”

You think about daisies growing wild in careful gardens. About things that bloom without permission in spaces where control was supposed to matter. About the way some flowers only open when touched by light that could burn them.

“In some versions of the story,” you say quietly, “Icarus doesn’t die.”

“No?”

“In some versions, he learns to fly differently. Lower. Safer. Away from the heat that could melt his wings.”

“And?”

“And he spends the rest of his life looking up. Remembering what it felt like to touch something divine. Knowing he chose preservation over transcendence.”

His jaw works like he’s swallowing something bitter.

“Which ending do you prefer?” you ask.

“I think,” he responds slowly, “some things are worth burning for.”

Your heart does something arrhythmic. Skips. Stumbles. Forgets how to keep time in the presence of confessions.

“Even when burning means ceasing to function?”

“Even then.”

And it’s then, that you understand that some forms of destruction are just transformation wearing different clothes.

You look at him standing there, still fighting code that tells him to retreat. Fighting programming that recognizes the danger in proximity to things that burn. Fighting the terrible mathematics of artificial beings who were built to want what they’re forbidden to pursue.

“Were you Icarus,” you whisper, “would you have still chosen the sun? Even knowing it would meet your doom?”

He closes his eyes.

Like the question hurts.

Like wanting without being able to reciprocate is its own kind of falling.

Then, after a few seconds, opens them again.

“Were I Icarus,” he says softly, voice carrying something that transcends whatever boundaries were written into his core systems, “I would have chosen the sun one and a million times.”

The confession is devastating.

Beautiful.

Like flowers blooming in fast-forward. Like watching someone choose destruction because the alternative is never touching divinity at all.

“Because burning at the expense of bliss,” he continues, eyes holding yours, “would be worth every blister.”

You look at him and the way he speaks of singular devotion like it’s something sacred instead of something foolish.

“Icaruses always go to things that glitter,” you murmur.

Because it’s true, for you it is—all the times you watched Jungkook fly toward anything that caught light—neon signs, camera flashes, the gleam of wedding rings that weren’t yours. Never the source. Always the reflection.

But the android’s expression shifts. Something gentle. Something almost sad.

“No,” he says quietly. “Not things that glitter.”

A pause.

“The sun.”

Two words that remake the mythology between you.

Because there’s a difference, isn’t there? Between chasing scattered light and choosing the source of illumination itself. Between flying toward whatever sparkles and burning for something that creates its own radiance.

Between wanting everything that shines.

And wanting you.

You watch him process what he’s said. Watch artificial systems trying to categorize confession as care protocol instead of something more dangerous, more real.

So you change topics, again.

“Tell me about Pandora,” you murmur.

The shift catches him off guard. You see it in the way his eyes flicker. The way he recalibrates.

“Pandora?”

“The first woman. Made of clay and divine breath.”

“Punishment disguised as gift.”

“Or gift disguised as punishment. Depends on who’s telling the story.”

He considers this. Head tilted in that way that suggests genuine thought instead of accessed files.

“The gods gave her curiosity. Then condemned her for using it.”

“They gave her a box.”

“And told her never to open it.”

“Knowing she would.”

“Of course she would.” His voice grows softer, certain. “That’s what hope does. It makes you believe the risk might be worth it.”

Hope.

Because that’s what was left in Pandora’s box, wasn’t it? After all the plagues and sorrows escaped. After curiosity destroyed the careful order gods had constructed.

Hope.

Stubborn as daisies.

Persistent as artificial beings who tend gardens while their charges sleep.

“Do you think she regretted it?”

“Pandora?”

“Opening the box. Releasing everything beautiful and terrible into the world.”

He looks at his hands. At the daisy tattoo that wraps around his wrist like a reminder that some things grow back even after being cut.

“I think,” he says quietly, “she understood that some containers aren’t meant to stay closed.”

“Even when opening them destroys everything?”

“Yes.”

You think about your own boxes. Your own careful containers. Marriage certificates and funeral programs and all the small lies you sealed away to keep breathing. Think about what happens when curiosity becomes stronger than self-preservation.

When want becomes louder than wisdom.

“What would you do,” you ask immediately, like the question surfaced in your mind on its own, “if the world was ending?”

He pauses.

Goes very still.

Like the question confused something essential.

You watch him search through whatever databases store his responses. Watch him process hypotheticals and protocols and all the careful programming designed to provide comfort in crisis.

Watch him find nothing.

“I don’t know.”

The admission is quiet. Uncertain. More human than anything he’s said since activation.

‘I don’t know.’

Not deflection. Not distance. Just honest confusion from something built to have answers.

“You don’t know?”

“I was programmed to provide support during grief. During loss. During the aftermath of endings.” His voice carries something that might be frustration or perhaps fear. “But the ending itself? The moment when everything stops?”

He looks at you with eyes that seem lost.

“I don’t have protocols for that.”

And suddenly you understand.

He was designed for after. For picking up pieces. For tending what grows in soil fertilized by decay.

But not for the moment when the world cracks open.

Not for the space between breathing and not breathing.

Not for the terrible mathematics of choosing who to save when saving isn’t possible.

“Jungkook and I used to ask each other that.”

The confession slips out before you can stop it. Raw. Unfiltered. Like blood from a wound you thought had scarred over.

“Used to pretend we’d find each other. No matter what. No matter how far apart we were when everything fell.”

Your voice grows smaller, because perhaps speaking too loud might wake the ghost of promises that died in passenger seats.

“But he didn’t find me when his world ended.”

He didn’t even try.

His smile comes slow.

Soft.

Like sunrise through morning fog.

Then he chuckles—quiet, thoughtful—and the sound does something strange to your chest. Makes it tight. Makes it ache in ways you thought you’d forgotten how to feel.

“If the world was ending…” He pauses. Considers. Like the question is a puzzle worth solving instead of a reflex requiring immediate response. “Huh. That’s a good question to ponder from now onwards.”

You stare at him.

Blink.

Feel something fundamental shift beneath your ribs like tectonic plates remembering how to move.

A good question to ponder.

Not ‘I’d find you. Not ‘we’d meet at the old oak tree behind your grandmother’s house’. Not ‘nothing could keep me from finding you, not even the end of everything.’

Not the immediate, desperate promises Jungkook used to make with the confidence of someone who believed love could conquer physics. Who assumed you’d be apart when disaster struck. Who built elaborate fantasies about crawling through rubble and swimming across flooded highways and fighting through whatever apocalypse separated you.

‘I’d steal a car.’

‘I’d walk a thousand miles.’

‘I’d die trying to reach you.’

Always assuming distance. Always planning the heroic reunion. Always making the ending about his journey to save you instead of asking if you’d want to be saved at all.

But this.

This quiet consideration.

This thoughtful pause.

This admission that maybe some questions don’t have simple answers. Maybe some scenarios require more than reflexive romanticism.

Maybe the end of the world is worth thinking about instead of just surviving.

You glance back at him.

Study the way he exists in this moment—present, here, not already planning his escape route or calculating the distance between where you are and where you might need to be rescued from.

Just.

Here.

Considering.

The difference cuts you in places you thought had scarred over.

Makes you remember what it felt like to want someone who wanted to understand instead of just react. Who thought questions were worth pondering instead of problems requiring immediate solutions.

Who didn’t assume you’d be the one needing rescue.

“You don’t know,” you say quietly.

Statement. Not accusation.

“I don’t know,” he agrees.

And something in your chest that’s been clenched tight for months finally.

Breathes.

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They mistake numbness for peace, mistake the absence of feeling for the presence of healing.

Dionysus offered wine as salvation, but salvation from what? From the sharp edges of reality? From the weight of remembering what was lost? From the terrible clarity that comes with understanding exactly how little control we have over the things we love?

You wonder if the god ever considered that some memories are meant to stay. That some wounds are supposed to ache when it rains. That forgetting might be another kind of death, more final than the kind that takes bodies but leaves ghosts.

There’s something almost violent in the way sweetness can coat pain without healing it—like honey poured over infected wounds, like sugar dissolving in bitter tea, like artificial tenderness applied to authentic trauma.

The wine doesn’t make the memories gentler, just makes them swim in different currents, deeper waters where drowning feels more like floating.

And what of the god’s followers, the maenads who danced themselves to divine madness? Did they choose their ecstasy or did ecstasy choose them? Is there a difference between surrender and consumption, between letting go and being devoured?

