Hi! I’m Lex, and I write fanfics every now and then. Quick disclaimer: I don’t claim to know BTS (or any other group I write about), and the characters in my stories are purely fictional. Hope you enjoy—stay safe out there!
Lady’s Honor || ★ ☮ ❆
Pairing: Seokjin x Reader
Synopsis: “What unfolds when a gentleman's noble effort to help a lady in distress inadvertently tarnishes her reputation? He finds himself bound to protect her honor at any cost—even if it means risking his own life.”
The Swimmer ||★ ☮ ❆
Pairing: Seokjin x Reader
Synopsis: “Tormented by the shadows of her past, Y/N turns to AA meetings to navigate her fiancé's death and her battle with addiction. When a new doctor arrives in her small hometown, no one anticipates that he would also attend the meetings. What’s even more surprising is his growing fascination with one of the town's most notorious residents.”
Just Tonight ||☮ ❆ ♡
Pairing: Seokjin x Reader
Synopsis: “Jin and Y/N agreed their Christmas break one-night stand would be just once. Feelings, however, were never part of the plan.”
Friday the 13th || ♡❆୨୧
Pairing: Seokjin x Reader
Synopsis: "Jin and his girlfriend Y/N plan to spend a carefree summer together before the new college semester begins. Hoping to earn some extra money and enjoy the season, they take jobs as counselors at Camp Crystal Lake. What starts as a fun summer getaway quickly turns into a nightmare when they find themselves fighting to survive a terrifying encounter lurking in the woods."
⛧♱ Jung Hoseok♱⛧
Afterglow || ☮ ♡
Pairing: Hoseok x Reader
Synopsis: "A loud crack of lighting boomed in the distance followed by a low rumbling. The storm was here. My love was not. I kept watching and waiting."
Shine a Light || ★ ☮ ♡
Pairing: Hoseok x Reader
Synopsis: "It's Christmas, but the HOA is being a real Grinch. Hoseok is determined to save the holiday for his niece and nephew, but he'll need some help to pull it off. With a little teamwork from the trio living across the street, he might just be able to outsmart the HOA and make this a Christmas to remember."
The Last Fruit of Summer || ★ ☮ ❆ ୨୧
Pairing: Hoseok x Reader
Synopsis: "Sixteen-year-old Y/N lives in District 11 and has always known her place. She belongs to a prosperous scouting troop, helps care for her two younger sisters, and is learning a trade that promises a steady future. As quiet courtship begins and her path seems secure, the Reaping calls her name."
Teaser
⛧♱ Kim Namjoon♱⛧
Mad Dog || ★ ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Namjoon x Reader
Synopsis: "Namjoon Kim, a struggling Philly boxer, gets a once-in-a-lifetime shot at undefeated heavyweight champ Jungkook Jeon. As he trains with sharp-tongued ex-contender Yoongi Min, Namjoon also falls for Y/N, the quiet sister of his best friend."
⛧♱ Min Yoongi ♱⛧
Book Covers || ☮ ♡ ❆
Pairing: Yoongi x Reader
Synopsis: “Y/N has been quietly crushing on Yoongi for ages, the mysterious guy who’s always tucked away in his favorite corner of the library, lost in a book. He seems like the perfect gentleman, but as the saying goes, you can't always judge a book by its cover…”
Bittersweet || ★ ☮ ♡ ❆ ୨୧
Pairing: Yoongi x Reader
Synopsis: “When a cynical graduate student meets an overly enthusiastic undergraduate, the air crackles with tension—though not all of it is good.”
By the Lake || ★ ☮ ❆ ୨୧
Pairing: Yoongi x Reader
Synopsis: “Four years after losing their children, the Mins have fought to heal. But when Dr. Yoongi Min dies in a crash, he awakens in the afterlife desperate to reunite with his beloved wife no matter the cost.”
The Matrix || ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Yoongi x Reader
Synopsis: "By day, Yoongi Min is a quiet programmer. By night, he is Agust, a skilled hacker. When he is contacted by RM, a notorious hacker branded a terrorist, Yoongi is pulled into a hidden war against powerful machines. Hunted by deadly agents, he must uncover the truth about his reality and fight for humanity’s survival."
⛧♱ Park Jimin♱⛧
Lady in Waiting || ❆
Pairing: Jimin x Reader
Synopsis: “Y/N has been in love with the Prince of Seoul since she had first stepped foot in the palace, but in between tea and books, one thing had never come up.”
Waterlog || ★ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Jimin x Reader
Synopsis: “After a car accident ends her athletic career, Y/N has slowly started rebuilding her life again as a high school swim coach. That’s until she gets a request from an old friend and finds herself back in the spotlight as the new coach of Olympic swimmer, Park Jimin.”
Nosferatu || ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader x Jimin
Synopsis: "In 1838, estate agent Jungkook Jeon travels to Transylvania to meet the enigmatic Count Jimin Park. While he's away, his bride Y/N is plagued by chilling visions and a creeping sense of dread. As a dark force tightens its hold, Y/N becomes the focus of an obsession as she is pursued by a terrifying vampire whose twisted love unleashes unspeakable horror."
Trees that Wheep || ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Jimin x Reader
Synopsis: "Across the four realms of Lustra lies the enchanted Bangtan Forest, homeland of the southern Foxglove pack and a place whispered about as the “land of magic.” It is also the domain of the Bridd, a line of witches bound by an ancient curse and entrusted as the forest’s sacred guardians. Y/N, the newest Bridd, inherited her role far too young. Now grown, she is honored by the wolves as the most powerful witch they have ever known. Yet beneath the reverence and power lives a woman who must choose between the weight of her destiny and the longings of her heart."
⛧♱ Jeon Jungkook♱⛧
Unparalleled || ♡ ❆ ☮
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader
Synopsis: “You had only met him once, a fleeting moment in the grand scheme of things, and the fact that he was on the other side of the hotel door felt surreal. Or, after being in a long-distance relationship for over a year, you and Jungkook are finally meeting up.”
A Picture’s Worth || ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader
Synopsis: “After pulling off the largest art heist of her career, Y/N has put that life behind her. However, after 4 years out of the business, she comes home to find a stranger in her house.”
The Blackout Series || ★ ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader
Synopsis: “When a transport ship crashes on a planet ruled by three suns, pilot Y/N is forced into a fragile alliance with the ship’s most dangerous survivor, Jungkook Jeon, as a deadly darkness threatens them all. What begins as a fight for survival spirals into separation, isolation, and a galaxy-spanning conflict that neither of them can outrun. Across hostile worlds and rising empires, loyalties are tested, identities are challenged, and the line between monster and savior grows dangerously thin.”
The Comeback || ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader
Synopsis: “Y/N Y/L/N has always been destined for greatness as a competitive figure skater, her dreams of the Olympics sparkling like the ice beneath her blades. But when a devastating injury sidelines her, those dreams seem to melt away. Just when she feels lost, she unexpectedly meets Jeon Jungkook, a talented NHL hockey player.”
The Lost Boys || ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader
Synopsis: "Teenage brothers Jungkook and Jung-Hyun relocate with their mother to a quiet town in Northern California. As Jung-Hyun bonds with two like-minded comic book enthusiasts, Namjoon and Seokjin, the more brooding Jungkook becomes captivated by Y/N. However, he soon discovers that Y/N is entangled with Jimin, the charismatic leader of a dangerous local vampire gang."
Nosferatu || ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader x Jimin
Synopsis: "In 1838, estate agent Jungkook Jeon travels to Transylvania to meet the enigmatic Count Jimin Park. While he's away, his bride Y/N is plagued by chilling visions and a creeping sense of dread. As a dark force tightens its hold, Y/N becomes the focus of an obsession as she is pursued by a terrifying vampire whose twisted love unleashes unspeakable horror."
⛧♱ Kim Taehyung♱⛧
Nosey Neighbors || ★ ♡ ☮
Pairing: Taehyung x Reader
Synopsis: “When you and Taehyung decide to have a bit of fun his elderly neighbors almost ruin it.”
The Bride || ★ ❆ ☮
Pairing: Taehyung x Reader
Synopsis: “A former assassin awakens from a four-year coma after her ex-lover Taehyung tries to kill her on her wedding day. Driven by revenge for the loss of her unborn child and stolen life, she creates a hit list and embarks on a ruthless mission to take down everyone responsible.”
Interview with the Vampire || ♡ ❆ ☮ ୨୧
Pairing: Taehyung x Reader
Synopsis: "A young journalist in San Francisco follows a mysterious woman to her motel, only to have his world turned upside down when she reveals she is a 200-year-old vampire. Once a wealthy 18th-century New Orleans widow, she spiraled into self-destruction before being rescued and transformed by the vampire Taehyung."
How i hope Pb reader and Jk reunite (brownie points if he cries when he's alone)
When I tell you I don’t think anyone’s prepared for the reunion…
Photo’s not completely inaccurate but I’d say that’s how he feels internally but externally is playing it off real cool because of the situation they’re in. Hard to explain without massive spoilers, but just know it’s coming… we just need to get through a few things first!
I wanted to start reading Pitch Black and just saw that you’ve updated some of it, and wanted to ask if it’s been updated on ao3 since I was planning on reading it there 😄
I'm actually doing that right now! First 5 chapters are already updated, just need to do 6 and then upload all the extra chapters as well. I'd say it's going to take a few minutes. I pulled an all nighter which is why AO3 is getting updated so late.
Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, LOTS of Angst, Third Person POV, 18+ Only
Word Count: 26k+
Summary: After surviving the Hunter-Gratzner crash, Audrey crosses systems under different names, carrying the ghosts of everyone she has lost and the memory of the man who left her behind.
Warnings: Strong Language, Side Character Death, Main Character Death, Violence, Blood, Child Death, Graphic Death Scenes, Religious Themes (I mean no harm and do not want to offend anyone), Bad Character Choices, Attempted Murder of a Child, enslavement, murder, bounty hunters, prisons, implied SA, trauma, nightmares, grief, obsession, nightmares, let me know if i missed anything...
A/N: Seeing as Audrey is one of my favorite PB characters, I thought I'd give her a story of her own. If you haven't read Pitch Black, I'd highly recommend it as it all takes place within this universe, but it's not really necessary in order to enjoy this story. Just might make it a bit more interesting. I hope you enjoy!
masterlist
New Mecca looked too bright from the air. The city lay cupped in the desert, all pale stone and golden domes trembling beneath the heat, while water flashed in hidden courtyards and the call to prayer rose through the engine noise, first as a single human voice and then as many woven together.
Leo pressed her face to the viewport and stared. She had been quiet since they broke atmosphere, and Jungkook noticed because he noticed everything, especially the things he pretended not to. For most of the journey, she had pestered him with questions about port authorities, bounty hunters, gangs, prisons, anything with teeth. She spoke like someone already planning her escape from a place she had not yet reached.
Now she only watched the city.
Namjoon sat behind her with his prayer beads wrapped around one hand. In daylight, his grief had shape: his wife, his children, the people who had trusted him, the boy he had failed to save. All of it rested quietly in his face as he looked down at New Mecca.
Leo glanced back. “What’d you say?”
Namjoon gave her a tired smile. “I said we’re home.”
“Your home.”
“Yes,” he said. “And for a time, yours too.”
Leo looked toward Jungkook. He stood near the rear hatch with his goggles over his eyes and his arms folded, silent as a loaded gun. Her attention had carried weight since the crash. At first, she watched him because she feared him, then because she was fascinated. Lately, she had begun measuring herself against him.
That was worse.
She had cut her hair, lowered her voice, and buried anything the universe might mistake for softness. She believed being hard meant becoming impossible to hurt.
Jungkook knew better. Being hard only meant the hurting had started early.
The ship struck the landing pad with a metallic shudder. Leo stumbled, caught herself, and immediately glared at Jungkook for having seen it. A faint smile touched his mouth.
“What?” she demanded.
“Nothing.”
“Then don’t look at me.”
Namjoon’s expression softened. “You argue like family.”
Leo stiffened, and Jungkook went still.
Family was how people got careless. They turned their backs. They started believing there were rooms in the universe where nothing terrible could enter.
The hatch opened, and New Mecca rushed in all at once: heat, dust, spice, hot metal, sweat, incense, and hundreds of overlapping voices. Leo stepped onto the landing pad as though she expected the ground to bite.
A thin, bearded man waited beyond the port. The moment he saw Namjoon, his face broke open.
“Namjoon?”
Namjoon stopped. The man rushed forward and embraced him, and Namjoon held on with a sound too small to be called a sob.
Leo looked away. Jungkook watched the crowd instead.
Hassan led them through the city to a blue-doored house built around a small courtyard. A fig tree twisted from the center and cast broken shade across the tiles. When Hassan opened a hidden valve, water spilled into a stone basin in a thin silver thread.
Leo stared at it. After the dead planet, water running for beauty looked obscene.
Namjoon’s relatives poured from the house. An older woman reached him first, took his face between her hands, and spoke his name as though addressing a ghost. Others followed, cousins, neighbors, an old uncle with a cane. They touched his shoulders, sleeves, and face, proving to themselves that grief had returned something instead of taking again.
Leo retreated into the shadow beside the door. A little girl peered at her from behind a woman’s skirt, and Leo stared back until the child hid herself again.
Leo swallowed.
By dusk, the courtyard had filled with food: bread wrapped in cloth, lentils heavy with spice, dates, roasted meat, and bitter coffee. Leo ate too quickly, caught herself, and forced her hands to slow. Jungkook barely touched his plate.
Namjoon watched him over the rim of his cup. “You will stay tonight.”
“That right?”
“My house is open to you.”
“Bad idea.”
“You brought me home.”
“I was headed this way regardless.” Jungkook shrugged.
The older woman placed another piece of bread beside his hand. “Then stay one night. One night can’t hurt anyone.”
Jungkook nearly laughed. One night could burn down a world.
Still, he stayed. Not because Namjoon asked, and not because of the bed waiting upstairs, the clean blankets, or the food pressed upon him by people who believed hospitality could tame danger.
He stayed because Leo looked relieved when he agreed.
That was how he knew he had to leave.
Night settled over the courtyard. Lamps burned softly in niches along the walls while the fountain whispered endlessly into its basin. Leo sat beneath the fig tree, turning a stolen kitchen knife between her hands. Jungkook watched from the upper gallery until she finally looked up.
“You gonna lurk all night?” she called.
He descended the stairs.
She held up the knife. “It’s nice.”
“Knife’s cheap.”
“I wasn’t talking about the knife.”
“You should give it back.”
“You giving advice now?” She lowered her gaze to the blade and ran her thumb along the blunt edge of the handle. “Namjoon says there are schools here. People who take in kids.”
“You’re not a kid, remember?”
Her mouth tightened. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Use my words against me.”
“Not my fault you talk too much.”
She glared at him, but something younger sat beneath it tonight, something the roughness in her voice could not quite hide. “I’m not staying forever.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
“I can learn things. Get work on a ship. I’m not going to sit in some room learning prayers and table manners.”
“Could learn worse.”
“From who? You?”
He gave her nothing. With his eyes hidden behind the goggles, there was little in his face for her to read.
Leo stood. “What happens now? You got a plan?”
“Always.”
“Does it include us?”
“Us?”
She hated the word as soon as he repeated it. “Me and Namjoon,” she corrected.
The smart thing would have been cruelty, quick and clean. He could have told her she slowed him down, that he did not collect strays. Pride might have cauterized the wound before she felt it.
But the universe had already told her those things, and he had no interest in repeating its work.
So he said nothing.
Her face changed before she could stop it, hurt slipping through the cracks in her expression. “Oh.”
Namjoon appeared in the doorway behind them. “Leo, a room has been prepared for you.”
“That’s not my name.”
He paused. “What is your name, then?”