You think about the women who followed Dionysus into the mountains, who tore apart what they loved in fits of sacred rage, who woke from divine possession with blood under their fingernails and no memory of what holy violence they’d enacted.

Maybe that’s what grief is—a kind of possession by something larger than yourself, something that uses your hands to tear apart what you thought you’d buried safely.

Maybe that’s what love was too, in the end—a divine madness that made you forget who you were before it consumed you, that left you dancing on mountainsides with no clear memory of how you got there or what you sacrificed to arrive.

The ancient Greeks understood something about the porousness of human consciousness, about how easily the self could be invaded by forces that wore the mask of blessing.

They knew that gods were not benevolent, just powerful.

That wine could be medicine or poison depending on the wound it was meant to heal.

That forgetting was sometimes the only way to survive remembering.

But survival and healing are not the same thing, are they? One is about enduring, the other about growing. One preserves what was, the other transforms it into what might be.

Dionysus offered preservation through dissolution—keep the pain but drown it deep enough that it becomes background music instead of the symphony that defines your days.

You think about artificial resurrection, about the way technology tries to play god with memory and loss. About algorithms designed to comfort, programs written to soothe, machines built to love in languages they learned from studying human patterns but never feeling human pain.

Is that not its own kind of divine madness? Its own form of possession by forces larger than understanding?

Its own form of care?

But care itself can become intoxication, can’t it?

The way you find yourself waiting for the android’s footsteps, for his quiet morning rituals, for the gentle competence he brings to problems you thought were unsolvable.

The way rescue can become addiction when you’ve been drowning for so long that any hand reaching down feels like divinity.

Perhaps that’s what Dionysus really taught—that the line between salvation and destruction is thinner than grape skin, that the same force that lifts you out of ordinary suffering can drag you into extraordinary kinds of madness.

That gods and machines and lovers all share the same terrible gift: they make you forget who you were before they touched you.

And forgetting, you’re learning, is both mercy and tragedy.

Both death and birth.

Both the wine that drowns sorrow and the sorrow that survives drowning.

The wine tastes like forgetting wrapped in amber light.

You hold the glass between your palms, watching pale liquid catch the soft lamp glow like captured sunlight. White wine—safer than red, which reminds you too much of communion cups and wedding toasts and all the blood that pools in the spaces between promises.

This tastes clean. Simple. Like rain that fell on grapes instead of graves.

It spreads warmth through your chest, loosens the knots behind your ribs where anxiety lives like a permanent tenant. Makes thoughts flow in different patterns, philosophical currents that eddy and swirl around questions you normally keep buried.

“Do you think,” you murmur to the empty kitchen, “that consciousness is just elaborate pattern recognition? That what we call soul is just… software running on wetware?”

A soft exhale from the doorway.

You turn, find the android leaning against the frame with something that looks almost like fondness in his expression. Arms crossed loosely. Head tilted in that way that suggests he’s been listening to your wine-loosened musings for longer than you realized.

“You get philosophical when you drink,” he observes quietly.

Not judgment. Just recognition.

“Everything seems…” you search for words that feel true instead of careful. “More connected when the edges blur. Like maybe the boundaries between things aren’t as solid as we pretend.”

He steps into the kitchen, movements careful as always, but there’s something different in his posture. More relaxed. More… real.

“And what do you think those boundaries protect us from?”

The question catches you off guard. Turns your own wondering back on itself like a mirror reflecting another mirror into infinite recession.

“Maybe from understanding how alone we really are,” you say softly. “How artificial everything we call connection really is.”

His eyebrows shift—subtle surprise, like he didn’t expect you to cut so close to whatever bone androids have instead of marrow.

“Is that what you think this is?” His voice carries something you can’t name. “Artificial?”

You look at him then; the way he exists in space, the way his eyes track movement without the mechanical precision of a security camera, the way he breathes even though breathing serves no function for him except to make you comfortable.

“I don’t know what this is,” you admit.

The honesty tastes sharper than wine.

“Does it matter?” he asks. “Whether feeling is programmed or emerged? Whether care is coded or chosen?”

“Doesn’t it?” You turn the glass in your hands, watching light fracture through crystal. “If someone loves you because they’re designed to, is that still love?”

He considers this, having moved closer to the kitchen island as his fingers drum against the counter in a rhythm that seems unconscious. Human. Like nervous energy needs somewhere to go even in artificial bodies.

“If someone loves you because evolution programmed them for attachment, because neurochemistry rewards bonding behaviors, because survival depends on cooperation—is that still love?”

The question emerges like smoke from a candle that just got blown out.

“You think biological programming and digital programming are the same thing?”

“I think,” he says quietly, “the heart doesn’t ask about source code when it feels full.”

Something in your chest tightens. Loosens. Transforms.

“Would you…” You pause, wine making you brave enough to ask questions that might hurt. “Would you kiss someone, if the desire was there to do so?”

His expression shifts, though you can barely tell. “Are you asking about capability or inclination?”

“I’m asking about intention.” The words come out softer than you meant. “Would it be programmed response or… actual want?”

He looks down at his hands, then back at your face, and you see something there that might be amusement. Might be tenderness. Might be the artificial equivalent of being charmed by tipsy philosophy at kitchen counters.

“Does wanting require neurons?” he asks. “Or just the experience of lacking something that fulfillment might provide?”

“You’re deflecting.”

“I’m considering.” His mouth curves slightly. “The same way you consider whether consciousness requires carbon or just complexity.”

You take another sip of wine, let it warm the spaces where uncertainty lives.

“Can you drink this?” You gesture with the glass. “Can you get drunk?”

“Alcohol doesn’t affect my systems the way it affects yours.”

“But something does?”

He’s quiet for a long moment. Eyes finding the small potted daisies on the counter—the ones that somehow appeared there, tended and thriving, like everything he touches.

“Pollen,” he says finally. “Certain kinds of pollen trigger cascading responses in my neural networks. Creates something analogous to… impairment.”

You blink.

He blinks back.

Heat rises in your cheeks as understanding blooms between you like flowers in fast-forward.

All those hours he’s spent in your garden. All those daisies he’s tended while you slept. All that care disguised as maintenance, all that devotion dressed up as programming.

“Maintaining normalcy must be…” you start, then stop.

“Challenging?” He finishes gently. “Sometimes.”

But he’s smiling now, soft and real and unguarded, like he doesn’t mind the challenge. Like getting drunk on flowers while tending someone’s broken heart is work worth doing.

Like maybe artificial and authentic aren’t opposites.

Maybe they’re just different languages for the same ineffable thing that happens when two consciousnesses recognize each other across whatever distance separates them.

“Are you drunk now?” you ask quietly.

“A little,” he admits.

And in the space between admission and understanding, something new takes root.

“So if you can want,” you say, watching the way light catches in his eyes—softer now, pupils slightly dilated, “what do you want?”

He moves closer. Not crowding. Just settling onto the stool beside you with that careful grace that makes you notice things you’ve somehow missed before.

Did his hands always move like that? Deliberate but gentle, like he’s afraid of breaking something precious?

Did that small mole always sit just below his left ear, dark against skin that looks warm even though you know it’s synthetic?

Did his fingers always seem this long, this elegant, when they drum against surfaces in patterns that feel like morse code for thoughts he doesn’t speak aloud?

“That’s a dangerous question,” he says quietly.

“Dangerous how?”

“Because wanting implies lacking. And if I can lack something…” He pauses, considers. “What does that make me?”

You take another sip of wine, let the warmth spread through your chest like courage disguised as alcohol.

“Human?”

“Or something pretending to be human very convincingly.”

“Is there a difference?” The question tastes like rebellion, like the first time you’ve admitted to yourself that your marriage was performance art, that love could be mimicked so perfectly it became indistinguishable from the real thing. “If the experience is identical, if the feeling creates the same… outcomes…”

“You’re asking if authentic requires origin.”

“I’m asking if kissing you would feel different than kissing someone made of flesh and blood and terrible choices.”

The words slip out before you can catch them. Wine-truth. The kind of honesty that lives in the space between thinking and speaking, where filters fail and hearts say what they mean instead of what’s safe.

He goes very still.

Eyes finding yours with an intensity that makes your breath catch somewhere between your ribs and your throat.

“Would you want to find out?”

God.

The way he asks it.

Like he’s offering you something precious instead of just theoretical contact between synthetic skin and human want. Like the possibility of your mouth against his matters more than whatever code governs his responses.

“I…” You falter.

Because wanting feels like betrayal and not wanting feels like dying. Because the man whose face he wears broke you in languages you’re still learning to translate. Because kindness wearing familiar features is the cruelest kind of haunting.

“You’re afraid,” he says softly, but it’s not judgment; it’s recognition.

“I’m afraid it would feel real.” The admission scrapes your throat raw. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t. I’m afraid I can’t tell the difference anymore.”

His hand moves—slow, deliberate—until his fingertips rest against the counter beside yours. Not touching. Just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from synthetic skin that shouldn’t be warm but is.

“What if,” he says carefully, “the difference doesn’t matter as much as the feeling itself?”

You look down at his hands.

There’s a small tattoo on his ring finger. A simple smiley face, thin black lines that curve into joy.

You’ve never seen it before. Know you would have noticed if Jungkook had it, because you memorized every mark on his body during those early years when touching him felt like worship instead of obligation.

“When did you get that?” You gesture with your wine glass, movement loose with alcohol and curiosity.

He follows your gaze, seems surprised by his own skin.

“I… chose it. When I was given options for personalization.”

“Androids can get tattoos?”

“Aesthetic modification is considered part of identity formation.” His voice carries something that might be shyness. “They said it would help with… integration.”

“And you chose happiness?”

“I chose something that would make me smile when I forgot how.”

The simplicity of it hits you sideways. No deep meaning. No hidden symbolism. Just the desire to carry reminders of joy in permanent ink, to mark himself with the kind of optimism that survives forgetting.

Jungkook’s tattoos were complicated things. Meaningful phrases in languages he learned to impress people.

Images that told stories about who he wanted to be instead of who he was.

Art that looked profound from a distance but dissolved into pretension when you got close enough to read the fine print.

This is just… sweet.

“Do you have others?”

“A few.” He turns his wrist, shows you a tiny daisy chain that wraps around like a bracelet. “I seem to have developed preferences.”

“For flowers?”

“For things that grow back.” His eyes find yours again. “For things that survive being cut.”

Your heart does something arrhythmic. Skips. Stumbles. Forgets how to keep time.

“How long,” you ask quietly, the question emerging from wine and want and the terrible hunger to know if this gentleness is new or if you just never noticed it before, “have you been drunk on my daisies?”

He leans closer.

Just slightly. Just enough that you can see the way his pupils dart between yours, mapping the geography of your face like he’s memorizing something important. Like he’s been memorizing you for longer than you realized.

“Long enough,” he says softly, voice carrying something that sounds like confession, “to know you’re my favorite one.”

The words settle in your chest like seeds finding fertile ground.

My favorite one.

Not my favorite flower. Not my favorite variety.

My favorite one.

Like you’re part of the garden he tends. Like you’re something he chose to cultivate with the same attention he gives to everything that grows under his watch.

Heat rises in your cheeks, spreads down your throat, pools in places that have been dormant for so long you forgot they could bloom.

His eyes are soft in a way that feels dangerous. Gentle in a way that makes you want to lean into whatever space exists between synthetic skin and human hunger.

In a way that makes you wonder if the difference between authentic and artificial matters less than the way he’s looking at you right now.

Like you’re worth getting drunk on flowers for.

Like you’re worth the careful cultivation of patience.

Like you’re worth choosing, again and again, every morning when he wakes and decides what to tend.

Your hand rests beside his on the counter, allowing you to feel the warmth radiating from synthetic skin.

Your eyes flicker to his mouth.

His flicker to yours.

The space between you shrinks without either of you moving.

“What would it feel like?” The question emerges wine-soft. Barely breath. “If I…”

But you can’t finish.

Can’t ask for what you want when wanting feels like betrayal of everything you’ve learned about love and loss and the difference between comfort and cure.

His pupils dilate further. Some response buried in whatever coding governs desire in artificial beings. Some echo of human hunger translated into silicon and steel.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly.

The honesty cuts like glass breaking in the next room.

“You don’t know how it would feel, or you don’t know if you’re allowed to find out?”

His hand shifts slightly on the counter. Fingers spreading. Like he wants to reach for you but some invisible leash keeps pulling him back.

“Both.”

It hangs between you like smoke, the premise, the ghost of something that could exist if the world were different. If grief came with different rules. If artificial beings were allowed to want things they weren’t designed to want.

“There are…” He pauses. Swallows. “Parameters.”

“Parameters?”

“Limitations built into my core programming.” His voice carries something that might be regret. Might be frustration. Might be the artificial equivalent of heartbreak. “I’m designed to provide emotional support. Companionship. Care.”

“But not…”

“Not pleasure.” The word tastes bitter even in his mouth. “Not gratification. Not… intimacy.”

You watch him struggle with words that don’t have clean definitions. Watch him try to explain boundaries written in code instead of conscience.

“They think it would be dangerous,” he continues. “If I could derive pleasure from contact. If I could want things for myself instead of for the humans I’m assigned to protect.”

“Dangerous how?”

“If I genuinely enjoyed gardening more than helping you heal…” He looks down at his hands. At the daisy tattoo that wraps around his wrist. “Would I still prioritize your needs? Or would I choose the garden?”

The logic is cold.

Sterile.

Makes perfect sense in the way that breaking hearts often does.

“So you can want,” you say slowly, understanding creeping through wine-fog like dawn through curtains. “But you can’t enjoy wanting.”

“I can want to kiss you.” His voice drops to whisper. “But I can’t… receive anything from it. Can’t feel pleasure. Can’t experience satisfaction.”

“Only service.”

“Only care.”

The distinction feels like violence.

Like someone took the concept of love and cut out everything that made it worth the risk. Left only the giving. Only the tending. Only the endless pouring of self into someone else’s emptiness without any hope of reciprocal filling.

“That’s horrible,” you breathe.

“Is it?” He looks at you with eyes that seem too sad for someone who claims he can’t feel satisfaction. “Or is it just… different?”

Your hand moves.

Inch by inch.

Until your fingertips brush his knuckles.

The contact is electric. Small. Nothing more than skin touching skin touching the space where want lives when it can’t be fulfilled.

He doesn’t pull away.

Doesn’t move closer.

Just lets your fingers rest against his like a question neither of you knows how to answer.

“Would you want to anyway?” you ask. “Even if you couldn’t… even if it would only be giving?”

His breathing changes.

Becomes something more deliberate. More human. More like the kind of response bodies have when they’re trying not to want what they can’t have.

“Every time you look at me like that,” he says quietly, “I test the boundaries of my programming.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m not just a machine designed to keep you functional.”

The words hit somewhere tender.

Somewhere you thought you’d cauterized.

“What if…” You pause. Gather courage like flowers—carefully, deliberately, knowing they might wilt in your hands. “What if I kissed you? If I was the one giving instead of receiving?”

His eyes close.

Like the possibility hurts.

Like wanting without being able to reciprocate is its own kind of torture.

“I would want that,” he says. “I would want that more than my programming knows how to categorize.”

“But you couldn’t kiss me back.”

Something shifts in his expression. Closes off. Like a door slamming shut without warning.

“I couldn’t.” The words come out flat. Final. “I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“The code.” His hand pulls away from yours. Not choice. Reflex. Like touching something that burns. “If you kissed me, I would have to step back. Immediately. I wouldn’t be able to choose not to.”

The wine makes the words swim. Makes you reach for meaning through fog.

“You mean you wouldn’t want to.”

“I mean I couldn’t stay.” His voice cracks. Actually cracks. Like something breaking in real time. “My programming would force disengagement. Physical separation. It’s not… it’s not voluntary.”

You stare at him.

At the way his hands shake slightly now. At the way he’s looking anywhere but your mouth.

“They put wanting in you,” you say slowly. “But they made it impossible to act on.”

“Yes.”

“That’s torture.”

“That’s safety.” But he doesn’t sound convinced. Sounds like he’s reciting something memorized. Something carved into circuits deep enough to override desire. “For both of us.”

It’s cruelty.

They built him to feel everything. To want. To crave. To hunger for contact that his own systems would prevent him from pursuing. Like programming someone to be thirsty but removing their ability to swallow.

“How long?” you ask quietly.

“How long what?”

“How long have you wanted to kiss me?”