She lifted her chin, reaching for the armor she wore whenever anyone came too close. Jungkook waited, but after a moment her gaze dropped to the knife in her hand.
“Forget it.”
She pushed past them and disappeared into the house. The fountain filled the silence she left behind, water whispering steadily into the stone basin.
“She follows you with her eyes,” Namjoon said. “She sees something in you, Mr. Jeon.”
Jungkook looked toward the doorway where Leo had disappeared. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“You think leaving will save her?” Namjoon studied him for a moment. “You are not responsible for what she becomes.”
“That supposed to make me feel better?”
“I didn’t think you cared how you felt.” Namjoon’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I was under the impression you felt nothing at all, Mr. Jeon. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
A floorboard creaked inside the house.
Leo was listening.
Jungkook lowered his voice. “She needs to hate me.”
“She already has enough hatred.” Namjoon stepped closer, speaking quietly now. “What she needs is someone who stays. She has lost a great deal, Jungkook.”
“So have a lot of people.”
“Yes, and some of them become cruel because no one teaches them anything else.” Namjoon held his gaze. “You could teach her something different.”
“You don’t know me very well.”
“I know enough. Our time together has shown me that you have morals, however strangely you choose to arrange them. You kill when it serves you, but I do not believe you enjoy it nearly as much as you pretend.”
Jungkook’s mouth hardened, but Namjoon continued before he could answer.
“You are not beyond saving. Neither is she.”
For a moment, Jungkook saw another world: a mining colony beneath three suns, a child’s cage, blood drying black against iron. He remembered hands teaching him lessons before he was old enough to understand what they were making of him, how pain had become instruction and survival a language no child should have learned so fluently.
“No,” he said at last. “I couldn’t.”
Later, after the house had fallen asleep, Jungkook gathered his goggles, blade, and pack. The clean blanket on the bed remained untouched. When he opened the door, he found Leo sitting against the wall outside his room, her knees drawn to her chest and the stolen knife hanging loosely from one hand.
She appeared to be asleep, but when he crouched in front of her, her breathing changed so slightly that anyone else might have missed it.
He eased the knife from her fingers and placed it on the floor beside her, not close enough for her to seize quickly, but near enough that she would know he had left it there. Her eyelids trembled, though she did not open them. Jungkook rose without speaking.
Namjoon waited in the darkness at the far end of the hall.
“You’re leaving,” he said.
“Already gone.”
“Are you going where you said you would?”
“Yes.”
Namjoon reached into his robe and drew out a small bundle wrapped in cloth. “Food.”
Jungkook looked at it but made no move to take it.
“Don’t insult me by refusing.”
He accepted the bundle. Namjoon’s fingers closed briefly around his wrist, perhaps in blessing, though Jungkook had never trusted blessings. They made promises the universe had no intention of keeping.
“Jungkook,” Namjoon said, “you may run from her, from me, and from this house, but you will not outrun what you have done for us. For that, I will always consider you a friend.”
“Careful. That almost sounded like gratitude.”
“It is.”
“Dangerous thing.”
“So is mercy.”
“Wouldn’t know.”
“Yes,” Namjoon said. “You would.”
Jungkook had no answer. Words were doors, and once opened, they let things through that could not always be forced back.
He descended the stairs and crossed the courtyard beneath the fig tree, where the fountain whispered steadily into its basin. The house held its borrowed peace around him in the quiet breathing of sleeping relatives, the scent of cooling bread and lamp oil, and the clean linen folded in rooms that had been offered without suspicion.
It was not his peace.
He reached the blue door just as bare feet touched the stairs behind him. He did not turn, but he knew Leo was there. He could feel the force of her silence, the fury she was holding in place, while the entire house seemed to wait for him to become something better than he was.
He could have told her he was leaving for her sake. He could have asked for her real name, whatever it was, or warned her not to follow because she still had a chance to become something he had never been. But saying any of it would have turned abandonment into love, and if he gave her even that much, she would follow him.
He could not allow it.
Jungkook opened the door. Leo made no sound, and somehow that silence hurt more than any curse she might have thrown after him. He stepped into the lane and closed the door between them.
By the time the first call before dawn rose over New Mecca, he had reached the edge of the port. He did not look back at Namjoon’s house or at the girl who would find a cheap knife beside her and an empty hallway ahead.
Morning touched the city behind him, and Jungkook walked into the dark before it could reach him too.
Leo left before dawn. Night made it easier. It hid faces and tears, and it softened the sight of a girl standing at a blue door with a stolen pack slung over one shoulder, trying not to listen to the house breathing behind her.
Namjoon’s home was never truly silent. Water whispered in the courtyard fountain, the beams creaked as the air cooled, and behind one closed door, Samara shifted in her sleep. Leo knew every sound by now: which tiles clicked beneath bare feet, which latches complained, and which windows could be opened without waking anyone. She had learned the house the way she learned every place, not so she could live in it, but so she could leave it.
Her hand rested on the door. The pack contained little beyond clothes, bread, dried fruit, water, a knife, and several coins taken from Namjoon’s drawer. The coins troubled her most. He would know she had stolen them, and worse, he would understand why.
That was what made him dangerous. Namjoon understood. He forgave. He kept making room for her, and kindness like that was a trap. It made you stop moving. It made you sleep beneath clean blankets and believe the hand feeding you would never close into a fist. It made you soft enough to become Audrey again.
Leo closed her eyes, and her mother’s voice rose from somewhere long buried.
Audrey, te o aratte.
Audrey, soko kara orinasai.
Audrey, otōsan wa neteru yo.
Audrey had scraped knees and hair that fell into her face. She had a favorite cup, a bed, and parents who smelled of soap, sunlight, and engine grease. Then the universe had opened its mouth and swallowed all of it.
Leo’s eyes snapped open.
Audrey was dead. She had died with her parents, during the years spent drifting between worlds, in the crash, and beneath the black sky where creatures hunted by sound. She had died so many times that Leo had finally crawled out of what remained, yet Namjoon’s house kept trying to resurrect her. It did so with bread cooling beneath a cloth, with Samara asking whether she wanted mint in her tea, with errands to the market and neighbors who smiled whenever they saw her.
Now it was trying again with a baby.
Namjoon had told her that afternoon after finding her on the roof at sunset, watching ships rise from the port.
“I have news,” he said, and the warmth and fear in his voice warned her before the words came. “Mari is with child.”
Leo kept her gaze on the lights gathering along the horizon. “Oh.”
“It is early still.”
“Good for you.”
The words came out harsher than she intended, but Namjoon only nodded.
“You’re part of this household, Leo. You’re not being replaced.”
She laughed without humor. “I’m not part of anything.”
“Leo—”
“I’m not your child.” She stood so quickly that her heel scraped across the stone. “And I’m not some charity case.”
“I have never thought of you that way.”
“Bullshit.”
His face tightened, but he let her continue, and somehow his patience only made her angrier.
“I’m happy for you,” she said, twisting the words until they sounded like an accusation. Then she left him there with his happiness and everything she had done to poison it.
Now she stood at the door while the house slept. She should have said goodbye. Namjoon deserved that much, and Samara deserved an apology, but seeing either of them would have been dangerous. Namjoon might put a hand on her shoulder and tell her she still belonged there, and some exhausted part of her might believe him.
One more night would become a week, then a month. The baby would arrive red-faced and furious, and everyone would gather around it as though the universe could still create something untouched. Leo would stand in the doorway remembering her mother’s hands, remembering Audrey, and she could not survive becoming that girl again.
She opened the door.
The lane outside lay blue beneath the moon. Leo eased the latch shut behind her until it clicked, and with that small sound, an entire life closed. She remained there long enough to hate herself, then started walking.
The route to the port already lived inside her. She had mapped the guards, alleys, rooftops, and walls weeks ago, telling herself it was only habit when, in truth, she had begun planning her escape the moment the house started feeling like home.
Anger carried her through the sleeping city. She was angry with Namjoon for his kindness, with Samara for her patience, and with the unborn baby for having a place waiting before it had even taken its first breath. Most of all, she was angry with Jungkook for leaving her.
That was the anger she could use.
She wanted to find him, not because she expected comfort or an apology. Jungkook would give her neither. He would look at her as though she were stupid for following him, and perhaps she needed that. He had never tried to soften her or asked her to belong. He had shown her exactly what the universe was and walked away before she could mistake survival for love.
Somewhere beyond New Mecca, he was still breathing, and Leo intended to find him.
The port glowed beyond the warehouses, where ships crouched beneath white work lamps and crews hauled cargo while cursing over broken equipment and leaking fuel lines. Leo watched from the shadows until she found a battered freighter with its cargo ramp still open. There were no scanners or armed guards, only a handful of workers arguing beside a stack of crates, far more interested in a faulty fuel coupling than in the thin figure slipping along the wall.
It would do.
She moved behind a loader and made for the ramp, but before she reached it, a hand closed around her shoulder. Leo twisted hard, drove her elbow backward, and brought the knife up beneath the man’s ribs before he could recover.
The port worker stumbled away with one hand pressed to his chest. “Crazy little shit.”
Leo backed toward the freighter with the blade raised.
“You don’t belong here,” he said.
She almost laughed. “No kidding.”
His gaze moved from the knife to her face, and whatever he found there made him raise both hands. “Fine. Get spaced for all I care.”
He retreated, but Leo remained where she was, trembling with something brighter and sharper than fear. She had wanted him to fight. The realization should have frightened her. Instead, it felt like proof that she was becoming exactly what she needed to be.
She boarded the freighter while the crew continued arguing outside. The cargo hold smelled of oil, dust, and unwashed bodies. Leo crawled behind a row of water drums and folded herself into the narrow space between them and the wall, knees drawn tight to her chest.
A moment later, the ramp began to rise. The port lights narrowed to a thin white line before disappearing completely, and the locks struck into place one after another, sealing her inside.
Only then did regret come.
It wore Namjoon’s face, not angry, because he was never angry. She saw him standing on the roof with one hand against his chest, protecting the joy she had tried to wound. She saw Samara peeling fruit at the kitchen table, glancing up whenever Leo entered as though still hoping she might finally sit down. She saw the blue door, the fig tree, and water spilling in a silver thread into the courtyard basin.
The baby would have all of it. The child could grow beneath Namjoon’s kindness without Leo’s shadow falling across the house. It could belong without ever learning what belonging cost.
Leo would have the dark.
The engines rumbled beneath her, sending vibrations through the floor and into her bones. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she did not know whether she meant Namjoon, Samara, the baby, Audrey, or herself.
Then the freighter lifted, and New Mecca fell away beneath them: the city of gold and prayer, the house that had offered her a life, and the people who had nearly convinced her to stay.
Leo closed her eyes and clung to her anger, willing it to burn Audrey out of her. She wanted it to silence her mother’s voice, erase the memory of her father’s hands, and destroy the girl who had once believed a home could remain standing simply because people loved one another inside it.
She was not Audrey anymore. She was not Namjoon’s daughter or some abandoned child still waiting for someone to choose her.
She was Leo.
Leo stepped off the freighter with a stiff neck, an empty stomach, and the taste of rust in her mouth. Two days wedged behind water drums and medical scrap had left one side of her body bruised and her throat dry enough that she had spent the last several hours licking condensation from the pipes. Hunger had stopped hurting somewhere along the way. Now it sat quietly inside her, conserving what little strength remained.
No one stopped her or looked twice. The port was little more than a scar of burned concrete and sinking metal carved into the side of a refinery settlement. Smoke dragged itself beneath a yellow-gray sky, floodlights buzzed through the false morning, and chemical rain had left an oily sheen across the ground. Everything smelled of fuel, hot wiring, and too many bodies breathing the same poisoned air.
Good. Lupus 5 was ugly, and it knew it.
Pretty places had begun to make Leo sick. New Mecca had been too golden and too clean, too full of running water and women who touched her sleeve to ask whether she had eaten. It had been crowded with prayers, warm bread, and the promise of a baby born into a house that had nearly convinced her there might still be room for her.
Lupus 5 offered nothing, which made it easier to trust.
She adjusted the stolen pack on her shoulder and joined the workers leaving the freighter. Her gaze stayed lowered, though never harmlessly. She watched hands, belts, weapons, loose credits, and the routes people took whenever guards appeared. She was careful not to look anyone in the face long enough for them to notice she was alone.
The thought struck harder than she expected, and anger rose immediately to meet it. She had chosen this. She had left Namjoon’s house before dawn, taken his money, and hidden aboard the first ship with an open cargo ramp. No one had forced her here.
Jungkook had still left first, and that mattered no matter how often she turned the memory over and tried to sharpen it into something else. He had walked through the blue door without looking back while she stood at the top of the stairs, and he had known she was there.
Of course he had known. Jungkook knew when men lied, when darkness hid teeth, and when a girl pretended to sleep outside his room because asking him to stay would have been worse than watching him leave.
He had known, and he had gone anyway.
Leo hated Jungkook for leaving, but she loved him too, and that made the hatred feel diseased. She loved him for pulling her from the wreck, for never speaking to her as though she might shatter, and for recognizing the knife in her without insisting it was something softer. After her parents died, he had been the first person to make the universe feel understandable. There were monsters outside and monsters within, and you survived both or you did not.
She wanted to find him and hit him until her knuckles split. She wanted to demand an explanation and force him to admit he had left because she mattered too much to ruin. Other times, she wanted him to say she had never mattered at all, because either answer would hurt less than silence.
Worse than any of it, she wanted him to be her father, and the thought turned her stomach because she had already had one. She wanted him to be her brother, her teacher, the thing that stood between her and the dark. Some part of her wanted to crawl beneath his arm and sleep without listening for footsteps, while another wanted never to need anyone that badly again.
A horn blared across the docking yard. Leo flinched, then hated herself for it. Her hand slipped into her jacket pocket and closed around the kitchen knife she had stolen from Namjoon’s house. Once, it had been ordinary, meant for bread, fruit, and meat. Leo had made it into a weapon.
That was what she did now.
She slipped through the port exit behind a mechanic carrying engine parts. Beyond the scanners, narrow streets twisted between lodging blocks and refinery pipes while chemical rain pattered against patched awnings. Men lingered in doorways with their hands near their belts, and children moved quickly through the alleys, their eyes too old for their faces.
One boy noticed her pack. Leo touched the knife, and he smiled, not kindly but knowingly, before disappearing between two stalls. She understood the message well enough.
You’re alone. So am I. Let’s see which of us eats.
Her stomach cramped at the smell of meat blistering over a coil burner, and she stopped before she meant to. The vendor was a broad woman with burn scars running down one arm and metal caps over several teeth.
“Credits,” she said.
Leo pulled one of Namjoon’s coins from her pocket.
The woman laughed. “That’ll buy you smoke.”
Heat climbed into Leo’s face. “How much?”
“For you?” The woman looked over the bad haircut, thin wrists, and stolen pack. “More.”
Anger came quickly. Leo pictured driving the knife through the woman’s hand, not killing her, only pinning it to the counter long enough to take the food and run while everyone watched. The image arrived too easily, so clear that for one terrible second she could almost feel the resistance of flesh beneath the blade.
Then the street vanished, and Youngblood stood before her again. That elegant mouth. Those bright, merciless eyes. The weapon heavy in Leo’s hands. The instant before she fired, followed by the silence afterward, when Youngblood could no longer threaten anyone.
Leo remembered the blood. Worse, she remembered the relief.
At night, Youngblood returned to whisper what Leo already knew.
You wanted to.
The vendor’s smile faded. “You buying?”
Leo realized her grip had tightened around the knife. She stepped back, and the woman dismissed her with a snort before turning away. Leo kept walking before the rage could make the choice for her, chemical rain gathering in her hair and slipping cold beneath her collar. Her hands had begun to shake, so she shoved them beneath her arms and forced herself onward.