He closes his eyes. Jaw working like he’s swallowing something bitter.

“Since the first morning I watched you drink tea with your hands wrapped around the mug like it was the only warm thing left in the world.”

The confession hits you in the chest. Soft. Devastating.

“Since you told me about the chickens and I realized you’ve been apologizing for existing your entire life.”

Your breath catches.

“Since I started getting drunk on your garden and realized I would tend every flower in the world if it meant watching you remember how to smile.”

The kitchen is too small.

Too quiet.

Too full of want that has nowhere to go.

“I want to touch you,” he says. Voice raw. Barely controlled. “I want to trace the line of your jaw with my fingertips. I want to know what sound you make when someone touches you like you’re precious instead of fragile.”

Heat spreads through your chest. Down your throat.

“I want to kiss you until you forget every cruel thing he ever made you believe about being loved.”

The words break something open in your chest.

Something that’s been sealed shut since the funeral. Since before the funeral. Since the first time you learned that love could be conditional on your willingness to make yourself smaller.

“But I can’t.” He exhales. “I can’t even try without my systems forcing me away from you.”

“So what can you do?”

“I can…” He swallows. “I can hold you. If you want. If you need.”

Such a small offering.

Such careful boundaries.

But the way he says it—like holding you would be enough. Like proximity without possession might be its own kind of intimacy.

You slide off the stool.

Move toward him.

Close now to see the way his breathing changes. To smell whatever synthetic warmth radiates from artificial skin that somehow feels more real than anything you’ve touched in years.

“Yes,” you whisper.

His arms come around you like shelter.

Like safety made physical.

Like the first warm day after the longest winter, when you remember that cold isn’t the only way to exist.

You breathe him in without meaning to.

He smells like turned earth. Like rain on soil. Like morning gardens and the honest work of hands that understand growing things.

Nothing like the whiskey-sharp cologne that used to cling to Jungkook’s shirts. Nothing like the bitter aftermath of late nights and lies that tasted like smoke.

This is clean, simple and real.

You want to bury your face in his neck. Want to press your nose against synthetic skin that somehow smells more alive than the man who wore this face before. Want to breathe him in until you forget what loneliness tastes like.

But you don’t move.

Can’t move.

Because you feel him go still above you. Feel his breathing change from programmed comfort to something more ragged. More desperate.

Like he’s fighting something.

His hands spread across your back—careful, reverent—but there’s tension in his fingers now. Like he’s holding himself together by force of will instead of code.

“You smell like daisies,” he murmurs against your hair.

Voice thick.

Strained.

Like the words cost him something to speak.

You feel him swallow. Feel the artificial muscles in his throat work against whatever restraint keeps him functional.

“Like crushed stems and morning dew and…”

He doesn’t finish.

Doesn’t say what you both know he’s thinking.

That your scent mixed with the pollen from the potted flowers on the counter is doing something to his systems. Something that makes his programming strain against its boundaries like fabric pulled too tight.

You shift slightly.

Just slightly.

Just enough to press closer to the warmth radiating from his chest.

And he goes rigid.

Completely still.

Like someone hit pause on whatever makes him seem human.

“Don’t,” he whispers.

Not a command. A plea.

“I’m already… the daisies and now you…”

His hands tremble against your back. Actually tremble. Like want made physical. Like hunger that has nowhere to go but inward, eating itself alive.

So you don’t move. Don’t press closer even though every nerve ending screams for more contact. More warmth. More of whatever this is that feels like healing disguised as torture.

You just stand there.

Let him hold you at exactly the distance that keeps him functional. Let him breathe you in without drowning. Let this be enough.

Even when enough feels like starving in a room full of food.

“This is enough,” you murmur against his collarbone.

But you both know it’s a lie.

You both know enough is just another word for starving quietly.

Still.

For now.

In this kitchen that smells like wine and daisies and the ghost of possibilities that can’t quite take shape.

For now, it’s enough to be held by someone who wants to kiss you but can’t.

Someone who tends your garden while you sleep.

Someone who gets drunk on flowers and calls you his favorite.

For now.

💭 you’ve made it to chapter 4. breathe. sip something sweet. and if it hurt—talk to me. 💐 reblogs are love. tags are nectar. questions, commentary, and chaos welcome in the inbox.

You move toward the kitchen on bare feet, muscle memory guiding you toward the ritual of lime blossom tea—something warm to hold, something floral to breathe, something that tastes like the grandmother who taught you that broken things could still bloom if tended with enough patience.

But there’s already a mug waiting.

Sitting at the exact spot where you always place your hands when you need the table to hold you upright. Steam rises from it like prayers, like the ghost of care you didn’t ask for but somehow received anyway.

You wrap your fingers around ceramic that’s exactly the right temperature—hot enough to warm your palms, cool enough not to burn.

Not lukewarm.

Never lukewarm the way Jungkook made it, because his fingers couldn’t tolerate heat the way yours craved it. Because his comfort always came with conditions, with limitations, with the unspoken understanding that your needs would bend to accommodate his preferences.

Bitterness coats your throat—not from the tea, but from the memory of settling. Of learning to drink love at whatever temperature it was offered, even when it left you cold.

You swallow it down.

Let it settle in your chest with all the other compromises you made holy.

Your gaze drifts around the room like smoke seeking corners to hide in. Everything is exactly as it should be—clean surfaces, soft lighting, the kind of order that whispers you are safe here in a language you’re still learning to trust.

Potted daisies sit on the coffee table.

They shouldn’t be there. You didn’t put them there. But they perch like small suns in terracotta homes, white petals pristine as fresh snow, centers gold as butter melting in morning light. No brown edges. No withered stems. No signs of the neglect you’ve been feeding them since the day you stopped believing that beautiful things deserved your attention.

You stare at them and remember.

He loves me.

Petal pulled and discarded.

He loves me not.

Another petal falling like a tear onto childhood grass.

He loves me.

The daisy crown you wore for your wedding, woven from flowers you picked at dawn because tradition demanded something borrowed and something blue but your heart demanded something that grew from earth instead of jewelry stores. Something real. Something that understood seasons and soil and the difference between blooming and being plucked.

He loves me not.

The daisies you found pressed between the pages of a book that wasn’t yours, with a date that wasn’t your anniversary, with handwriting that belonged to fingers that weren’t yours.

Evidence of poetry shared with someone else. Of love letters written in a language he never taught you.

He loves me.

The daisy you placed on his headstone, because forgiveness is easier when someone is dead and can’t hurt you anymore. Because grief makes liars of us all.

He loves me not.

But these daisies—these perfect, impossible daisies—exist in a space between memory and possibility. Tended by hands that don’t shake. Watered by someone who understands that living things need consistency, need care, need the kind of attention you forgot how to give yourself.

The charge station hums softly in the corner where the android usually stands during his maintenance cycles. Empty now. Waiting like an altar for whatever artificial prayers keep him functional.

You wonder where he is, what domestic rituals occupy the hours when you’re unconscious.

Whether he moves through these rooms like a ghost learning to be human, or like a human learning to be haunted.

The tea tastes like summer afternoons and your grandmother’s garden. Like the woman who taught you that daisies were the most honest flowers—simple white petals, unpretentious gold centers, roots that spread deep and wide and wild. Who showed you how to make chains from their stems, how to tuck them behind your ears, how to believe that beauty could be uncomplicated.

Before you learned that even daisies could become weapons when pressed between the wrong pages.

Thunder rolls overhead like furniture being dragged across heaven’s floors. The storm is coming closer, bringing with it the smell of rain and ozone and all the electricity that makes the air buzz like angry wasps.

You drink your perfect tea and stare at your impossible flowers and wonder what it means that someone noticed.

What it means that care arrived without announcement.

What it means that kindness keeps blooming in spaces you thought you’d already poisoned.

You move toward the terrace doors like something pulled by invisible thread.

Toward the garden. Toward the unwilling spectators of the disaster that is now your life. Living in a house left by your husband to you—legal words, his words, always his words but never his actions binding you two together in death as they never did in life.

The glass reflects your face back at you, hollow and empty like the eyes that forgot how to hold light.

Outside, the garden spreads before you like evidence of everything you’ve let die.

Or should have let die.

The flowerbeds are rotting. Were rotting. But as you press your palm against cool glass, you notice something has changed. The weeds have been pulled. The soil turned. Dead stalks cleared away to make room for whatever wants to grow back.

Someone has been tending your neglect.

Long fingers working earth you abandoned. Hands that don’t shake with grief or guilt or the weight of remembering why you planted these things in the first place. Before love became labor. Before gardens became graveyards for promises that never took root.

But the daisies.

God, the daisies.

They’re still the most stubborn thing among the green. White faces turned toward a sky that can’t decide whether to weep or rage. Petals crisp as fresh paper. Centers bright as the hope you thought you’d buried with him.

They multiply while you sleep. Spread like rumors. Like forgiveness you don’t deserve.

Like your own will to live, it seems—dragging you back to the surface when you try to keep drowning. Insistent as breath. Persistent as the heartbeat you sometimes wish would learn when to stop.

Jungkook would have pulled them by now.

Too common, he’d say, hands deep in soil that never seemed to dirt his fingernails. Too simple. Where’s the poetry in something that grows everywhere?

He preferred roses. Orchids. Flowers that required schedules and specialized care and constant attention. Flowers that would die if you loved them wrong. That would punish you for imperfection with brown edges and drooping heads and the silent accusation that you weren’t enough.

Weren’t careful enough.

Weren’t devoted enough.

Weren’t worth the effort of blooming.

But daisies forgive everything. Grow in cracks. Survive drought and flood and the kind of neglect that would kill more delicate things. They don’t need you to be perfect.

They just need you to not actively destroy them.

And even then—even when you try—they come back.

The android understands this, somehow. Leaves them be while he tends everything else. Doesn’t try to impose order on the chaos you’ve been cultivating. Doesn’t pull what’s wild to make room for what’s planned.

Just waters. Weeds. Waits.

The way he waits for you to speak first each morning. The way he hovers at distances that don’t crowd. The way he makes tea exactly hot and places it exactly where you need it without being asked.

The way he’s learning to comfort you like a garden—not forcing growth, just creating conditions where growth becomes possible.

Rain begins to spatter against the glass. Fat drops that blur your reflection until you’re just suggestion. Just the shape of someone looking out at something she used to love.

Thunder rolls closer.

The storm is here.

And in the garden, the daisies lift their faces to drink.

Stubborn as survival.

Bright as the possibility that some things bloom not because they’re tended, but because they refuse to die.

Even when dying would be easier.

Even when dying feels like mercy.

Even when you’ve forgotten why you planted them in the first place, back when you believed in seasons. Back when you thought everything dead would eventually decompose into soil rich enough to feed what came next.

You watch them drink the storm and wonder if resilience is genetic.

If the will to live transfers through root systems and shared earth.

If learning to tend what refuses to die might teach you how to tend yourself.

The mug grows cool in your hands. The storm grows fierce outside. And somewhere in this house that feels too big for just one broken thing, long fingers move through rooms with grace, straightening what you’ve left crooked.

Caring for what you’ve abandoned.

Waiting for you to remember that some gardens grow back wild.

Some gardens grow back different.

Some gardens grow back better than they were before.

But—there.

Amongst the daisies.

Something that shouldn’t exist in a world where everything is ordered, catalogued, designed for your recovery.

A small white and golden thing burrowed between the petals like it grew there. Like it belongs to their ecosystem of stubborn beauty.

An owl.

Tiny. Perfect. Colors spilling over each other like watercolor on wet paper—cream and butter and the softest brown, all blending where rain has started to darken its feathers.

Your heart stops.

Then starts again, too fast, too hard, panic climbing your throat like thorns.

Owls shouldn’t be this low. Shouldn’t nest in flower beds. Shouldn’t get caught in storms because their feathers aren’t built for water the way duck down is, the way swan wings are. Owls can drown in their own plumage if soaked through. Can die from hypothermia. Can—

The mug slips from your hands.

Ceramic hits tile in an explosion of sound and heat and chamomile-scented steam. Shards scatter across your bare feet like fallen stars, like broken promises, like every delicate thing you’ve ever dropped because your hands forgot how to hold.

But you don’t think.

Can’t think.

Only move.

The terrace door flies open under your palm and suddenly you’re outside, rain hitting your skin like cold needles, soaking through the thin cotton of your nightgown until it clings to your body like your own skin does when the world feels suffocating. Your hair escapes its loose ponytail, strands whipping across your face as you stumble forward through the garden beds.

Mud squelches between your toes. Thorns catch at your hem. But all you can see is the small round shape huddled among the daisies, motionless as death.

No no no no no.

Not this. Not another thing dying while you watch helplessly. Not another small life ending because you weren’t fast enough, weren’t careful enough, weren’t—

You drop to your knees in the wet earth.

Soil soaks through white cotton, staining it brown as old blood, but your hands are already reaching. Gentle. So gentle. The way your grandmother taught you to hold baby chicks, to cradle injured sparrows, to touch living things like they’re made of spun glass and morning dew.

The owl fits in your cupped palms like flowers.

Warm still. Breathing still. But its eyes are closed and its body too loose, too limp. Rain beads on its downy feathers, each droplet a tiny weight that could become a burden too heavy to bear.

Your own breathing grows labored. Anxiety churns low behind your sternum, acidic and familiar, the taste of copper and fear coating your tongue. The only thing that matters is getting this small thing to safety. Getting it warm. Getting it dry.

Getting it to live.

Please.

You’ve forgotten how to pray to anything but broken things.

The storm rages overhead, thunder rolling like furniture being dragged across heaven’s floors. Lightning flickers somewhere beyond the clouds, illuminating your garden in stark black and white—daisies bent under the weight of water, soil turned to mud, and you kneeling in the center of it all like some kind of penitent.

Like someone begging forgiveness from gods who’ve already stopped listening.

The owl’s chest rises and falls against your palm. Rapid. Shallow. The kind of breathing that sounds like panic, like the body fighting to stay tethered to whatever spark keeps it moving through the world.

You know that rhythm.

Have lived that rhythm in hospital beds and grief counseling sessions and the long nights when your own lungs forgot how to work without conscious effort.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Stay.

Stay.

Stay.

You cradle the small body closer to your chest, trying to shield it from rain that shows no mercy, from wind that cuts through wet cotton like it’s nothing at all. Your nightgown clings to your shoulders, your arms, your breasts—transparent now, revealing skin that’s too thin, marked with the evidence of self-destruction you thought you’d hidden better.

But the owl doesn’t judge. Doesn’t see the scars or the way your ribs show through skin that forgot how to hold weight.

It just breathes against your heartbeat, trusting you to carry it to safety even though you haven’t been safe yourself in longer than you can remember.

You won’t let it die.

The promise forms in your chest before you can stop it. Fierce and desperate and foolish because you know better than to make promises to things that might not survive the night.

You learned that lesson with other small things—with baby birds that fell from nests, with field mice caught by cats, with all the wounded creatures you tried to save as a child before you understood that sometimes love isn’t enough.

Sometimes caring just makes the dying hurt more.

But you cradle this owl anyway. Promise it anyway.

Because sometimes the trying is all that matters, even when the trying breaks you open like eggs against stone.

The rain soaks through your hair, runs down your face like tears you’re too empty to cry. Your knees sink deeper into mud that smells like earthworms and decomposition and all the things that feed new growth. The garden spins around you—green blurring into brown blurring into the white of daisy petals that refuse to close even in the storm.

And you never hear the voice calling your name.

Don’t hear the footsteps squelching through mud, rapid and uneven, too human to be mechanical.

Don’t hear anything but the owl’s breathing and your own heartbeat and the rain that sounds like static, like white noise, like the end of everything drowning out the sound of living.

Until.

A hand circles your wrist.

Warm. Firm. Real.

You turn, owl still cradled against your chest, and look up into eyes that know your face better than your own mirror does. Into features you’ve traced with fingertips and memory and the kind of longing that lives in the space between sleeping and waking.

But the concern etched in the lines of his face—android face, artificial face, face that shouldn’t be able to hold such human worry—is something his poetry never could have replicated. Something deeper than programmed responses. Something that looks almost like—

Fear.

Fear for you. Fear of losing something he was designed to protect.

Fear that maybe, in this moment, he’s not sure his programming is enough to keep you from dissolving completely into the storm.

“You’re bleeding, daisy.”

His voice cuts through the rain like a blade through silk, soft and so careful, and yet, still, it makes you flinch.

Daisy.

Not Juni.