She had killed before, but that truth belonged to the crash, to terror, and to survival. Here, hungry on an ordinary street, it felt different. The vendor had not been a monster. She had only been cruel, and Leo had still wanted to hurt her.
Jungkook would have understood, though the thought offered no comfort. Maybe he had left because he had seen this waiting inside her, recognized the direction of the road, and known exactly where it ended. Or perhaps he had planted it there himself.
The anger swelled again, but it no longer belonged only to him. It belonged to Namjoon and his endless forgiveness, to Samara, whose gentleness had made Leo remember what it felt like to be someone’s daughter, and to the unborn child who would arrive already belonging. It belonged to her parents for dying and to Audrey for still existing somewhere inside her, frightened, soft, and impossible to bury.
It belonged to Bindi for being dead.
Bindi had been loud and bright and alive in a way Leo had not known adults could be. She had made danger look embarrassing. Had she lived, perhaps she would have taught Leo that strength could laugh, swear, and swagger without becoming cruel.
And Y/N...
Leo stopped beneath a broken awning.
Y/N was harder to remember, not because the memories had faded, but because they hurt too precisely. Leo could imagine her taking her aboard some practical little ship, rolling her eyes at the haircut, and telling her to stop pretending she did not care. Bindi would be nearby, laughing. They were women who knew how to survive without turning survival into worship, and perhaps Leo could have learned another way from them. Perhaps she could have become hard without becoming hollow.
The possibility opened inside her like a wound. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
Bindi was dead. Y/N was dead. Her parents were dead. Audrey was dead. Jungkook had left, and Leo was hungry.
Those were facts, and facts did not ask to be mourned.
Behind a locked service gate, she found a refuse bin belonging to one of the food stalls. She stared down at vegetable skins, burned bread, stripped bones, and grease-soaked paper while Namjoon’s table rose treacherously in her mind: warm bread wrapped in cloth, food pressed toward her without payment, and Samara pretending not to notice when Leo took a second helping.
Leo climbed the gate and searched through the refuse until she found a piece of bread, wet on one side and reeking of old oil. She tore away the worst of it, swallowed the rest, and felt her body wake ravenous at the first taste of food.
A dog appeared at the mouth of the alley, its ribs sharp beneath its mangy coat. It fixed its eyes on the bone in Leo’s hand and growled. She drew the knife, and the animal lowered its head.
For a moment, they faced one another across the garbage, each thin enough to be desperate and frightened enough to attack. Leo saw herself in the dog and hated it for making her look, so she threw the bone past its head. The animal bolted after it without hesitation.
“Run while you can,” she muttered, but her voice broke on the words.
Leo crouched beside the bin with grease on her fingers and rain dripping from her hair. She wanted Namjoon’s house so badly that the longing nearly folded her in half. She wanted the fountain and the fig tree, Samara’s tea, and the blue door standing unlocked when she returned. She wanted Namjoon to see the stolen coins and forgive her before she could even give them back.
At the same time, she wanted him not to forgive her. She wanted him furious enough to make leaving necessary.
That was what kindness had done to her. It had given her something to betray and nowhere to put the guilt afterward.
She scrubbed roughly at her face and found shelter behind a shuttered machine shop, where warm air leaked from a vent low in the wall. The space beside it was narrow, damp, and hidden from the street, but it was enough. Leo curled there with the pack beneath her head and the knife clenched in one fist while Lupus 5 moved around her. Boots splashed through dirty water, music thudded behind thin walls, and somewhere nearby, someone screamed.
No one answered.
The planet was cruel, indifferent, and honest. Leo told herself she preferred it.
As her eyes grew heavy, the dead gathered around her. Bindi laughed. Y/N turned toward the dark. Youngblood smiled with blood in her teeth, and her mother called Audrey home. Then Jungkook appeared at the end of the corridor with his goggles shining, and as always, he turned away when Leo tried to reach him.
Dad, she never called him. Brother, she never called him. Please, she never said.
Even in dreams, pride kept its teeth buried in her throat.
Leo tightened her grip on the knife. She would find him. She would make him look at her and see what had happened after he left: the hunger, the garbage, and the violence that came too easily. She would force him to tell her whether he had abandoned her to prevent this or because he had known it was inevitable. If he had no answer, she would hate him. If he did, she might hate him more.
Sleep dragged her under before she could decide which would be worse.
The last thing she saw was Y/N disappearing into the dark, brave and doomed, while Leo reached after her too late. This time, just before the dream closed, Y/N turned, and for one impossible second, Leo thought she might come back.
Then her face became Jungkook’s, and he left her all over again.
By the fourth day, Leo woke behind the machine shop curled around a cramp, her cheek stuck to her sleeve while rainwater dripped from a pipe overhead in slow, maddening intervals. Lupus 5 brightened by degrees, the darkness thinning into a dirty yellow beneath the refinery smoke until the whole settlement looked diseased.
Good, she thought. Let it rot.
Her stomach twisted again and forced a small sound from her throat. She hated the weakness of it. It had been nearly a day since she had eaten half a protein square stolen from a drunk, and he had caught her wrist and driven her into a wall before she managed to escape. Before that, there had been bread pulled from a refuse bin and water from a cracked pipe that tasted of rust.
She had thought surviving the creatures meant she knew how to live. Monsters had been simpler. They came screaming out of the dark, all teeth and wings, and you ran or you died. Lupus 5 was slower and crueler. It let her destroy herself by degrees, choosing pride over food until her body began devouring the pride too.
“His fault,” she whispered.
The words sounded weak, so she said them again with more force. “His fault.”
Jungkook had left her in a house full of clean sheets and kind people after teaching her to want something from him that she did not know how to name. He had walked through the blue door without turning around, though she had been awake and he had known it. That was what she could not forgive. Jungkook knew when people lied, when darkness hid teeth, and when a girl sat outside his room with a knife because asking him to stay would have hurt more than watching him leave.
He had known, and he had gone anyway. Had he taken her with him, she would not be here. Had he explained himself, perhaps she would not have followed. Had he looked at her even once as though she mattered enough to warn, she might have been able to hate him cleanly.
Instead, she loved him too.
She loved him for saving her, for never speaking to her as though she were fragile, and for recognizing the ugly things inside her without pretending they were anything else. She wanted to find him and break his nose, then have him put an arm around her and tell her she had done well surviving without him.
She wanted him to be proud of her, and that was the most humiliating hunger of all.
Leo pushed herself upright, but the alley tilted beneath her and she had to brace one hand against the wall to keep from falling. Anger steadied her. It usually did.
The main strip outside the port had already filled with refinery workers and mercenaries. Food stalls steamed beneath patched awnings, filling the wet air with the smell of fried grain, broth, and roasting meat. Leo stopped across from a bakery cart where blistered golden loaves sat stacked in wire trays.
The owner was arguing with two customers while a boy near the corner watched the man’s belt instead of the bread. Another thief. Leo noticed him at the same moment he noticed her, but before either of them could move, a mercenary drinking at the next stall looked up and caught them both.
The boy disappeared into the crowd. Leo stayed where she was, staring at the bread until the mercenary smiled into his cup. Only then did she turn away.
Jungkook would have told her she had waited too long.
“Shut up,” she muttered.
By evening, her hands would not stop shaking. She found herself outside a bar called the Broken Lung, watching plates pass through the open doorway: bowls of stew, black bread, and strips of greasy meat. Still, she could not make herself go inside. The place was crowded with mercenaries, people who made their living dragging others home in chains. No matter how straight she stood, they would see the hungry child beneath the bad haircut and stolen jacket.
Then another thought struck her. Mercenaries knew bounty boards, prison routes, and outlaw names. One of them might know where Jungkook had gone.
For one clean second, Leo forgot her hunger and stepped toward the bar.
A hand caught the back of her jacket and dragged her into the alley beside it. She spun with the knife already raised, only to find three mercenaries surrounding her.
The woman who had grabbed her was tall and lean, with her hair braided close to her scalp and a silver implant gleaming where one eye should have been. A rifle hung across her back. Beside her stood a broad man with a scar disappearing beneath his collar, while the youngest of the three held a steaming bowl of stew.
Leo stared at it before she could stop herself.
The woman noticed. “Well,” she said. “Look at that.”
“Back off.” Leo held the knife between them, though the blade trembled in her hand.
The scarred man laughed. “She’s got teeth.”
“You’ve been working this strip all week,” the woman said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You hungry?”
“No.”
The scarred man’s grin widened. “Must be why she’s shaking.”
Leo wanted to stab him. Not kill him, only open his cheek and make the smile disappear. The thought came so easily that it frightened her.
The woman glanced at the younger man. “Give her the bowl.”
He pulled it closer to his chest. “I just bought this.”
“Give it to her.”
His expression soured, but he held the stew out. Leo did not move. Food was never only food, not when it came from strangers and certainly not from people carrying weapons.
“Think it’s poisoned?” the woman asked. “If we wanted you dead, you’d already be dead.”
Leo’s stomach cramped loudly enough for all three of them to hear. The scarred man laughed again, and humiliation burned through her, nearly strong enough to make her refuse the food. Then the smell reached her, rich, hot, and impossible to ignore, and she snatched the bowl from the younger man’s hands.
Keeping the knife in one hand, she ate with the other. The first mouthful burned her tongue, but she swallowed without chewing and immediately took another. Her stomach seized around the food after days of almost nothing, yet she kept going, scraping the thick sauce from the sides with her fingers as tears stung her eyes. She blinked them away before anyone could mistake them for gratitude.
“Slow down,” the woman said.
Leo ate faster.
When the bowl was nearly empty, the woman asked, “What’s your name?”
“Why?”
“You’re eating my crewman’s dinner.”
“Didn’t ask for it.”
“No,” the woman said. “You didn’t.”
There was no pity in her voice, only calculation, and Leo understood calculation. She studied their armor, the ship patches sewn into the fabric, and the worn weapons and scuffed equipment that had clearly been used rather than carried for show.
A crew meant a ship, and a ship meant information.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asked.
“Passing through.”
“With what money?”
Leo scraped the bottom of the bowl and said nothing.
“Runaway,” the scarred man said.
She looked up. “You bounty hunters?”
“When the money’s right.”
Jungkook’s name rose behind her teeth, but saying it felt dangerous. If they laughed, she might use the knife. If they knew him, then the search would become real.
“I’m looking for someone,” she said.
The woman’s silver eye clicked as it focused. “Who?”
“A convict. Jeon.”
The change in them was slight but immediate. The younger man stopped smirking, and the scarred one straightened while Leo’s heart struck hard against her ribs.
The woman studied her more carefully. “First name?”
“Jungkook.”
The scarred man let out a low whistle.
“You know him,” Leo said.
“Everybody knows of him.”
“Where is he?”
“If we knew that,” the man replied, “we wouldn’t be eating stew on Lupus 5.”
“He’s worth a lot,” the younger mercenary added, but the woman silenced him with a look.
Leo stepped forward, and suddenly the alley no longer swayed beneath her feet. “How much?”
“More than you’ll ever see.”
“Who’s after him?”
“Anyone stupid enough to believe they can bring him in.” The woman glanced at the knife in Leo’s hand. “You know Jeon?”
Leo tightened her fingers around the empty bowl.
Did she know him? She knew the sound of his voice in the dark and the stillness that came over people when he smiled. She knew he could kill with less effort than most men used to light a cigarette. She knew he had saved her, and she knew he had left her.
“I was with him,” she said.
“When?”
“After the Hunter-Gratzner crashed. I survived with him.”
“Thought only Jeon and some holy man made it back,” the younger mercenary said.
“And me.”
The woman looked at her differently after that, no longer seeing only a starving child but something that might contain value. Leo straightened beneath the scrutiny, hating how good it felt to be regarded that way.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Leo.”
“Bit young to be chasing Jungkook Jeon.”
Leo had no answer she was willing to give them. She was following the wound he had left behind, searching for the only person who might understand what she had become because he had helped make her that way.
Instead, she lifted her chin. “Let me join you.”
The mercenaries exchanged glances.
“I can work,” Leo continued. “Carry cargo, watch doors, steal. I know how he thinks.”
The woman’s expression hardened. “Do you?”
Leo knew he would avoid the obvious entrance, that he listened more than he spoke, and that he abandoned any place the moment it began to matter. Most of all, she knew he would leave before anyone could ask him not to.
“Better than you do.”
The scarred man laughed. “I like her.”
Leo stepped closer. “I’ll earn the food.”
There it was, the truth she had been trying not to say, and the woman heard it. For a moment, she examined Leo with the cold attention of someone considering a damaged tool. It should have been insulting, but instead it felt safe. Tools were fed because they were useful, not because anyone loved them.
The woman held out her hand. “Wilde.”
Leo looked at Wilde’s hand but did not take it. After a moment, Wilde lowered it without comment.
“We have a table inside,” she said. “Sit with us, answer a few questions, and you can have another bowl.”
Leo should have walked away. Food was a hook, and a place aboard their ship would be a deeper one. Mercenaries did not give without expecting payment, and whatever they wanted from her would cost more than stew.
But they knew Jungkook’s name. They were the first proof she had found that he was more than a shadow she had invented to keep herself moving.
Leo set the empty bowl on a nearby crate. “Fine. But I’m not stupid.”
Wilde turned toward the bar. “Good. I don’t like stupid people.”
Leo followed them inside, where heat and smoke closed around her. Mercenaries crowded the tables beneath flickering bounty screens, their weapons resting within easy reach. She scanned every face, every exit, and every hand hovering near a holster before a scrolling line of text caught her eye.
JEON, J — STATUS UNKNOWN.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. He was real, and he was alive, or alive enough that no one had managed to prove otherwise.
Wilde called to her from a booth, and Leo forced herself to move. A second bowl arrived moments later, and she wrapped both hands around it, drawing the heat into her aching fingers.
She had accepted their food. Soon, she might accept their ship, their work, and whatever ugliness came with them. None of that mattered.
For the first time since Jungkook had closed the blue door between them, Leo knew where to put all that hunger.
Leo stood on the wrong side of a heavy metallic door with her hands cuffed in front of her, unable to understand what was happening. Not at first. The seal drew itself into place with a hydraulic sigh, followed by the dead, final clunk of the locks engaging, but her mind refused to accept the shape of it.
Wilde had told her to wait there. Dario had told her to keep her mouth shut. Gallant had not looked at her.
That was the part she remembered most clearly. Not the cuffs, the Rykengoll guards in their dark helmets, or the blunt shock-rifles held across their chests. Not even the stale, animal stink of the transfer bay. Gallant had stood near the cargo lift with one hand on his belt and his eyes turned away, as though shame had finally found him but far too late to be useful.
Leo stared at Wilde. “What is this?”
Her voice did not sound frightened, and for half a second, she was proud of that.
Wilde looked back at her, the silver implant in her eye clicking softly as it read Leo’s face the way a scanner read cargo. “Business.”
Leo laughed once because the answer was too stupid to be real. “No.”
Dario shifted behind Wilde. “Don’t make it ugly, kid.”
The word struck something raw. Leo stepped forward, and one of the Rykengoll guards immediately raised his rifle. Wilde lifted a hand, stopping him before he burned Leo down to the floor like refuse.
“You said I could join you,” Leo said. “You bought me food. You said—”
“I said you could sit and talk.” Wilde’s expression remained almost gentle, which made it worse. “And you talked plenty.”
Cold spread through Leo’s stomach. She had told them about Jungkook, the crash, the dark planet, the creatures, Youngblood, and Namjoon. Not everything. Not the softest parts, or the names that still hurt too much to touch, but enough.
More than enough.
She had thought she was proving herself useful. She had believed every answer brought her closer to Jungkook. It had never occurred to her that useful things could be sold.
“You bitch.”
Wilde did not flinch. Dario did, though only slightly, and Leo hated him for having a conscience too weak to matter.
“I can work,” she said quickly, hating the panic beginning to creep into her voice. “I can help you find him. I told you, I know him. I know what he does and how he thinks—”
“Shut the fuck up, kid,” Wilde snapped. “You don’t know shit, or we would’ve had him by now.”
The first guard seized her arm, and Leo fought.
She drove her heel into his shin, twisted hard enough to nearly wrench her own wrist apart, and slammed her shoulder into his chest. Someone cursed. Dario reached for her, and she bit him, sinking her teeth into the flesh of his hand until blood touched her tongue.
He shouted and backhanded her so hard the transfer bay flashed white. Leo dropped to one knee, and then the muzzle of a shock-rifle pressed against the back of her neck.
Pain became the whole universe.
It was nothing like being struck or falling. It was light beneath her skin, white and blue and furious, every muscle in her body seizing until she could no longer tell whether she was screaming or choking. Her teeth cracked together, and her cuffed hands clawed uselessly at the metal floor.
For a few seconds, she was not Leo or Audrey or anything with a name. She was only a body electricity had found.
When it stopped, she lay curled on the grating, shaking. Wilde crouched in front of her, and Leo tried to spit at her but managed only blood.
Wilde’s mouth tightened. “You’ll live longer if you learn to be quiet.”
Leo dragged air back into her lungs. “Jungkook will kill you.”
The name changed the air. It always did.
Wilde leaned closer. “Maybe. But he’d have to come looking first.”
Leo had no answer for that. The door closed behind Wilde with a quiet, final sound, and from that moment on, she belonged to the Rykengolls.
They did not call her Leo. That was the second thing she learned.
Names were among the first things they took, though there was no ceremony to it. No speech, no solemn declaration that her old life was over. The Rykengolls were too efficient for poetry. They processed her in a long gray room that smelled of disinfectant, sweat, and old fear, stripping away her pack, the stolen knife, and the coins she had taken from Namjoon’s drawer.
Then they found the strip of cloth tied around her wrist. Samara had once wrapped bread in it on New Mecca and smiled when Leo pretended not to notice.
When a guard reached for it, Leo lunged.
He caught her by the hair and slammed her face against the metal counter. “Still.”
Blood spilled from her nose and gathered beneath her cheek. Behind the counter, a woman with dull blond hair scraped into a knot scrolled through a screen, wearing the vacant expression of someone who had decided long ago not to see what passed in front of her.
“Sex?” she asked.
Leo’s head rang. “What?”
“Sex.”
“Go to hell.”
The guard twisted her arm until a sound slipped through her teeth.
The woman did not look up. “Female. Approximate age?”
“She says she ran with Jungkook,” another guard said, and several of them laughed.
Leo hated them so much she could barely breathe.
“Fourteen,” one guessed.
“Maybe fifteen.”
“Old enough to bite,” Dario muttered somewhere behind her.
Leo tried to turn toward his voice, but the guard pressed harder until her cheek ground painfully against the counter.
“Designation?” the woman asked.
“She gave one,” said the guard holding her. “Leo.”
The woman paused, and for some reason, that frightened Leo more than the laughter had. At last, her pale, empty eyes lifted.
“No.”
Leo’s chest tightened. “No?”
“Too common in the male block. Causes errors.” The woman returned her attention to the screen. “Trinity.”
Leo went still while the room continued moving around her. Trinity meant nothing, and that was what frightened her. Leo had meant something, even when she pretended otherwise. It was the name she had chosen like a blade, the name Jungkook had known. Leo was the girl who had survived the dark with Namjoon, stolen food on Lupus 5, and stood on a roof in New Mecca telling herself Audrey was dead.
Trinity was blank, nothing more than a tag fastened to a cage, something the Rykengolls could enter into a system, write down, and own.
The guard lifted her head by the hair just far enough for her to see the woman’s bored face. “No,” Leo said again, though the word came out weaker this time.
The woman finally looked annoyed. “Quiet, girl.”
Leo’s throat closed. The name mattered because there was almost nothing else left.
The guard shoved her forward, and someone snapped a band around her wrist, dark metal wrapped over a strip of embedded code. It tightened until it bit into her skin. Leo tried to pull away, but a shock-rifle touched her ribs, and her body remembered the pain before her pride could answer. She froze.
“Trinity,” the woman said as she passed a scanner over the band. It blinked green. “Labor intake. Rykengoll property. Transfer grade pending.”
Leo looked toward Dario. He stood near the exit with a bandage wrapped around the hand she had bitten, refusing to meet her eyes.
“Please,” she said.
He looked up then, and for one second, something human crossed his face. Leo hated herself more for seeing it than she hated him. She had begged. Not loudly or well, barely at all, but she had done it, and now the sound would live inside her forever as one more thing to wake from.
Dario looked away.
The guards took her through another door, and after that, everything dissolved into movement: corridors, gates, hands, orders, numbers. They shoved her into a narrow transport that stank of bodies, then carried her down into a compound carved partly from rock and partly from the remains of some old industrial ruin.
Rykengoll territory was not a city. It was a throat, and everything went down.
They descended through processing, past holding pens, and into the work levels, where heat breathed from the vents and chains rattled overhead. Mineral damp sweated from the walls, lights flickered behind wire cages, and people in gray uniforms moved beneath them with bands around their wrists and eyes that never rose unless someone forced them to.
Leo kept waiting for an opening: a guard glancing away, a door left ajar, a hand loosening around her arm. None came.
The Rykengolls were not stupid. That was the third thing she learned, and perhaps the worst. Cruel people were supposed to be stupid. In stories, arrogance made them careless, but the Rykengolls had done this too many times. They knew where fear became resistance and where resistance gave way to collapse. They knew exactly how far to push before a body broke in ways that stopped being profitable.
At last, they put Leo in a holding cell with six others and no window. The door closed behind her with the same final sound as before, metal deciding the course of her life.
She stood in the middle of the cell with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at the sealed door until the other prisoners slowly came into focus. A woman with bruises circling both wrists sat against the wall, rocking faintly. An old man lay on his side with his eyes open, while two boys whispered in one corner, their voices dry and quick. Someone younger than Leo slept with their face turned toward the wall.
The sixth prisoner was a broad-shouldered girl with a shaved head and a split eyebrow. She watched Leo the way one dog watched another near a bone.
“What’d they call you?” she asked.
Leo said nothing.
The girl’s mouth twisted. “Fine.”
Leo crossed to the far wall and slid down it, drawing her knees against her chest. Her whole body hurt. Her jaw throbbed where Dario had struck her, her wrist burned beneath the metal band, and her ribs still ached where the shock-rifle had touched her. Beneath all of it ran a deeper trembling that no amount of clenching could hide.
She was afraid. The realization humiliated her so badly that she nearly gagged. Leo pressed a fist to her mouth and bit down on her knuckle until the pain gave her something smaller to hold.
Jungkook would know what to do.
The thought came before she could stop it, and the hatred followed close behind. Jungkook had done this. Not Wilde, Dario, or the Rykengolls with their records, bands, and shock-rifles. Not really. They were only the hands the universe had used. Jungkook had left her hungry enough to trust a bowl of stew, lonely enough to speak his name to strangers, and desperate enough for him that anyone who had heard of him could lead her by the throat.
It was his fault. All of it.
She closed her eyes and saw him at the blue door in New Mecca, walking away without turning around. “You son of a bitch,” she whispered.
The shaved-headed girl snorted. “Talking to yourself already?”
Leo opened her eyes. The girl nodded toward the metal band around her wrist. “New name?”
Leo’s lips felt numb, but before she could answer, a guard called from the corridor.
“Trinity.”
No one moved. Something metal struck the door with a sharp clang, and the shaved-headed girl looked at Leo. One by one, the others followed her gaze. Leo sat perfectly still, barely breathing, until the door opened and a guard filled the frame.
“Trinity.”
“That’s not my name,” Leo said.
The guard glanced down at his screen. “It is here.”
He looked bored, and Leo had already begun to fear that expression more than hatred or amusement. Bored men did not see people. They saw tasks.
“Stand.”
Leo stayed where she was until the guard raised his shock-rifle. Then her body obeyed before her mind could agree, hauling her upright so quickly that her knees nearly buckled. The shaved-headed girl looked away, and Leo was grateful for the small mercy of not being watched.
They fed her in a room lined with long tables bolted to the floor. Gray mash, hard bread, and water with a chemical bite. It was not enough, but hunger had stripped away what little pride she had left, so Leo ate. Around her, the others did the same, quickly and in silence. No one spoke unless they had already learned who was safe, and no one looked at the guards.
Leo did.
There were six in the room: two stationed near the door, one on the upper catwalk, and three moving between the tables. They carried batons, shock-rifles, and sidearms. One had a ring of keys hanging from his belt, though they were probably useless without the proper codes. Cameras watched from the corners, the vents were too narrow to crawl through, and there were no windows.
Her hands shook around the bread. One of the guards noticed and smiled faintly, so Leo lowered her eyes before he could see how much she hated him, or how much more she hated herself for being afraid.
That night, or what passed for night underground, they returned her to the cell. The lights dimmed but never went out. The compound allowed no true darkness, perhaps because the Rykengolls thought it kinder, though Leo doubted kindness had anything to do with it. More likely, they understood that half-light was worse, leaving every shape unfinished and every movement possible.
Leo curled on the floor with her pack gone, her knife gone, and her name gone. Sleep came in pieces, and the nightmares had changed.
Before, they had chased her. Creatures on wings. Youngblood with blood on her mouth. Y/N turning toward the dark again and again, always too far away to save. Leo knew those dreams. She hated them, but at least they belonged to her.
Now the nightmares wore new hands. Wilde offered her food. Dario told her not to make things ugly. Gallant looked away while Namjoon stood on the roof with disappointment and love mixed painfully across his face. Jungkook waited behind him, silent and already leaving.
The Hunter-Gratzner’s cargo hold became the transfer bay, and the creatures circling above wore Rykengoll helmets, their wings clicking like scanner implants. Youngblood sat behind the intake counter stamping forms, her elegant fingers clean and white while Leo’s blood spread across the metal.
Designation? Youngblood asked.
Leo tried to answer, but her mouth filled with black sand.
Designation?
The creatures screamed overhead, and at the end of the corridor stood Y/N, not as she had died but as Leo had always wanted her to be: alive, breathless, and fierce, with one hand outstretched.
“Come on, Leo.”
Leo reached for her, but the band around her wrist tightened. Y/N’s face shifted, becoming Wilde’s and then her mother’s.
No. No, no.
“Audrey,” her mother said.
Leo screamed in her sleep and woke with someone’s hand clamped over her mouth. For one blind second, she fought as though the creatures had found her, clawing at the wrist, kicking, twisting, and trying to bite.
The hand held firm. “Quiet,” a voice hissed. “Quiet, you idiot.”
It was the shaved-headed girl.
Leo stopped fighting, her chest heaving, and the girl withdrew her hand before crouching beside her. “You want them coming in here?”
Leo stared around the cell, unable at first to understand where she was. Slowly, the half-light returned, followed by the damp walls, the bodies scattered across the floor, and the smell of fear and unwashed skin.
Not the dark planet. Not Youngblood’s ship. Not New Mecca.
Not home.
She almost laughed. There was no home left.
The girl sat back. “You were screaming.”
Leo wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “No, I wasn’t.”
The girl gave her a flat look, and from the corner, one of the boys muttered, “Yes, you were.”
“Shut up,” Leo snapped, but her voice cracked, and silence settled over the cell again.
The shaved-headed girl studied her for a moment, then leaned against the wall nearby instead of returning to her place. She stayed far enough away that it could not be mistaken for comfort. She did not speak or touch Leo again. She was simply there, and somehow that made it worse.
Leo hated that she noticed.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked quietly.
Leo turned away. “You heard them.”
Her throat tightened. The girl waited while Leo pressed her wrist against her chest, hiding the band as though that might make it disappear.
She wanted to say Leo. She wanted to spit the name like blood and dare the room to take it from her. Part of her even wanted to say Audrey once, just to learn whether it still belonged to something living.
But Leo had been sold, and Audrey was dead. The band around her wrist blinked softly in the half-light, patient as a verdict.
“Trinity,” she whispered.
The girl nodded once, as though that settled something. Leo wanted to take the name back, to tear it from the air before it could touch her skin, but it was already there, already heard and already easier than fighting every guard, every door, every form, and every voice.
She lay down facing the wall, and the girl said nothing more. Leo stared at the damp stone until the shapes in it began to shift, becoming teeth and wings, her mother’s hand, Y/N’s eyes, and Jungkook’s goggles catching a light that was not there.
She was terrified in a way anger could not fix. No one had ever told her that anger was fire, but fear was stone. It filled her limbs, settled across her chest, and made her feel small inside her own body. She could hate Jungkook until her bones cracked with it, blame him, curse him, and promise herself she would spit in his face if she ever saw him again, but none of it opened the door, returned her knife, loosened the band around her wrist, or changed the sound of guards moving through the corridor.
When the footsteps stopped outside the cell, Leo went rigid.
The viewing slot snapped open, and a guard looked inside, his face hidden behind smoked glass. His gaze moved over the bodies on the floor before settling on her.
“Trinity.”
Leo did not move. Across from her, the shaved-headed girl opened her eyes.
The guard tapped his baton against the door. “Trinity.”
Leo’s heart hammered hard enough to split her ribs. For a moment, she was the girl outside Jungkook’s room with a knife in her hand, pretending to sleep. She was Audrey in her mother’s kitchen. She was Leo on a dead planet, staring up at a black sky and realizing the darkness was full of mouths.
Then all those girls fell away. She was only a body on the floor, a band around her wrist, and a name she had not chosen.
The shaved-headed girl watched without judgment, and somehow that made the surrender hurt more. Leo looked toward the guard.
“I’m coming,” she whispered.
He stepped away from the slot. Leo rose in the half-light and waited for the door to open, telling herself that answering did not make the name hers, that they had not taken Leo from her.
But when the lock released, it was Trinity who walked toward the door.
Trinity woke with one hand clamped over her mouth and, for several seconds, did not understand that it belonged to her. The dream still occupied the room, clinging to the damp stone behind her bunk and the low red maintenance light that made everything look skinned. Her heart battered against her ribs, and her breath came hot against her palm while every muscle remained braced for something that had already happened.
No. Nothing here was ever truly over. It only changed shape and waited.
She lowered her hand slowly as the cell returned around her: the cracked ceiling stained with mineral runoff, the pipe ticking above her bunk, and the smell of iron, bodies, old smoke, and the sour chemical wash the Rykengolls used to pretend filth could be controlled. Somewhere beyond the door, a cart rattled over uneven flooring. Farther down the corridor, someone coughed until the sound turned wet.
Trinity lay still and listened. Before moving, listen. Before speaking, listen. Before trusting silence, listen harder.
There were no footsteps outside, no keys turning, no low laughter drawing closer. No guard leaned toward the viewing slot to call her designation. There was only the compound and the sound of her own breathing.
She sat up too quickly, and pain moved through her, dull and intimate, buried deep in muscle and skin. Closing her eyes, she waited for it to pass.
She did not cry. She had not cried in front of anyone in years, and crying alone did not count because no one was ever truly alone here. The walls listened, cameras watched, vents carried sound, and someone was always pretending to sleep.
Sixteen. That was what the clerk had entered into her file the week before: approximate age, sixteen. As though she were cargo being weighed and marked, as though her age mattered only because buyers had begun requesting her by Trinity.
The favorite.
The others used the word when they wanted to hurt her, sometimes with envy, sometimes with pity, and sometimes with the particular cruelty of people who had been broken long enough to resent someone else’s shape of suffering.
She was a favorite because she was pretty now, and that was the joke the universe had saved for her. Hunger had carved the softness from her face, but time had returned some of it differently. Her cheekbones had sharpened, her mouth had filled out, and her eyes looked older than everything around them. Her hair had grown past her shoulders, thick, dark, and curling no matter how badly she treated it.