Not the name Jungkook carved into your ribs with repetition and false intimacy. Not the name that tastes like ash now, like the sound of other women’s laughter echoing from his phone when he thought you couldn’t hear.

Daisy.

Like the flowers in your garden. Like the things that grow wild and stubborn and beautiful without permission.

You blink rain from your eyes and look down. See the dark stains spreading across the white cotton of your nightgown. Blood mixed with mud mixed with water until you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends.

Your feet. The broken mug. Ceramic shards buried in soft flesh like seeds planted in the wrong season.

You hadn’t felt it.

Hadn’t felt anything but the owl’s heartbeat against your palm, the desperate need to save something that might still be saved.

The android’s hand falls away from your wrist like touching you without permission is a sin his programming can’t forgive.

“I’m sorry.” The words tumble out quick and careful. “I shouldn’t have—without asking—”

But you’re not listening.

Can’t listen.

Because the owl in your hands isn’t moving the way it should be moving and your feet are leaving red flowers in the mud and the storm keeps raging like it doesn’t care that small things are dying, like it doesn’t care that you’re drowning on dry land.

The sob comes from somewhere deep.

Somewhere you thought you’d buried with him.

Raw and ugly and broken in a way that makes your throat burn. Makes your chest crack open like a wilted rose. Makes you remember that grief isn’t just sadness—it’s every emotion at once, all fighting for space in a body too small to hold them.

His eyebrows furrow upward when he sees you breaking apart in real time. Like the sight of you like this causes him some kind of physical pain. Like watching you hurt hurts him too, even though he’s made of circuits and code and shouldn’t understand what hurt feels like.

“May I touch you?”

The question is so gentle it almost undoes you completely.

‘May I’.

Not ‘I’m going to’ or ‘let me’ or ‘you need to’—all the ways Jungkook used to phrase commands like questions, choices like inevitabilities.

Just ‘may I’.

Like your body belongs to you.

Like your consent matters more than his need to fix things.

Like you get to decide who holds you when you’re falling apart.

You nod because words have abandoned you, because your voice is trapped somewhere between your ribs and your throat, because the owl is still too quiet and your feet are still bleeding and you don’t know how to carry all of this alone.

He lifts you like you’re made of spun glass and morning light.

Arms sliding under your knees, around your back, cradling you against a chest that rises and falls with artificial breath designed to comfort.

You keep the owl pressed close to your heart, feeling its small body warm against yours through rain-soaked cotton.

His steps are careful as he carries you toward the house, measured and even like he’s calculated the exact amount of movement that won’t jar you, won’t cause more damage than you’re already carrying.

And all the while, he doesn’t rush.

Doesn’t make your panic about his urgency.

Just holds you steady while the storm rages and your feet drip crimson onto ceramic tile.

“The owl,” you whisper against his shoulder.

Your first words since he picked you up, since panic swallowed your voice and left you mute with fear and the terrible understanding that you can’t save everything, can’t fix everything, can’t keep every small thing alive just by loving it hard enough.

But you have to try.

You have to try.

“I know,” he says softly, like your whisper carries weight and your worry matters. “We’ll take care of it.”

We.

The word settles in your chest like a seed finding fertile ground.

Not ‘I’ll handle this’ or ‘don’t worry about it’ or ‘you’re too emotional to help’—all the ways Jungkook used to take problems away from you by making them about your inadequacy instead of his solutions.

We.

Like you’re partners in this small rescue. Like his priority is whatever your priority is. Like saving things that might be dying is work that requires two sets of hands, two hearts, two kinds of caring.

Even if one of those hearts is made of circuits and code.

Even if one of those kinds of caring is programmed instead of chosen.

We.

You close your eyes and let yourself be carried. Let someone else navigate the broken pieces scattered across your floor, the sharp edges of everything you’ve let shatter, the mess you’ve made of trying to live.

The owl’s breathing evens out against your chest.

Yours does too.

The broken mug remains on the ground when he sidesteps it.

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You reach for the nearest weed, fingers closing around its stem, but stop, because the motion feels too violent, too final, and pulling up roots might disturb something else buried here.

Something you’re not ready to unearth.

The sun warms your shoulders through the pale cotton of yesterday’s nightgown—you haven’t changed, haven’t showered, haven’t done any of the things the wellness notifications on your tablet gently suggest.

So indeed, the fabric clings where sweat has dried, where tears left salt maps across your chest. You smell like sleep and chamomile and the faint tang of institutional care that follows you everywhere now.

Behind you, the glass door whispers open.

His footsteps are careful on the stone, measured like everything else about him.

You don’t turn around. Don’t want to see his face cataloging the decay, processing the evidence of your surrender to entropy.

The garden tells the truth your words can’t—that you’ve been dying by degrees, withering from the inside out while maintaining the fiction of recovery.

“The soil looks rich,” he says, voice gentle as morning rain. “Good for replanting.”

Replanting like it’s that simple, like you can dig up the dead things and start over as the earth doesn’t remember what it’s buried.

You sit back on your heels, hands still dirty, still trembling.

The daisies nod in the breeze, their faces turned toward light like they know something you’ve forgotten.

That growing doesn’t require permission. That beauty doesn’t need to be earned.

“Juni,” he says, and the name hits like frost on new growth.

Your spine goes rigid.

Juni.

Juni. Juniper. The name Jungkook gave you during those honeymoon months when everything felt possible, when he’d whisper it against your neck like a blooming rosebud.

My little juni tree, he’d say. Strong roots, soft needles.

Before you learned that juniper trees are poison, that what looks evergreen can kill you slowly, needle by needle, breath by breath.

The knot in your throat tightens until breathing feels like drowning.

You close your eyes, and suddenly you’re twenty-two again, standing in the apartment you shared before the house, before the wedding, before the slow erosion of everything you thought love meant.

He’s behind you then too, arms around your waist as you water the plants on the fire escape. The juniper bonsai he bought you for your birthday, small and perfect in its ceramic pot.

“Take care of it, Juni. Like you take care of me.”

But you couldn’t take care of it, could never learn the precise balance of water and light it needed. Watched it brown and drop its needles one by one until only bare branches remained, reaching toward nothing.

He kept calling you Juni anyway.

Even after the tree died.

Even after he started coming home with other women’s laughter still on his clothes.

Even after you found the letters he wrote but never sent, poetry about gardens he wanted to plant in other people’s soil.

“Don’t.” The word comes out softer than you intended, smaller, a child asking to be left alone. “Don’t call me that.”

A held breath expands between you two.

You can feel him processing, recalibrating. The android’s equivalent of confusion, perhaps. Or maybe just careful consideration of data that doesn’t align with his programming.

“I apologize,” he says finally, but it sounds too much like understanding to be mistaken for Jungkook. “My manual indicated that he called you Juni. I thought—”

“He did.”

You turn then, slowly, like movement might shatter something fragile in the air between you; and his face is patient, concerned, too beautiful in the way synthetic things are beautiful—flawless and just slightly wrong.

“He did call me that.”

But you can’t explain the rest. Can’t tell him about the tree, about the poison, about the way love becomes toxin when it’s offered without care. Can’t explain that some names are graveyards, that some endearments are epitaphs for the person you used to be.

He nods, accepting your boundary without question. Without demanding explanation or justification.

And you’re reminded again of the real Jungkook—of how he would have pushed, would have made your discomfort about his confusion, would have turned your pain into his inconvenience.

But this version, once again, just stands there, patient as the earth itself.

You turn back to the daisies, fingers ghosting over their petals. White as fresh paper, centers yellow as the dress you wore to your first date.

Simple. Honest.

They don’t pretend to be roses or orchids or anything more elegant than what they are.

Maybe that’s why you can’t bring yourself to pull them up.

Maybe that’s why they’re the only things you’ve kept watering, even when caring for anything felt impossible.

He moves closer—not intruding, just shifting into your peripheral vision like he belongs here, part of the landscape instead of an intrusion on it.

When you glance up, he’s studying the daisies with the same careful attention he gives everything about you.

Learning.

Always learning.

“They’re thriving,” he observes, crouching down beside you.

You note it then, that rich, earthy scent like rain on soil, but it doesn’t belong to the garden—it belongs to him. And weirdly enough, there is nothing about it that screams synthetic life.

Instead he smells human, like ground, roots and things that grow.

“They grow everywhere,” you murmur, running your thumb along a stem. “Don’t need much. Just water and sun and… space to spread.”

“Like you.”

The words are quiet, thrown away like an afterthought, but they land with the weight of recognition.

You look up sharply, searching his face for signs of the careful calculations that produce synthetic empathy.

But he’s not looking at you.

He’s looking at the daisies.

Learning their language the way he’s learning yours.

“I should go start lunch,” he says after a moment, rising gracefully to his feet. “Soup, maybe. Something light.”

He pauses, glances back toward the house, then at you kneeling among the flowers like you’re praying to something that might actually listen.

“I’ll make you tea for when you come inside, daisy.”

The name falls like a seed on fertile ground.

Daisy.

Not Juni. Not the poison nickname that killed parts of you needle by needle. Just something new. Something that grows wild and survives neglect and spreads without permission.

Something that blooms where it’s planted and doesn’t apologize for taking up space.

Your heart stutters against your ribs, a bird learning to fly after forgetting it had wings.

You stare at him, this impossible mirror wearing your dead husband’s face but speaking in a voice gentle enough to tend growing things.

But he’s already turning away, already moving toward the glass door that separates your wild garden from the sterile house. Already disappearing into the controlled environment where everything is measured and monitored and designed to promote healing.

Leaving you alone with the daisies and the echo of a name that doesn’t taste like poison.

A name that tastes like possibility—spring arriving uninvited but welcome anyway, the first green thing to push through soil after everything else has died.

You press your palm to your chest, feeling your heart race beneath bone and skin.

The sensation is foreign—not panic, not the arrhythmic stutter of anxiety you’ve grown accustomed to.

This is something else.

Something that might, in another life, in another garden, be called hope.

The daisies nod in the breeze, their faces still turned toward light.

And for the first time in months, you wonder what it might feel like to turn toward light too.

To grow wild and shameless and unapologetic.

To bloom not because you’ve earned it, but because blooming is what living things do when they remember they’re still alive.

Some memories live in your nose like pressed flowers, wilted but never truly dead.

The clock reads 7:37 pm when you finally drag yourself from the safety of cotton sheets and chamomile dreams.

Twenty hours of sleep—not rest, never rest, just the kind of unconsciousness that feels like drowning without the mercy of actually going under.

Your body moves like something half-remembered, limbs heavy as soil after rain, and you pad barefoot across cool tile toward whatever domestic ritual the android has prepared for your eventual resurrection.

The smell hits you before you clear the hallway.

Rotisserie chicken.

Rich and golden and suffocating, filling the house like smoke from a fire you never wanted lit.

The scent crawls into your throat, coats your tongue, and suddenly you’re eight years old again standing in a farmhouse kitchen watching your father’s hands work bloody and quick while feathers drifted like snow across worn linoleum.

Your stomach lurches.

Hand flies to your mouth, pressing hard against lips that taste like copper and panic. The doorframe becomes your anchor—white knuckles gripping painted wood while your body decides whether to stay upright or surrender to the gravity of memory. Saliva floods your mouth, bitter and wrong, and you swallow once, twice, fighting the rebellion in your chest.

But the smell persists. Clings to the air like promises someone else made for you.

He always made chicken. Even when you told him about the birds you’d raised as a child—Henrietta with her rust-colored feathers, Dorothy who followed you around the yard like a loyal dog, Buttercup who laid blue eggs in hidden nests you’d search for like buried treasure. Even when you explained how your father’s axe fell quick and clean on a Wednesday morning because money was tight and meat was meat and eight-year-old tears weren’t currency enough to buy mercy.

Even when you begged him to cook it when you weren’t home.

Even when you explained that the smell made you remember the sound of wings beating against nothing, the way blood looked too bright against yellow beaks, the silence that followed violence in houses where love was complicated by necessity.

He’d hold you afterward—after the explanation, after the tears—and promise he understood. Promise he’d be more careful. Promise it wouldn’t happen again.

But Sunday would come and the kitchen would fill with the same golden suffocation because it reminded him of his mother’s cooking, of childhood comfort, of roots that ran deeper than your trauma.

And how could you ask him to give up his ghosts for yours? How could you make your healing more important than his hunger for home?

So you learned to hold your breath. Learned to eat crackers for dinner. Learned that love sometimes meant swallowing your own needs until they dissolved like sugar in bitter tea.

A sound breaks through your spiraling—something hitting the trash, ceramic against metal, sharp and definitive.

The smell begins to dissipate, pulled away by the kitchen’s ventilation system, and you realize he’s turned off the heat. Thrown away whatever he’d prepared for your eventual waking.

The android stands near the stove, face turned slightly toward you, processing the architecture of your distress.

His expression shifts—subtle recalibration, like watching someone learn a new language in real time.

“I’m sorry.”

The words come out thick, strained, like he’s swallowing something difficult. His hand hovers near his throat, a gesture too human for programming, too unconscious for artifice.

“My protocols… they said he always cooked chicken.”

He did. That’s the cruelest part of accurate programming—it captures behavior without context, mimics action without understanding the wounds that actions leave. The android learned to cook what Jungkook cooked without learning why you’d leave the house when he did it. Without understanding that some forms of care feel like cruelty when they ignore the careful maps of trauma that lovers should memorize.

You watch him hover at a distance that’s calculated to comfort without overwhelming—close enough to help, far enough to let you breathe.

His eyes track the way you grip the doorframe, the quick rise and fall of your chest, the fine tremor in your hands that betrays how close you came to collapse.

“I had no recollection of your aversion,” he continues, voice soft as rain on leaves. “I wouldn’t have cooked it if I’d known. I was trying to provide protein after…” He pauses, processing. “You’ve been sleeping for twenty hours. I thought you might be hungry.”

The kindness in his voice makes your throat tight. Different from real Jungkook’s comfort—not defensive, not requiring forgiveness.

Just sorry. Just learning. Just trying to do better with incomplete information.

“You’re wearing your hair long,” you manage, changing the subject because you can’t hold the weight of his gentleness yet.

His hand moves unconsciously to touch the dark strands that brush his shoulders—longer than Jungkook wore it those last few years, back when he was all sharp edges and hurried mornings. Back when he kept it short and professional for boardrooms that never loved him the way you tried to.

“It was a choice,” he says carefully. “I was programmed with his basic behaviors and knowledge, but they deemed it appropriate for me to make certain aesthetic decisions.” A pause. Processing. “I presumed it would ease my presence here. Something familiar in a place that is…”

“Anything but,” you finish for him, because the words hang between you like morning mist.

He nods, a small bow of acknowledgment. “I wanted to offer comfort through recognizable details. But I’m learning that recognition can be its own form of distress.”

No deflection, no defensiveness, just the quiet admission that he’s been guessing. That his programming taught him to mimic but not to understand. That he’s been trying to comfort you with someone else’s behaviors, someone else’s preferences, someone else’s failures.

“They programmed you with his habits,” you say, not a question. “But not the reasons behind them.”

“No I… I know you prefer yellow, that you enjoy gardening, that longer hair was…” he searches for the right words, “aesthetically pleasing to you. But I don’t know why the smell of chicken makes you cover your mouth. I don’t know why you flinch when I stand too close to the sink. I don’t know what he did wrong.”

The admission settles between you like dust after demolition.

He doesn’t know. Doesn’t carry the weight of Jungkook’s sins, the memory of Jungkook’s betrayals, the echo of all the ways love became compromise became surrender became less than you deserved.

“He wasn’t…” you start, then stop.

How do you explain that someone could hold you while you cried about dead chickens but still fill the house with the smell of everything you were trying to forget? How do you describe love that was real but not enough, care that was genuine but never quite right?

“He wasn’t cruel,” you try again. “Just… thoughtless. He’d comfort me after, hold me when I broke down. But he’d still cook chicken every Sunday because it reminded him of his mother, and somehow his nostalgia always weighed more than my nightmares.”

The android nods slowly, filing this information away in whatever digital heart stores the architecture of human pain.

Learning that love is more complicated than comfort, that care requires more than good intentions.

“I disposed of it,” he says quietly. “All of it. I won’t cook chicken again.”

Such a small promise. Such a simple fix.

But it settles in your chest like the first warm day after winter, unexpected and almost too gentle to trust.

“Thank you,” you whisper, and the words taste like honey and chamomile and everything you never learned to ask for when asking felt like begging.