In another life, someone might have brushed it beside a window and called it beautiful. Here, beauty was inventory, and curls only gave hands something easier to catch.
Trinity gathered the hair at the nape of her neck and twisted until her scalp hurt. Once, she had hacked it short with a stolen shard of metal while crouched behind a waste processor. She had liked herself better afterward, sharp, unfinished, and difficult to hold. The Rykengolls had punished her for it, not because they cared about the hair, but because she had made a decision about her own body without permission.
Now she kept it long because long hair made certain days easier, and favors here were often nothing more than the absence of something worse. Defiance had a price, and survival was an account that was always running low. She hated every calculation and made them anyway.
The nightmare still shifted behind her eyes. Wilde’s silver implant clicked in the dark. The transfer-bay door sealed. Youngblood smiled with blood on her teeth. Y/N reached for her, only for that hand to become a guard’s closing around Trinity’s wrist. Namjoon called her child, and Jungkook turned away at the blue door.
Then the dream descended into the room she refused to remember directly, into the weight of being chosen and the voices outside pretending not to hear.
Trinity bent forward and pressed her forehead to her knees. No details. She would not give her mind details.
Details were hooks: a smell, a voice, the scrape of a chair, fingers against her jaw. Whenever memory came, she built a wall against it brick by brick, anger by anger, until only a blank red place remained where the thing had been. Tonight, however, the wall had cracked, and her body remembered what her mind would not.
For three years, the Rykengolls had taught her the language of ownership. They taught it through locked doors and metal bands, through food withheld and food offered, through work no one asked whether she wanted and men who spoke her name as though they had purchased the right to soften it.
Come here, Trinity. Smile, Trinity. Good girl, Trinity.
There was no good left in her. Once, she had believed that meant they had ruined her, but she knew better now. Ruined meant useless, and Trinity was not useless.
She was alive.
She could still count exits. She remembered which guards drank, which carried their keys on the left side, and which cameras lagged when the power dipped. She knew which doors opened during shift change and which smiles made men careless. She could lower her eyes without surrendering, let them believe they had won, and hold on to her hatred when nothing else remained. Some nights, it was the only part of her that still stood upright.
Across the cell, her reflection waited in the warped sheet of metal bolted beside the washbasin. It was not meant to be a mirror, but the Rykengolls liked their property presentable.
Trinity lifted her head and studied the stranger the red light had made of her. Tangled curls hung over one shoulder, her split lip had nearly healed, and a bruise at her collarbone had begun yellowing around the edges. Years underground had leached the color from her skin except where heat, labor, or hands had marked it.
Sixteen, the file said, though she looked older and felt ancient. Somehow, she also felt small.
That was what she despised most. Not the pain or shame, or even the fear that returned no matter how often she tried to kill it, but the smallness afterward. The hollow place where she withdrew from herself and watched from far away while Trinity moved, Trinity obeyed, Trinity survived.
Audrey would have cried, and Leo would have run. Trinity stayed.
The thought should have sounded like defeat, but it did not. Staying was not the same as surrendering, just as obedience was not always submission. Sometimes survival meant bending low enough for the blade to pass overhead and waiting until it was safe to stand again.
She had not escaped yet.
The truth settled heavily against her spine. Three years beneath Rykengoll stone. Three years of waking, working, being selected, and being returned. Three years of believing she had reached the bottom of what she could endure, only to discover another level waiting beneath it.
There were mornings when breathing felt like labor she had never agreed to perform and days when standing seemed impossible. She understood the prisoners whose eyes had emptied, who answered to any name and moved wherever the guards directed them. She understood them, and she feared becoming them, so she refused.
It was not because she still believed someone would rescue her. Hope was a bright, foolish thing, and the Rykengolls had crushed it early. She no longer imagined Namjoon arriving with mercy in his hands, Y/N walking out of the dark, or Jungkook finally coming for her. She had learned better.
Sometimes she wondered whether he was dead, though the thought hurt in ways she refused to examine. If Jungkook was dead, then all her anger had nowhere to go. He would never learn what his leaving had made possible, never see the band around her wrist or hear the name they had forced over hers. But if he was alive, then he had remained gone, and somehow that was worse.
Trinity’s fingers curled around the edge of the bunk. Some part of her had stayed alive for the chance to stand before him again.
Look, she would tell him. Look what happened after you left. Look what they called me. Look what I survived without you.
A sound caught in her throat, somewhere between a sob and a laugh. She pressed her fist to her mouth until it passed.
The corridor lights brightened with the morning cycle. Doors clanged open farther down the block, a guard shouted for labor intake, and somewhere nearby one prisoner cursed while another retched. The compound resumed around her, indifferent to whatever the night had done.
Trinity rose, her legs trembling once before they steadied beneath her, and crossed to the basin to splash cold water over her face. Pain that served a purpose was almost clean. She scrubbed at her mouth and neck until the motion began to feel desperate, as though she were trying to erase evidence from skin that no longer belonged to her.
But it did belong to her.
It was hers even if they touched it, marked it, and entered it into a file as property. It was hers despite the band around her wrist blinking green. Her body had carried her through every room and survived every hand. Whatever the Rykengolls believed they owned, they had not taken that from her.
She gripped the basin and leaned toward her warped reflection. The girl in the metal looked exhausted, bruised, and frightened, but she was still there. Beneath the fear and the gray weight settled into her bones, anger remained in all its forms: old anger, young anger, Rykengoll anger, Jungkook anger, and perhaps even Audrey’s anger, if Audrey had not turned entirely to dust.
It stirred inside her now, stretching awake and refusing the grave they kept digging.
A guard stopped outside, and the viewing slot snapped open. His gaze moved over her hair, her face, and the bruises he did not care enough to name.
“Ready?”
Trinity wiped the water from her chin and smiled. It was not a pleasant smile, but it belonged entirely to her.
“Yeah.”
Her voice was hoarse from nightmares and from all the screaming she had swallowed. The lock disengaged, the door opened, and Trinity stepped into the corridor with her head raised and the wristband cold against her pulse.
Trinity had not planned to escape that night. Later, if anyone asked, if anyone dragged the story from her with threats, knives, or the awful false gentleness people used when they wanted pain wrapped neatly in words, she would not know how to explain the truth of it. There had been no perfect moment, no signal, and no grand decision made with her back straight and her eyes dry. There had only been a door left unlatched, a guard who thought she was too tired to notice, a keycard hanging from his belt, a knife resting on a tray, and three years of rage rising so quickly inside her that it drowned out fear.
The night cycle had sunk the Rykengoll compound into its usual half-dark. Never true darkness, because they knew what darkness did to prisoners. They knew what people whispered into it and what hope might become if no camera could see. Instead, they kept the corridors narrow and washed in red light, the cells dim but visible, and the workrooms bruised by emergency lamps. There was enough light to remind everyone they were being watched, but never enough to make anyone feel human.
Trinity stood in the washroom off the east corridor with one hand braced against the cracked basin, breathing through her mouth. Her lip had split again, though not badly enough to warrant treatment or count as damage by anyone’s measure but her own. Blood had dried at the corner of her mouth and tracked down her chin, while the band around her wrist blinked green in the warped mirror plate, patient as ever.
She stared at her reflection. The girl in the metal looked half-feral, with long curls tangled around her shoulders, one eye shadowed by an older bruise, and a fresh mark darkening near her throat. Her gray work tunic hung crookedly from one shoulder, torn where someone had grabbed too hard.
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Don’t go back there.
But the room came anyway. The hands. The laughter beyond the door. The rust-colored stain on the wall she had stared at while counting her breaths because leaving her body had been the only door they could not lock.
She turned on the tap and splashed cold water over her face once, then twice, then again until the dried blood loosened and ran in thin pink threads down the drain. Her hands were shaking, so she pressed them flat against the basin and willed them to stop.
Behind her, a guard laughed. Not at her, exactly. He leaned in the doorway with his helmet tucked beneath one arm, talking to another guard in the corridor with the careless ease of a man at the end of his shift, already thinking about food, sleep, and whatever passed for pleasure in a place like this.
A dull black keycard hung from his belt, fastened to a steel clip.
Trinity saw it in the mirror and looked away too quickly. The guard noticed.
“What?” he asked.
She lowered her head. “Nothing.”
He stepped into the washroom, and the air changed.
Her body recognized him before her mind allowed his face to sharpen. He belonged to the night crew and carried Rykengoll blood, not merely the uniform. She knew because the others used his family name like a shield. Dain Rykengoll, cousin to someone important and brother to someone worse, a man raised with keys in his hand and the belief that cruelty was a family tradition.
He moved closer, and Trinity’s breathing shortened.
“I asked you a question.”
“No, you didn’t.”
The words escaped before she could stop them. Silence tightened around the room, and the second guard in the corridor stopped speaking.
Dain smiled at her reflection. “That mouth,” he said softly. “Always that mouth.”
Trinity closed her eyes. Fear came first, as it always did, no matter how deeply she despised it. Cold, bright, and humiliating, it slipped beneath her skin and hollowed out her bones, making her feel small while the room stretched too wide and every exit seemed farther away than it was.
Dain stepped close enough for his chest to brush her shoulder. “Turn around.”
When Trinity opened her eyes, the keycard was still swinging at his hip. Beside the basin, a short maintenance blade rested on a narrow metal tray. It was not a weapon, at least not officially, but a flat utility knife used to scrape sealant from pipes. Someone had left it behind, perhaps a careless worker or the universe itself, bored at last and curious to see what she would do with a gift.
Her gaze moved from the blade to the keycard, then to the girl reflected in the warped metal.
“Trinity,” Dain said.
She turned, and her hand closed around the knife before Dain understood what she was doing. There was no grace in the movement and no training worth naming, only panic, rage, and the memory of every hand that had ever held her down. She drove the blade upward into the soft place beneath his ribs.
His eyes widened. For one suspended second, they looked equally surprised. Then he made a wet, offended sound, and Trinity froze with the knife still buried in him.
She had imagined killing countless times, in bunks and corridors, in half-sleep and dreams where she tore the compound open with her teeth, but none of it had prepared her for the warmth of blood spilling over her fingers or the terrible intimacy of standing close enough to feel his breath fail against her cheek.
Dain seized her by the hair, and pain ripped across her scalp. Trinity screamed, not from fear this time but fury, and drove the blade deeper. His grip loosened. She tore the keycard from his belt as he collapsed against the basin, knocking his helmet to the floor with a hollow clang.
The second guard shouted from the corridor, and Trinity ran. Her legs nearly failed beneath her, the keycard slick in her hand, while the blade remained buried in Dain because she had forgotten to pull it free.
Stupid. She needed a weapon.
The guard raised his rifle. Trinity threw herself sideways as he fired, and the shot struck the wall where her head had been, bursting sparks from a conduit. The red lights flickered, but no alarm followed. Not yet. Perhaps he had missed the panic switch, or the blast had damaged something important. Perhaps luck, ugly and late, had finally noticed her.
She drove into him low and shoulder-first, the way she had seen workers strike jammed cargo doors. He was larger, armored, and prepared for a prisoner to cower, not to hit him like something hurled from a machine. They struck the floor hard, and the rifle skidded out of reach.
His hand closed around her throat.
Trinity clawed at his face, her nails catching skin. He cursed and slammed the back of her head against the floor, sending white light across her vision as his fingers tightened and her lungs seized.
Not here. Not beneath him. Not again. She would not die on a Rykengoll floor while somewhere nearby a door stood open.
Her searching hand found his belt and then the baton. She tore it free and hit the trigger more by accident than skill. Electricity cracked blue-white as she drove it into his side. The guard convulsed, his grip spasming around her throat, and Trinity struck him again.
She kept going long after his body stopped fighting, after the smell of scorched fabric and skin filled the corridor, and after she knew he was dead. She held the trigger until the baton finally died in her hand.
Only then did she shove him away and crawl backward, gagging. She could not breathe. Her throat burned beneath the bruises his fingers had left, blood from her scalp ran warm behind one ear, and her knees shook so violently that she had to brace herself against the wall before she could stand.
Footsteps echoed from the far corridor.
Trinity snatched up the rifle. It was too heavy, and she had no idea how to hold it properly, but that no longer mattered. She had watched enough guards use one to understand the basics: point, pull the trigger, brace for the kick.
The keycard flashed green at the first junction door, and the lock released. Trinity slipped through and nearly collided with a woman in gray technician’s coveralls. For half a second, they simply stared at one another.
The woman was not a guard, nor was she armed, but that did not make her innocent. No one who wore the Rykengoll crest by choice was innocent. The hooked black emblem stitched onto her shoulder marked her as house personnel, perhaps a cousin, clerk, or handler, one of the people who moved papers and bodies while pretending distance kept their hands clean.
The woman looked past Trinity, saw the blood and the rifle, and opened her mouth. Trinity struck her with the butt of the weapon, knocking her to one knee with a cry. She could have run. She should have run.
Then the woman reached for the alarm panel.
Trinity fired.
The shot was enormous in the narrow corridor. The woman slammed against the wall and slid down it, leaving a dark smear behind. Trinity remained frozen with the rifle trembling between both hands until her stomach heaved. She turned and vomited against the wall, though nothing came up but bile and water.
Her body wanted to collapse, and her mind wanted to crawl into some dark corner and shake until the guards found her. Anger dragged her upright by the throat, and she moved.
The alarm began as a low pulse through the walls, something felt more than heard. Then the lights snapped from red to white, blinding after so long in dimness. Doors slammed throughout the corridor grid while men shouted codes somewhere beyond them.
Trinity ran harder, her boots slipping in blood and striking metal as she took the service stairs two at a time. She had memorized the route in fragments over three years without ever truly believing she would use it, because belief had always hurt too much. East washroom to junction, junction to lower service stair, stair to processing level, processing to cargo lift, and from there to the exterior docking ring where Rykengoll ships and hired haulers came and went beneath the shielded rock. She had no complete map, only scraps, but scraps would have to be enough.
At the processing door, Dain’s keycard blinked red. Trinity swiped it again, then a third time, and each failure threw the same small light back at her while footsteps echoed somewhere above.
“No,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “No.”
Through the reinforced window, she could see the room beyond: counters, screens, cabinets, and the desk where they had named her. It was the place where Leo had died because a bored clerk needed something easier to enter into a file.
Trinity backed away and fired into the lock. The first shot ricocheted with a metallic scream, making her flinch so violently that she nearly dropped the rifle. The second struck deep inside the panel and sent sparks spilling across the floor. She kicked the door, pain flashing through her foot, then kicked it again with a scream until the damaged lock finally gave way in a grinding shriek.
She stumbled into processing and found the room occupied. Of course it was.
A clerk sat behind the central counter, staring at her with wide eyes. She looked older than the woman who had named Trinity, though perhaps she was the same person and Trinity had simply stopped noticing age in those who hurt her. At the far end of the room, a guard stood beside a cabinet with his helmet off and a cup in one hand. His gaze dropped to the rifle.
Trinity fired first and missed. The shot destroyed a screen behind him, scattering glass and sparks across the counter. The guard dropped his cup and lunged for his sidearm, but she fired again. The rifle kicked into her shoulder hard enough to bruise bone, and the guard spun into the cabinet before sliding down with a shocked grunt.
He was not dead. Not yet.
When he tried to raise the pistol, Trinity crossed the room and fired at close range.
The clerk was screaming now, crouched behind the counter with both hands over her head. Trinity turned the rifle toward her, and the sound stopped.
For one suspended second, she wanted to pull the trigger. Not because she had to or because the woman stood between her and the door, but because she remembered the intake screen.
Female. Approximate age. Designation. Trinity.
She remembered her blood on the metal counter and the casual theft of the last thing that had belonged to her.
The clerk stared up at her, trembling. “Please.”