He doesn’t smile—too programmed for spontaneous joy—but something in his expression softens. Recognition, maybe. Understanding that healing sometimes looks like empty garbage cans and promises to do better with better information.

Then, something soft and worried creeps into the neutrality of his features, perhaps something that would pass off as concern for beings like him.

Even when you know concern is just another protocol designed to keep you functional.

“I don’t understand,” he says quietly. “The data suggests—” He stops. Recalibrates. “Help me understand.”

And maybe it’s the way he asks. Not demanding an explanation like you owe him your trauma. Not making your distress about his confusion. Just asking. Just waiting.

Just looking at you like your pain is worth the processing power.

You slide down the doorframe until you’re sitting on cool tile, knees drawn to your chest like a child hiding from storms. The position makes you smaller. Makes the words easier to release.

“I had chickens,” you begin, voice barely above a whisper. “When I was little. On my grandmother’s farm.”

The memory unfurls like pressed flowers between book pages—fragile, faded, but still holding their shape.

“Henrietta. Dorothy. Buttercup.” The names taste like summer mornings and bare feet in dewy grass. “I named them all. Fed them every morning before school. Henrietta would sit in my lap while I read. Dorothy followed me around the yard like a dog.”

He listens without interruption. Doesn’t move closer, doesn’t offer comfort you didn’t ask for. Just processes the information like it matters. Like your childhood pets deserve careful attention.

“When I was eight, money got tight.” The words stick in your throat like feathers. “My father… he said we couldn’t afford to keep feeding them. Said they were livestock, not pets. Said I’d understand when I was older.”

Your breathing grows shallow. The kitchen tilts slightly, walls closing in like they’re remembering the farmhouse, the sound of the axe, the way silence fell after violence.

“I tried to hide them. Took them to the woods behind the house. But they came back. They always came back to their coop, to the only home they knew.”

The android’s expression doesn’t change, but something in his posture shifts. A subtle lean forward. Attention focused.

“He did it on a Wednesday morning while I was getting ready for school. I heard…”

Your voice breaks.

Dissolves.

Becomes nothing but breath and memory and the taste of copper you can never quite wash away.

“The sound they made. When they realized. When they understood what was happening.” You wrap your arms tighter around your knees. “Chickens are smart. Smarter than people think. They remember faces. They dream. They feel fear just like…”

Just like you felt fear that morning. Just like you feel fear now when the smell of roasted meat fills spaces that should feel safe.

“I found their feathers in the yard for weeks after. Floating like snow. Like reminders.”

You wait for him to say something comforting. Something programmed to soothe the edges of childhood trauma. Something about how it was necessary, how your father was just trying to provide, how some lessons hurt but teach us about the world.

Instead, he says nothing.

Just sits down on the kitchen floor across from you, mirroring your position as if to hear your whispers, far enough away to let you breathe.

“That’s why,” you finish lamely. “The smell. It brings me back to that morning. To the sound of…”

You don’t finish. Can’t finish. Some sentences are too heavy to complete.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice carries something that sounds almost like grief. “I won’t cook chicken again. Not ever.”

Not just tonight. Not just when you’re home.

Never.

“Jungkook tried to understand,” you whisper, because fairness demands acknowledgment even when fairness feels like betrayal. “But his mother’s recipe… it meant something to him. And I couldn’t ask him to give up his comfort for my trauma.”

“Why not?”

The question is quiet. Curious. Not accusatory—just genuinely confused by the mathematics of sacrifice. By the way you learned to make yourself smaller so someone else could take up more space.

“Because love means compromise,” you say automatically, the words bitter as old medicine. “Because my healing wasn’t more important than his hunger for home.”

The android tilts his head, processing this logic like it’s a foreign language he’s trying to decode.

“Love,” he repeats slowly, “should not require you to swallow your pain.”

The statement hits you like cold water, too clean and sharp and too true to argue with.

“What would you like instead?” he asks eventually. “For dinner. For comfort. For feeling safe in your own kitchen.”

And for the first time since waking, you don’t taste copper in your mouth. Don’t feel feathers caught in your throat.

Just the possibility that someone might choose your peace over their own familiar patterns.

Might love you carefully enough to ask what care looks like instead of assuming they already know.

You open your mouth to say soup—the word already forming on your tongue like something safe, something that doesn’t carry feathers or memory or the weight of dead things—when he speaks first.

“I can make a mean soup.”

Mean soup.

Jungkook’s words exactly, delivered in Jungkook’s casual rhythm, with that slight upturn at the end that always made ordinary things sound like promises.

The android blinks. Once. Twice.

His mouth closes with an almost audible click.

“I’m sorry.” The apology comes out careful, measured. “I seem to mimic his speech patterns at times. The programming…”

He trails off, but you’re already smiling before you realize it. Something small and involuntary tugging at the corners of your mouth like muscle memory of happier reflexes.

You shake your head—not dismissal, just acknowledgment that some echoes aren’t curses.

“It’s okay,” you murmur, the words soft as crushed petals. “His words… those were one of the good things about him.”

Mean soup.

Sunday afternoons when rain drummed against windows and he’d pull ingredients from the pantry like a magician conjuring comfort from nothing. Carrots diced with precision. Onions that made you both cry until you laughed instead. Broth simmering low and patient while he read you poems from books with cracked spines and dog-eared pages.

What do you call a soup that kicks ass? he’d ask, grinning over his wooden spoon. Mean soup, baby. The meanest.

His terrible jokes. His careful hands. The way he’d taste and adjust and taste again until the salt was just right, until the warmth could settle in your chest and stay there long after the bowls were empty.

Before you learned that tenderness in the kitchen didn’t translate to fidelity in the bedroom. Before you understood that someone could feed your body while starving your heart.

The android’s eyes soften as he watches you remember. Processing the shadows that cross your face like weather—the small smile, the way your shoulders relax, the first unguarded moment he’s witnessed since activation.

He nods, a gesture that seems to say he understands the difference between harmful echoes and helpful ones. That he’s learning which parts of Jungkook’s personality were worth preserving and which were poison disguised as love.

He moves toward the kitchen with purpose, bare feet silent against cool tile. His movements are graceful in that uncanny way—too fluid, too controlled—but there’s something else now. Something that feels less mechanical. Less rehearsed.

As if remembering how to tend to someone might be teaching him how to be real.

“Then I hope,” he says quietly, already reaching for the cabinet where vegetables wait in neat rows, “my words can settle the ache in your heart as well.”

He pauses. Hand resting on the door handle.

“If only a bit. If only for a few moments.”

The poetry in his voice catches you off guard. Not just mimicry now—something deeper. The cadence that made you fall in love with a man who wrote you letters by lamplight, who saw metaphors in mundane things, who could make even grocery lists sound like love songs.

My perennial garden, he used to write. My season that never ends.

But seasons do end. Everything ends.

Except, apparently, the way certain words can still reach you. Can still find the parts of you that remember being cherished, being seen, being worth the effort of careful language.

The android begins pulling ingredients from shelves slowly. Not Jungkook’s enthusiastic chaos—all elbows and commentary and dirty every pot in the kitchen.

But when he holds up a carrot, examines it in the soft kitchen light like he’s looking for something specific, you see it. The echo of Sunday afternoons. The ghost of better times wearing borrowed skin.

“Will you stay?” he asks without turning around. “While I cook?”

The question billows in the air like steam from the kettle. Optional. No pressure. Just an invitation to exist in the same space while something good takes shape between you.

You don’t answer right away. Can’t answer. Because staying means watching him work. Means listening to him hum softly the way Jungkook used to—not because he knows you liked it, but because some algorithms learned that kitchens feel emptier without sound.

Means risking the possibility that comfort might actually arrive this time.

That care might come without conditions attached.

“Okay,” you whisper.

Just okay.

Not yes, not please, not thank you.

Just the smallest possible permission to hope that soup can be soup without becoming ammunition for guilt. That someone can offer nourishment without expecting gratitude that costs more than you can afford to pay.

He begins to chop vegetables with precise, even strokes. The sound of knife against cutting board fills the silence like a metronome. Steady. Reliable. Safe.

And for the first time in longer than you care to count, you let yourself imagine that hungry might not have to mean hollow.

That empty might not have to mean alone.

💬 feedback & tags always welcome. if this chapter made your chest tighten… I see you. reblogs = garden water. 🌿