Trinity’s finger tightened around the trigger. She had said that once to Dario, and the memory struck hard enough to make her sway. Slowly, she lowered the barrel half an inch.
“Open the exterior lift,” she said, her voice ragged.
“I can’t.”
The rifle rose again.
“I can. I can,” the clerk sobbed. “Don’t shoot. Please.”
“Do it.”
The woman moved to the console with shaking hands while Trinity kept the rifle trained on her, though her arms were beginning to weaken. Her shoulder screamed, blood ran from her scalp, and her throat felt crushed beneath every breath. Every sound in the compound had become a threat: boots pounding against metal, alarms pulsing through the walls, distant voices shouting, doors slamming, and power humming behind the panels.
The clerk entered a code. A moment later, the screen flashed.
LIFT ACCESS: OPEN.
Trinity backed toward the exit.
“They’ll find you,” the clerk whispered.
She stopped. For a moment, she was no longer standing in processing. She was in an alley on Lupus 5 with a bowl of stew in her hands, believing she had found a way forward. She was in Namjoon’s house with one hand resting on a blue door. She was aboard the Hunter-Gratzner with the dark alive above her. She was every girl she had ever been, each one furious with the next for surviving.
Trinity looked at the clerk. “Let them try.”
The cargo lift had already begun to rise when Trinity reached it. She threw herself through the narrowing gap, scraping her hip against the metal frame before hitting the floor inside. The doors slammed shut behind her, and the lift jolted upward, trapping her in a metal box while alarms pulsed through the shaft.
She pressed herself into a corner with the rifle raised, every breath tearing through her bruised throat. Fear had sunk its teeth into her hands, knees, and lungs. It told her she was already dead, that guards would be waiting when the doors opened, and that Dain Rykengoll would rise from the washroom floor and follow her with blood in his mouth. It told her Jungkook had never been afraid like this because Jungkook was not weak, and she was.
Trinity tightened her grip on the rifle.
The doors opened onto chaos. The exterior docking ring was a cavern carved into black rock, half hangar and half open wound. Ships crouched beneath hanging work lamps while fuel lines twisted across the floor. Workers scattered as alarm strobes washed everything in alternating white and red, and guards ran toward the compound entrance rather than away from it. None of them had expected a bleeding girl with a rifle to emerge from the cargo lift.
Trinity stepped out and fired into the ceiling. The shot cracked through the cavern, sending workers screaming to the floor, and she ran toward the smallest ship she could see: an ugly utility shuttle with its ramp lowered and its engine panels hanging open. It looked like a two-seater, perhaps short-range, but she neither knew nor cared. Its nose pointed toward the launch tunnel, and that was enough.
A mechanic rose from beside the landing strut with his hands raised. “Hey—”
“Move.”
“You don’t know how to fly that.”
Trinity almost laughed. Her mouth tasted of blood. “No shit.”
The mechanic glanced past Trinity toward the approaching guards, and she swung the rifle at his head. He ducked just enough for the stock to glance off his temple instead of cracking his skull, but the blow still sent him down cursing. When he caught her ankle, she kicked him hard in the face, tore herself free, and scrambled up the ramp.
Inside, the shuttle smelled of oil, heated plastic, and stale smoke. Controls glowed across the cramped cockpit in patterns that meant nothing to her: too many switches, too many screens, and a pilot’s harness hanging loose beside a cracked navigation display. Warning lights flashed everywhere because the ramp was still down, the engine panels were open, and the ship had not been cleared for launch. It was not ready, and it certainly was not hers.
Trinity dropped into the pilot’s seat and stared.
She had watched pilots before. She had listened. Y/N’s hands moved through her memory, confident, quick, and alive. The Hunter-Gratzner’s cockpit had been all noise and terror, but Y/N had made machines answer her. Leo had watched from doorways while pretending not to care. Later, in New Mecca, she had questioned mechanics passing through the port, and aboard Wilde’s ship, she had listened whenever the crew discussed fuel, vectors, or docking clamps.
She had only pieces, but pieces would have to be enough.
“Come on,” she whispered.
She found the ramp control by its shape rather than its label and struck it. The ramp began to rise just as a shot punched through the rear bulkhead. Trinity screamed and ducked, fumbling for the hatch seal while another round cracked the cockpit glass without breaking through. Guards shouted outside, and the mechanic rolled beneath the shuttle seconds before the ramp locked into place.
Now she needed the engines.
Her fingers flew over the switches. One killed the cabin lights. Another opened a comm channel crowded with shouting voices. A third set off an alarm directly above her head, and she silenced it with her fist. Then the floor began to vibrate, and the first engine woke with a rough cough.
A broken sound escaped her, somewhere between laughter and a sob. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”
The second engine refused to start. She hit the switch again, but nothing happened. Then a guard appeared in front of the shuttle with his rifle raised, and Trinity seized the control yoke and shoved it forward.
The shuttle lurched sideways instead of ahead. Metal screamed as the landing gear scraped across the hangar floor, forcing the guard to dive clear. Trinity overcorrected and slammed into a stack of cargo crates, sending them tumbling across the dock. Something exploded behind her, small but bright, and the cockpit erupted in warning tones.
“Shut up!” she shouted at the ship.
Her hand struck the throttle by accident.
The shuttle shot forward so violently that her head snapped against the seat. The launch tunnel rushed toward her, narrow, low, and impossible. Trinity hauled on the yoke, clipped the left wall, and sent a sheet of sparks across the cockpit glass. The ship shuddered from nose to tail, but she clenched her teeth and kept the throttle open.
Gunfire erupted behind her. Ahead, the tunnel opened into night, and the shuttle burst from the rock like a badly fired bullet.
Atmosphere caught the ship and hurled it sideways. Clouds swallowed the cockpit while lightning flashed somewhere to her left. The navigation display screamed warnings in a language of blinking red that she could not understand, so she climbed because down meant the Rykengolls, and anything above them had to be better.
“Up,” she gasped. “Come on. Up.”
The shuttle climbed in ugly, uneven bursts, fighting her every second. One engine burned erratically while the other sputtered, caught, died, and caught again. The controls trembled beneath her hands, blood from her scalp ran down the back of her neck and into her collar, and the pain in her injured shoulder had faded into a dangerous numbness.
Then the ship broke through the clouds. The planet dropped away beneath her, and the stars appeared.
Trinity froze.
For the first time in three years, there was nothing above her head. No rock, no ceiling, no pipes or red lights, only blackness stretching vast and endless in every direction.
Her breath stopped. The void looked too much like the dead planet, too much like all those mouths waiting beyond the reach of light. For one mindless second, she expected wings to blot out the stars, shrieks to scrape across the hull, and claws to strike the cockpit glass. She nearly turned back, not because she wanted to, but because terror had no sense of direction.
Then the comm crackled.
“Unidentified shuttle, return to dock immediately. You are carrying Rykengoll property. Repeat, return to dock—”
Trinity struck buttons until the voice disappeared. She stared through the cracked glass at the stars and laughed once, low, shaking, and half-mad.
“No.”
The shuttle drifted while alarms continued blinking around her. She did not know how to set a course and barely understood how to keep the nose from dipping. The navigation computer waited for an input, a destination, coordinates, a route, but she could not turn any of those words into safety.
Where could she go?
Jungkook came to mind first because he always did, but Jungkook was smoke, rumor, and a wound without coordinates. She had chased him once and ended in chains. She could not do it again, not while bleeding and barely conscious in a stolen shuttle she might crash before reaching the next moon.
Then she thought of New Mecca.
The memory hurt so sharply that she nearly rejected it: Namjoon’s house, the blue door, the fig tree, water spilling into the courtyard basin, and his wife standing with one hand over her belly. Three years had passed. The baby would have been born by now, perhaps old enough to walk and speak, a child who did not know Trinity existed. A child who had taken a place she had never truly accepted and had no right to resent.
Could she return after stealing from Namjoon and leaving without a word? Could she stand at that blue door after everything the Rykengolls had made of her and ask to be let inside?
Trinity looked down at her hands. Blood had dried in the creases of her fingers, some of it hers, most of it not. Four people were dead behind her, including a Rykengoll, a family name with power, influence, and enough reach to hunt her across systems. Namjoon would be safer if she stayed away. Everyone was safer when she stayed away.
But she was terrified.
The truth rose naked and humiliating, untouched by all the anger she had spent years sharpening. She was afraid of the ship, of the dark, of being found, and of what might happen if she fell asleep. Most of all, she feared that if she stopped moving, she would break apart into every name she had tried to bury.
Audrey. Leo. Trinity.
She pressed a bloodstained hand over her mouth. Namjoon had once told her his house was open, but perhaps he had meant Leo, or the girl she had been before any of this. Perhaps he would look at Trinity and see only what the Rykengolls had made of her. Worse, he would look too long and understand too much, and that frightened her almost as badly as the people pursuing her.
The navigation computer chimed impatiently. Trinity wiped her hand on her trousers and leaned over the controls, searching through the stored routes with trembling fingers. The shuttle had been built for short hauls, not mercy, and most of its destinations meant nothing to her: moons, depots, refinery stations, transfer yards. Then she found an old commercial route, and the bright line of text made her throat close.
HELION PRIME / NEW MECCA — ARCHIVED ROUTE
Her vision blurred. She blinked hard until the letters sharpened again.
“Don’t cry,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare.”
She selected the route, and the computer asked for confirmation. Trinity stared at the screen while the compound seemed to rise behind her in pieces: the cells, the washroom, the bodies cooling beneath the alarm lights, everything she had survived and everything she had done in order to survive it. Ahead lay Namjoon, if he would still have her. Ahead lay shame, confession, and the terrible possibility of a door opening.
She hated how badly she wanted it. She hated Jungkook for not being the place she could return to, for making Namjoon feel like retreat, and for leaving a wound so deep that she had filled it with blood and anger without ever finding the bottom. But anger could not pilot the shuttle, stitch her wounds, or hold her together while she shook.
Her finger hovered over the screen just as a warning flashed across it.
PURSUIT SIGNAL DETECTED.
Trinity struck confirm.
The stars shifted as the shuttle turned and the course locked, placing New Mecca somewhere ahead along a line she could not see but had chosen anyway. She strapped herself into the seat with clumsy hands, then curled over the controls as though she could keep the ship together by force.
The engines whined, the hull trembled, and somewhere behind her, Rykengoll ships would already be waking while crews loaded weapons and shouted her name across the comms.
Let them come.
Helion Prime rose out of the black like a promise Trinity had no right to believe in. She watched it through cracked cockpit glass and a smear of dried blood, one hand locked around the shuttle’s controls while the other pressed against her side, where an old wound had reopened sometime during the last jump. The ship shuddered around her as though it hated her nearly as much as everything else did, while red and amber warnings blinked across the console: low fuel, damaged port stabilizer, uncertain navigation, compromised hull integrity.
Everything was compromised.
Trinity laughed under her breath, though the sound came out wrong. “Yeah,” she rasped. “Get in line.”
The planet swelled across the viewport, bright with city glow and orbital traffic. It was not New Mecca yet, not Namjoon’s district with its blue door and quiet courtyard, but it was close enough to tighten something in her chest that she refused to name. Helion Prime was a civilized world, a holy world, a place where people still bothered with laws, prayer, public water, and clean sheets.
Then she looked down at herself. Blood had dried beneath her nails, bruises striped her arms, and an oversized coat hung from her shoulders, stolen from a mercenary who no longer needed it. Her hair had been tied back with wire since she lost the last strip of cloth several days ago. She was seventeen now, at least according to a miserable date she had barely noticed, a birthday passed inside the belly of a stolen ship while its engine coughed and pursuit signals blinked behind her.
Seventeen felt absurd. She had been older than that for years.
The comm crackled. “Unregistered shuttle, identify yourself and prepare for inspection.”
Trinity killed the channel.
The shuttle dropped hard into the atmosphere. Heat screamed across the hull, and the cockpit rattled so violently that her teeth clicked together. Below, the cloud cover split open to reveal the night side of Helion Prime in vast grids of light: towers, roads, port beacons, and patrol lanes.
Too many patrol lanes. Too much order. Too much sky watched by people who cared about regulations and ship signatures.
Her bounty would already be in the system. It had followed her like a curse, beginning as rumor before becoming a number on a screen, then a face pulled from Rykengoll intake records and scattered across every mercenary channel between the compound and Helion Prime.
TRINITY. RYKENGOLL ESCAPEE. ARMED AND DANGEROUS. BOUNTY: 700,000 UD. CHARGES: FOUR COUNTS MANSLAUGHTER. THREE COUNTS FIRST-DEGREE MURDER. DELIVER ALIVE PREFERRED.
The first time Trinity saw the notice, she had been hiding in the service crawlspace of a refueling dock two systems back while mercenaries argued nearby over whether she was worth more whole or merely breathing. Her own face had stared back from the screen, grainy and pale, her eyes too dark and her curls hiding half of one cheek. Beneath it, Trinity had been printed like a verdict.
She had almost corrected it aloud, but the words stopped before they reached her mouth.
Not Trinity. Not Leo. Not Audrey.
The trouble was that she no longer knew which name she would have given them.
That happened more often now. Audrey felt like a story someone else had told her while she was sick, a little girl with parents, a mother’s voice, and a father’s laugh. She was too soft to seem real and too impossible to hate properly. Leo felt closer, but worse. Leo was hunger and need. She had stood at Namjoon’s door with a stolen pack and believed that finding Jungkook would explain the pain. She had believed in things while pretending she believed in nothing, then spoken his name to mercenaries over a bowl of stew.
Most days, Trinity hated her for that.
Leo had been a trick, a name worn like armor so the world would look elsewhere. She belonged to cropped hair, a lowered voice, and the desperate performance of being untouchable. She had been a door built from lies.
Now all three names felt distant. Even Trinity sat wrong against her skin sometimes, though it fit better than the others. Trinity had blood on her hands and knew better than to pretend it would wash clean.
The shuttle bucked, and a proximity alarm shrieked through the cockpit. Trinity snapped back to the controls just in time to see a patrol skiff cutting across her descent.
“Shit.”
She yanked the yoke. The shuttle rolled too far, tilted sickeningly, and dropped between two traffic lanes while horns blared over the open comms. Something large and official flashed overhead, close enough for its wake to rock her ship. Trinity fought the controls with both hands as her shoulder burned and the wound in her side tore open again.
She did not know how she was still alive, and that was not modesty. It was arithmetic.
She should have died escaping the Rykengoll compound. She should have died in the launch tunnel or when the first mercenary crew caught up with her at Pell Station and tried to smoke her out of an airlock corridor. She had killed one of them by accident, if accident meant grabbing a loose cable and driving it into his exposed throat because he was choking her and she could not reach her knife.
Manslaughter, perhaps.
She had killed another on Vesper Dock after he followed her into a waste-processing bay and called her sweetheart as though he already owned the payout. That one had not been an accident. He recognized her and raised his weapon, so Trinity hurled a bottle of solvent into his face and kicked him into the grinder feed before she had time to think long enough to become afraid.
First-degree murder, according to the notice.
Trinity sometimes wondered who decided such things. Someone clean, probably, sitting behind a desk and reading reports written by people who had never heard a man scream into machinery. More hunters came after Vesper Dock: a woman carrying a stun net, two brothers with Rykengoll tattoos hidden beneath their collars, and a bounty runner who saw Trinity limp and told his partner, “Easy money.”
None of it had been easy, not for them and certainly not for her.
Every death remained. People liked to imagine that killing made you lighter if you hated someone enough, but it did not. It only added weight in places no one else could see. Trinity carried all of them now: Dain Rykengoll in the washroom, the guard with the baton, the woman reaching for the alarm, the man in processing, and the mercenaries who had found her along the way. Some had deserved worse than death. Others had simply stood between her and the next open door.
She had stopped sorting them. Sorting required time, and hesitation got people caught.
“Unregistered shuttle, alter course immediately. You are entering restricted approach.”
The comm had reactivated itself, or perhaps she had struck the wrong control. Trinity snarled and slammed her fist into the panel until the voice disappeared again.
She only had to reach Namjoon. The thought held her together more securely than the harness.
He would know what to do. Namjoon always seemed to know, even when he did not, and that had once been one of the things she hated most about him: his calm, his endless patience, and the way he could stand in the middle of disaster and still find somewhere useful to place his hands. He would take her in, hide her, send her somewhere safer, or call someone who could help. He might pray over her, though she might bite him for that, but he would not hand her over. He would not look at the bounty and see money, and he would never call her property.
She pictured his house and realized, with a shock, that she missed him.
The feeling was so strange that for a moment she forgot to be angry. She did not merely need him or intend to use him because she had nowhere else to go, though both were true. She missed his voice carrying through the courtyard, his tired smile, and the way he called her child even when she snapped at him for it. He had never once demanded that she soften before offering kindness.
Who had he been before all of that, before the robes and prayers, before New Mecca, the crash, the dead planet, and the blue door? Had he ever been young and foolish? Had he ever hated someone so much that he built himself around it, or stared at his own hands and wondered when they had stopped feeling like his?
It was difficult to imagine. Namjoon seemed as though he had been born already forgiving people.
Trinity’s mouth twisted at the thought. That was unfair. He had lost people too. He had grieved, carried ghosts back into his house, and still found room for her. Perhaps kindness had never been softness in him. Perhaps it was discipline, something he chose as deliberately as she chose knives.
She pushed the thought away. Thinking about Namjoon made something inside her ache, and aching was dangerous. It slowed the hand and made her remember doors that might still open.
She needed to land, but the shuttle was coming in far too fast. Trinity realized it when the port towers rose before her without seeming to slow, their landing lights smearing into bright streaks while alarms screamed over one another. She grabbed for the controls, struck the wrong switch, then found the right one almost by accident.
The shuttle’s nose pitched upward, and its underside clipped something below, perhaps an antenna, a lighting rig, or the edge of the pad itself. Metal shrieked across metal, and the impact hurled Trinity against the harness hard enough to send fresh pain through her side.
The shuttle struck the landing pad and skidded across it in a storm of sparks, shedding pieces of itself while cargo crews scattered. A fuel cart overturned and erupted in pale flame. The ship spun once, smashed into a barrier, and stopped so violently that darkness crowded the edges of her vision.
Trinity hung in the harness, gasping. For one suspended moment, the world went silent. Then everything returned at once: suppression foam hissing across the pad, men shouting, sirens rising, metal groaning as it cooled, and her own breathing, too loud and wet at the back of her throat.
Move.
She fought with the harness, but the release had jammed. “Come on.” Her fingers slipped against the buckle, slick with blood. The cockpit glass was webbed with cracks but remained intact, and through it she could see figures running toward the shuttle. Port emergency crews came first, with security close behind and perhaps mercenaries or law officers among them.
The buckle finally gave. Trinity fell sideways out of the seat and bit back a cry as the wound in her side pulled open farther, spreading heat beneath her coat. She grabbed the rifle beside the copilot’s chair, then stopped. It was too large and too obvious, so she left it behind and took the smaller pistol instead, the one stolen from the last man who had tried to collect her. It fit her hand, and she knew how it behaved.
Knowing mattered.
The hatch refused to open. Trinity kicked it once, then again, pain shooting up her leg. Outside, someone climbed onto the shuttle’s nose and shouted through the fractured glass.
“Stay where you are!”
She fired into the hatch panel. The shot deafened her inside the cramped cockpit, and sparks burst from the damaged frame. With a scream, Trinity kicked it again until the warped hatch opened just wide enough for her to force herself through.
Foam and smoke swallowed her. She struck the landing pad on one knee, and the world pitched sharply around her, but she shoved herself upright and ran.
“Stop!”
A shot struck the pad near her boot. Trinity spun and fired back without aiming, sending people diving for cover, then turned again before she could see whether she had hit anyone.
The port was a maze of light and alarms, perfect and terrible. Ships stood in orderly rows across the pads, cargo containers rose in stacked lanes, and maintenance vehicles broke the sightlines between them. Trinity ran through the confusion with one hand clamped against her side and the pistol held low against her leg. Every step hurt, and every breath hurt worse.
She had to get out of the port. Namjoon’s district lay across the city, probably too far to reach on foot, but perhaps she could steal transport, reach the public lanes, find water and bandages, or at least somewhere to change her clothes.
There were too many conditions, too many things that had to go right.
Behind her, a security announcement thundered across the port. “Attention. Fugitive on pad seven. Armed suspect. Female, approximately seventeen. Bounty warrant active. Use caution.”
The words rolled through the night, reducing her once again to a list other people could act upon. Female. Seventeen. Bounty warrant.
Trinity ducked behind a cargo container and pressed her forehead against the cold metal, forcing herself to breathe. Her body wanted to collapse, and her hands shook badly enough that the pistol rattled softly against the wall. Boots struck pavement nearby, engines roared, and voices crackled over comms as security teams began sealing lanes and locking exits.
Mercenaries would be coming too. Seven hundred thousand UD was enough to wake every carrion bird in the city.
She looked down at her wrist. The Rykengoll band was gone, cut away weeks ago with a plasma torch by a drunken mechanic she had paid at gunpoint, but sometimes she could still feel it against her pulse, cold metal blinking green as though she remained their property. Trinity dug her thumb into the scar it had left.
The container door beside her opened, and a man stepped out carrying a cargo hook. Surprise crossed his face as they stared at one another. Then he noticed the blood, the pistol, and the face from the bounty feeds, and his mouth began to open.
Trinity raised the gun. “Don’t.”
His gaze dropped to the weapon, then shifted past her shoulder. He was no longer looking at her.
Trinity turned.
Three bounty hunters stood at the mouth of the lane. They were not port security or Rykengoll soldiers, but independent mercenaries who had smelled profit before the official cordon could close. One wore a helmet with a cracked visor, another carried a net launcher, and the third, a broad woman with a white scar cutting across her cheek, held a pistol steady at Trinity’s chest.
“Easy,” the woman said. “Alive pays better.”
Trinity almost smiled. There it was again.
Preferred.
“Walk away,” she said, though her voice came out hoarse, young, and badly hurt.
The scarred woman studied the wound in her side, the trembling pistol, and the effort it took for her to remain upright. “You’re done, sweetheart.”
Something inside Trinity turned cold and bright. She fired, not at the woman but at the net launcher. The shot struck its housing, and the weapon discharged early with a metallic crack. The weighted net burst sideways and wrapped around the helmeted man instead. He screamed as the charge activated and his body convulsed.
Trinity ran before the others could recover.
The scarred woman fired, and pain sliced across Trinity’s upper arm, hot and immediate. She stumbled into a maintenance cart and rolled across its hood as another shot cracked behind her. The pistol nearly flew from her hand, but she caught it by the trigger guard and kept moving.
The port exit was ahead, and the barred security gate was already descending.
It ground down from above while guards shouted from the public side. Trinity forced herself faster, though the wound in her arm screamed and dark spots spread across her vision. She knew before she reached it that she was not going to make it.
Still, she threw herself into a slide beneath the falling gate. For one wild second, she thought she had timed it perfectly, but the bars slammed down across the hem of her stolen coat and pinned her to the ground.
Trinity landed hard on the public side, half through the gate and half trapped beneath it. She twisted onto her back and clawed at the coat, but the fabric refused to tear. Boots pounded behind her as the scarred mercenary approached. Port security waited ahead, and people along the street had stopped to stare because civilized people loved horror as long as it happened on the pavement and not inside their own kitchens.
She yanked at the coat again, then shoved the pistol through the bars and fired blindly behind her. Someone shouted. A boot struck her trapped leg, and she kicked back, missed, then kicked again.
Hands seized her from the public side, not to help but to restrain her. Two security officers dragged at her arms, and then a third joined them as Trinity twisted, bit, and drove her elbow into the nearest face. Someone cursed. A baton struck her shoulder, another crashed into her ribs, and pain folded her nearly in half, but she continued to fight. She tore one hand free and clawed toward a guard’s eye until he caught her wrist and slammed it against the pavement hard enough to send the pistol skittering away.
“Hold her!”
“Watch her hands!”
“Sedative!”
“No,” Trinity snarled. “No, no—”
A knee drove between Trinity’s shoulder blades and forced her face against the pavement. For one suspended second, she smelled rain on stone, hot fuel, and blood. Beneath it all came the impossible memory of mint tea in Namjoon’s house.
She had been so close. Not close enough to see the blue door or raise her hand to knock, but close enough to know she had almost reached him.
A needle punched into the side of her neck. Trinity screamed and bucked hard enough to break one guard’s grip, but the world had already begun to blur at the edges. She dragged air into her lungs and tried to stay conscious through hatred alone.
“Multiple counts of manslaughter and murder. Escaped Rykengoll property.”
“Destination order?”
There was a brief pause. Trinity tried to lift her head, but the pavement rolled beneath her.
“Temporary holding,” the voice answered. “Then transport to Butcher Bay.”
The name cut cleanly through the sedative haze.
Everyone knew Butcher Bay. Even in the Rykengoll dark, prisoners had whispered about it: a triple-maximum-security prison buried beneath rock and steel, a place where people vanished and exits existed only as rumors. It had been built for monsters, or perhaps merely for those the universe found it convenient to call monsters because paperwork required less effort than mercy.
Trinity tried to laugh, but the sound came out as a broken breath against the pavement. Butcher Bay. Not Namjoon, not New Mecca, not the blue door, and certainly not safety, if safety had ever been real.
Hard cuffs closed around her wrists behind her back. They were not the old Rykengoll band, but they were close enough that panic surged through the drugs. She jerked once, weakly.
“Still got fight,” a guard muttered.
“Not for long.”
They hauled her upright, and the city swam around her in streaks of Helion light, port towers, and onlookers whose faces blurred beyond recognition. Somewhere past them was Namjoon. Somewhere on this same world, perhaps across the city, he sat in his courtyard with his child sleeping nearby, breathing and praying, completely unaware that she had almost reached him.
Trinity tried to say his name, but her mouth would not obey. She wanted to tell them she had somewhere to go, someone waiting who would know what to do. A holy man who had once called her child and meant it without asking for anything in return.
The sedative dragged her lower, and her head fell forward.
The scarred bounty hunter appeared near the gate, breathing hard with one hand pressed against the bleeding cut at her temple. She looked furious until a security officer mentioned reward jurisdiction. Then she began arguing, because of course she did. Everyone wanted a piece of Trinity now.
Seven hundred thousand UD. She was worth more hunted than she had ever been safe.
A faint smile touched her mouth. Jungkook might have found that funny.
No. Jungkook would not find anything. He was gone and had remained gone. He had left, and every road she had taken while trying to find him had carried her farther from the girl who once waited outside his door.
His fault, the old voice whispered, but Trinity was too tired to hold on to the thought.
As they dragged her toward the transport, her gaze found the horizon beyond the port walls. Dawn had begun there, pale and gold, touching the towers of Helion Prime one by one. Somewhere in a district she could not reach, morning would be arriving at Namjoon’s house. His child would wake, his wife would move through the rooms, and water might still be whispering into the courtyard fountain.
Trinity allowed herself to see it for one second before crushing the image flat.
No maybes. No doors. No home.
The transport opened its black mouth, and the guards shoved her inside. As the doors sealed, Trinity heard the same sound she had heard three years earlier in the Rykengoll transfer bay: a door closing quietly, finally, almost politely.
This time, however, the girl trapped on the wrong side of it was not Leo. Audrey might have prayed, and Leo might have lied or cried, but Trinity only leaned her head against the cold wall, tasted blood in her mouth, and clung to her anger with both hands as Helion Prime carried her away from the one person she had almost allowed herself to miss.
Butcher Bay had a sound, though it was not any one thing. It was ventilation groaning through stone, chains knocking softly in distant shafts, boots striking metal grates, men speaking through their teeth, doors opening and closing, and power humming behind walls thick enough to bury screams before they reached anywhere useful. Layered together for long enough, it became the same low mechanical breath.
Audrey moved through it with blood drying beneath her nails.
She had not begun thinking of herself as Audrey again all at once. The name had returned in pieces, as everything did now: broken thoughts, half-formed memories, rage followed by fear, and then some sudden, absurd fragment from years ago, like the smell of her mother’s hair when she bent to kiss her goodnight. The mind did strange things after too much violence. It dragged softness into the open at the worst possible moments.
For now, there was only the corridor, a stolen access card clenched in her left hand, a shiv in her right, and two dead men behind her.
The first had been a guard near the waste lift, older and thick-necked, bored enough to come close when she pretended to be sick. He seized her arm with the weary carelessness of a man tired of touching inmates and tired of denying himself the pleasure of it. Audrey drove the shiv beneath his jaw before either of them could decide which was more surprised. He made a wet, choking sound and sagged against her, nearly dragging her down with him.
The second had been another prisoner, which was worse, though not because he was innocent. He saw the access card and the blood, smiled through three broken teeth, and said, “You’re taking me with you, sweetheart.”
When he reached for her, she killed him in the service tunnel with a length of broken pipe. It was messy, frightened, and loud enough that she knew the escape might have died there with him. Even after he fell, she stood over his body for a moment too long, panting with the pipe still raised and waiting for him to move.
He did not.
Butcher Bay reduced people to numbers: prisoner numbers, cell blocks, body counts, years, sentences, reward figures, and levels underground. Audrey hated how easily her own mind had learned the same arithmetic. Two here. Four in the compound. More between there and Helion Prime. She no longer added them together. Totals felt too much like confession, and confession required someone willing to care about the difference between murder and survival.
No one here cared. Butcher Bay had not been built for caring. It had been built to keep things buried.
She moved with one palm against the wall, her fingertips skimming cold metal while she counted junctions by touch. The lights flickered, and her vision blurred whenever she breathed too deeply. Her ribs still ached from the arrest on Helion Prime, sometimes sharpening without warning as though the security gate had only just slammed onto her coat or the baton had only just found bone.
She shoved the thought of Namjoon away so violently that she nearly stumbled. There was no room for him here, no blue door or courtyard fountain, no child who would be three or four years old by now if the dates in her head could still be trusted. There was no holy man waiting to look at her with grief, kindness, and far too much understanding. Butcher Bay had swallowed all of that and given her something else in return.
Nakamura, Audrey.
That was what the intake record had said. She had seen it by accident two weeks after arriving, when a clerk opened the wrong line on a screen and left it glowing long enough for her to read.
NAKAMURA, AUDREY.
The sight of it struck harder than any guard. For a moment, she was no longer standing in the intake cage. She was small again, inside a room that no longer existed, hearing her mother say Audrey as though it meant come here, as though it meant you are mine. It had meant there would be dinner and morning, that someone would remember the shape of her before fear got to her.
She waited for the disgust to come, but it never did.
That was the strange part. Audrey did not feel like a wound anymore, not exactly. The name still hurt, but the pain was clean in a way Trinity had never been.
Trinity was a slave name. It belonged to the metal band around her wrist, to long hair twisted in a guard’s fist, to property written on a screen and favorite whispered in a room. Trinity was the face attached to a bounty worth seven hundred thousand UD, the girl who had survived because survival was the only thing left to her. Audrey hated her for it, even while owing her everything.
Leo was worse in a different way because Leo belonged to Jungkook, though he had never chosen the name or asked her to become that person. Perhaps that was what made it worse. Leo was the lie she had built so she could walk beside him: the lowered voice, the cropped hair, and the desperate imitation of hardness she had mistaken for freedom. She had been a child wearing someone else’s shadow as armor, looking at Jungkook Jeon and believing that if she became enough like him, nothing would ever touch her again.
Stupid. Sweet. Already dead.
Audrey could hate Leo and pity her. She could barely think about Trinity without wanting to claw her own skin open. Audrey, however, felt like something else. Not home or safety or innocence. Those things were gone, and pretending otherwise would have been its own kind of sickness. But Audrey was a door, a name that had not been given to her by Jungkook, stamped into a file by Rykengoll clerks, or shouted through a cell slot by guards.
It was hers, and she wanted it now. The wanting frightened her because wanting anything always had.
At the next junction, Audrey stopped and listened. Boots moved somewhere above her, distant but drawing closer. A voice crackled over the prison speakers and died before forming words, while far below men roared over a fight. Butcher Bay always sounded as though it were eating itself.
She glanced left, then right, and realized she was no longer certain which corridor led to the medical wing. The thought nearly made her laugh.
The medical wing.
She had come here half-hating and half-believing the old story Jungkook had told her. Not sweetly, of course. Jungkook never told stories sweetly. He had offered it like a fact or a warning, one more ugly joke the universe had played on him: a slam doctor, twenty menthol Kools, a surgical shine job, eyes made for the dark.
For years, she had carried that story as proof that Jungkook had been made here. Somewhere beneath Butcher Bay’s stone and steel, she had believed there must be a room where a man could be opened and changed, where some doctor could turn eyes into mirrors and darkness into an advantage. She had imagined finding that room and forcing the doctor’s hand, emerging with the same shine that made Jungkook look like something the night had claimed.
Worse, she had imagined him seeing her afterward.
That was the shameful part. She had pictured Jungkook looking at her and recognizing what she had done, what she had become. She would no longer be Leo, no longer a child waiting to be abandoned, but someone with darkness built into her body. Someone who had earned it.
But Butcher Bay had no such doctor, not now and perhaps never. There were only med techs with filthy gloves and bad tempers, prison surgeons who patched stab wounds quickly enough to send men back to their cells, drug dispensers, restraints, and rusting equipment. Twice a week, screams travelled through the walls from the dental station. There was no secret miracle waiting beneath the prison, no hidden rite of smoke and pain, no passage into Jungkook’s world.
There was nothing. The story had been a lie, or worse, a myth Jungkook had allowed to live because it sounded better than the truth.
Audrey’s anger rose so violently that she had to brace one hand against the wall. It had been eating her alive lately, though not like fire. Fire had direction. It consumed whatever fed it and eventually burned itself out. This was something with teeth behind her ribs, chewing steadily and refusing to finish the job.
It had taken her sleep first, then her appetite, then the thin remains of patience that might once have stopped her from killing men who came too close. Now it fed on her memory in uneven bites, leaving some things painfully vivid while smearing others beyond use.
She remembered Y/N’s eyes but could no longer clearly summon her father’s face. She remembered Jungkook closing the blue door, but not whether her mother had worn her hair loose or tied back on the morning everything changed. She remembered Dain Rykengoll’s blood warming her hand, but not the sound of her own laughter before M6-117.
Audrey pressed her knuckles to her mouth. She would not fall apart in a service corridor with alarms waiting to sound and two bodies cooling behind her. Instead, she forced herself forward and took the right-hand passage because movement was better than standing still.
The stolen card opened one gate and then another, each green blink feeling less like luck and more like a countdown. Sooner or later, someone would find the guard, deactivate the card, seal the corridors, and discover that the prisoner listed in their database was no longer where she belonged.
She found herself holding her name behind her teeth without speaking it.
It was strange how the official record made Audrey feel both real and unreal. A database knew her. A prison had preserved what she had spent years trying to bury. Butcher Bay, in its blunt and merciless way, had returned the one thing everyone else had stripped from her or forgotten.
The corridor narrowed ahead and sloped toward a maintenance hatch framed by yellow hazard lines. Beyond it, if her memory could still be trusted, lay a ventilation shaft leading to an exterior service platform. Three days earlier, she had watched two workers disappear through the hatch, timed how long they were gone, and noticed the colder light clinging to their clothes when they returned.
It might lead outside.
Audrey quickened her pace as her thoughts scattered. Jungkook had lied, or perhaps the doctor had died and the story had once been true. Perhaps nothing about him had ever been true. Maybe Jungkook had always been exactly what he appeared to be: a man who survived and allowed frightened children to turn him into prophecy because they needed something larger than their grief.
She hated him, and some part of her still loved him.
No. Not love. Not anymore.
That word belonged to Leo, and Leo embarrassed her. Leo had wanted a father, a brother, a protector, some monster who might turn around and explain that the universe made sense if only she learned to see through the proper kind of darkness.
Audrey wanted none of that now. She wanted herself, whatever remained of her and whatever that might mean.
The hatch was locked, and the stolen card blinked red in her hand.
Audrey stared at it. “No.”
She swiped again, but the same red light answered her.
“No, no, no.”
A speaker crackled somewhere behind her. “Security alert. Block C service corridor. All personnel respond.”
Her stomach dropped. The card had gone dead in her hand, and for one terrible second she stood motionless, the useless piece of plastic pinched between bloody fingers while all of Butcher Bay seemed to turn its head toward her.
Then she drove her shoulder into the hatch.
Pain burst white across her vision, but the metal did not move. She struck it again, then a third time, until her legs nearly folded beneath her. Gripping the frame, Audrey dragged air through her teeth while tears sprang to her eyes from pain and fury, never sorrow. Not here.
Boots thundered through the corridor behind her.
She turned as three guards rounded the corner, with two more close behind them, all five raising their rifles.
“On the ground!”
Audrey lifted the shiv.
It was ridiculous, and she knew it. A sharpened piece of scrap against rifles, armor, shock batons, and the full crushing machinery of the prison. Her arm trembled, and blood from her knuckles made the handle slick.
“On the ground, Nakamura!”
The first shock round struck her in the chest. Her body locked and dropped before her mind understood what had happened. The floor rushed up hard, and the shiv skittered away to strike the wall. Electricity tore through her muscles in bright, merciless waves, leaving her unable to breathe, move, or properly scream. Only a broken sound escaped through her clenched teeth.
Footsteps closed around her, and someone kicked the shiv beyond reach.
“Stupid little bitch,” one guard muttered.
Audrey tried to spit at him, but her mouth would not obey. A boot rolled her onto her stomach, her arms were wrenched behind her, and restraints snapped around her wrists tightly enough to grind bone. As the shock began to recede, she convulsed once and sucked in air with a ragged, humiliating gasp.
“Two dead confirmed,” someone said above her.
“Waste lift and service tunnel?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus.”
“Keep her down. She bites.”
Audrey closed her eyes, then forced them open again. She would not disappear inside herself or leave her body behind to survive whatever came next. She had done that often enough in Rykengoll rooms.
This time, she made herself remain present. The cold floor pressed against her cheek. Blood coated her tongue. Her hands were trapped behind her, and five guards surrounded her. One breathed too hard. Another sounded frightened.
Good. Let them be frightened.
A knee settled against her spine. “Where’d you think you were going?”
Audrey smiled into the floor, not because anything was funny, but because the anger had found her again. It crawled through the lingering electricity, wounded but alive.
“Out,” she whispered.
The guard bent closer. “What?”
She turned her face just far enough for him to hear. “Out.”
His expression twisted. He seized her by the hair and dragged her head back, sending pain flashing across her scalp, but Audrey kept smiling.
For the first time in years, she liked her name. Perhaps that was madness. Perhaps it was simply all she had left. But if she could still be Audrey here, cuffed and bleeding on a prison floor, then Trinity had not consumed everything. The Rykengolls had not kept everything, and Jungkook had not defined the shape of her life before walking away with the only key.
Audrey remained beneath it all. She was meaner now, bloodier, and damaged in places that might never heal, but she was still there.
Still here.
A siren began pulsing overhead.
“Warden wants her transferred,” another guard said. “Immediate.”
“To where?”
“Hubble Bay.”
Audrey’s smile vanished.
She knew the name, though not as well as Butcher Bay. Prisoners traded prison names the way children traded stories about monsters, except these monsters had coordinates. Some said Hubble Bay was colder. Others said it was cleaner, and therefore worse, because clean cruelty carried sharper edges. Whatever the truth, it meant another hole, another transport, and another series of locks. Another place that would file her name, strip her, feed her, punish her, and wait to see what shape she broke into next.
Despair opened beneath her so suddenly that she nearly fell into it.
Not again. Not another cage, another transport, another door closing.
She thrashed, but the guards barely shifted. They hauled her upright with one man gripping each arm. Her legs dragged for several steps before remembering how to hold her, and the corridor tilted around her.
The hatch framed in yellow stood only a few feet away now, a stupid little square of possibility. Maybe it led outside. Maybe there was open air beyond it, a service platform beneath the sky.
Audrey stared at it until a guard shoved her forward. “Move.”
She moved because they made her, and that was the part she hated most. Not defeat itself, but the way her body obeyed because pain had taught it speed. Her feet found the floor without instruction. Her shoulders hunched before the next blow came, and her head lowered whenever a rifle stock passed too close. Survival lived in her bones now, older and quicker than pride.
Anger lived there too.
As the guards marched her back through Butcher Bay, men crowded their cell doors to watch. Some laughed, some shouted filth, and others went quiet when they saw the blood on her and the number of guards required to hold her.
“Nakamura,” someone called from the dark. “Hell of a try.”
Audrey did not turn.
“They’ll bury you at Hubble!” another voice shouted.
Maybe they would. She had been buried before.
Audrey raised her head, and the guards tightened their grips, mistaking the motion for resistance. It was not. Not yet.
She was thinking about Jungkook again, though she did not want to. Jungkook and his lies. The shine in his eyes. The stories that transformed prisons into legends and pain into something chosen, meaningful, and wearable as armor.
Perhaps that was the cruelest lie of all.
Pain did not make anyone special. It simply hurt. Sometimes it taught, sometimes it sharpened, and sometimes it hollowed a person out until anger settled into the empty space like a king upon a stolen throne. Audrey was tired of being ruled by it, but she did not yet know what else could keep her standing.
At the transport bay, the guards stopped while a clerk confirmed her identity. A screen beside the door flickered to life.
NAKAMURA, AUDREY. TRANSFER ORDER: HUBBLE BAY. SECURITY LEVEL: EXTREME. RESTRAINTS: FULL. NOTES: MULTIPLE HOMICIDES. ESCAPE ATTEMPT. HIGH RISK.
Audrey looked only at the name.
For one strange second, everything else fell away: the murders, the restraints, and the guards holding her between them. There was only Audrey, bright and official on the screen, undeniable because even the prison had written it down.
She was still angry and afraid. Her mind remained crowded with Jungkook, Namjoon, the Rykengolls, Y/N, Bindi, Leo, Trinity, and all the other ghosts reaching for her, accusing her, and vanishing before she could decide which of them she was supposed to be. Yet the name steadied her a little, and for now, a little was enough.
The transport doors opened and released a breath of cold air. A guard shoved her toward them, but Audrey stepped inside before he could do it again. The restraints cut into her wrists, and blood had dried stiffly across her skin. Behind her, Butcher Bay continued its endless song of vents, chains, and closing doors. Somewhere ahead, Hubble Bay waited with another mouth open.
They forced her into a seat and secured the locks. When they snapped into place, she flinched despite herself. Then the doors closed behind her with the same quiet, final, almost courteous sound she had heard too many times before.
Audrey leaned her head against the metal wall and closed her eyes. Trinity had survived the Rykengolls, and Leo had survived the dark. Now Audrey would have to discover what she could survive.
If she ever saw Jungkook again, if the universe proved cruel enough or perhaps kind enough to place him before her one more time, she would ask him about the shine in his eyes, about Butcher Bay, and why every story he had ever given her seemed to end in another cage.
By the time they put Audrey Nakamura on the transport to Crematoria, they had stopped pretending ordinary restraints would be enough. They chained her anyway, wrists, ankles, waist, and throat. A restraint collar rested cold against her pulse, linked to the guards’ rifles and the ship’s security grid. Her hands were cuffed in front of her and secured to a metal bar that locked into the floor whenever she sat, while the shackles around her ankles were short enough to ruin her stride. Two guards stood behind her seat, one on either side, close enough to strike but careful not to come within reach.
They had learned.
Hubble Bay had learned after she broke a woman’s jaw with the heel of her hand and bit through another guard’s glove deeply enough to take flesh with it. Slam City had learned after the riot in Block Twelve, when three men came for her in the showers and only one crawled back out. The transport crew had learned before she ever stepped aboard because her file had arrived ahead of her, warnings flashing red across every page.
NAKAMURA, AUDREY. ALIAS: TRINITY. AGE: NINETEEN. EXTREME FLIGHT RISK. EXTREME VIOLENCE RISK. DO NOT ISOLATE WITHOUT RESTRAINT. DO NOT APPROACH WITHOUT TWO ARMED PERSONNEL.
Audrey sat with her back straight, her dark curls falling wild around her shoulders, and watched the guard across from her try not to stare. He was young, too young to have mastered the vacant boredom of someone who had done this too long, and his fingers kept shifting against the grip of his rifle in a nervous rhythm.
Audrey listened and imagined breaking them one at a time.
The thought came without heat, and that was new. At sixteen, rage had been fire, consuming her sleep, her appetite, and whatever softness had survived the Rykengolls. At seventeen, it became a road, carrying her through ships, stations, prison corridors, and blood-slick mistakes. By eighteen, rage had become a language she spoke more fluently than any name she had ever worn.
Now, at nineteen, it was weather. It was always present, surrounding her, settled into her lungs, the walls, and the light. She no longer had to summon it because she lived inside it.
The transport shuddered as it broke orbit, and the restraints tightened around her wrists, not enough to injure, only enough to remind her they were there. Audrey looked down at her hands. Her knuckles had split too many times to heal smoothly, and one finger remained crooked from a bad break in Slam City. A pale scar circled the wrist where the Rykengoll band had rested for three years, faint now but never gone. Crude prison ink crawled along the inside of her forearm, made with burned wire and stolen pigment. The marks were not decorative or sentimental. They were warnings, counts, and names she had crossed out after deciding names were too generous.
The sweet girl from Taurus 1 was gone. She had been gone for so long that Audrey sometimes wondered whether she had invented her, a child with parents, a real bed, a mother who might have brushed her hair, and a father who might have laughed when she ran too quickly through the house. That girl belonged to another species, something domestic and soft-handed.
Leo was gone too.
Poor little Leo, lowering his voice, cutting his hair, and believing a name could become armor. Leo had belonged to Jungkook long before she understood what belonging meant. He had looked at a murderer and seen a map, following the shadow because it seemed safer than the light. Leo had been hunger in an alley and hope disguised as spite, a child with too many knives and too little sense. He had still wanted to be found. He had still believed someone might turn around.
Trinity had nearly survived.
She had been made beneath Rykengoll stone, hammered into shape by hands that should have been severed at the wrist. Trinity learned how to smile without meaning it, count guards without seeming to look, and wield fear like a second blade. She had been property, fugitive, bounty, prisoner, and finally rumor.
Audrey had returned after all of that, but never as the girl she had once been. This Audrey was a new animal, one who had found herself inside cages and discovered she possessed enough teeth for all of them.
Across from her, the young guard stopped tapping. Audrey raised her eyes, and he quickly looked away.
Smart.
The older guard beside him noticed and gave a thin laugh. “Don’t make friends with that one.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Good. She eats friends.”
Audrey smiled, and the young guard went pale. Good. Let him be frightened. Fear was honest. It did not pretend she could be rehabilitated, prayed clean, hidden away, forgiven, or loved back into a shape that fit inside a house with a blue door. Fear looked at her and understood what kindness had taken too long to learn.
She was dangerous, though not in the polished way bounty notices claimed. She was dangerous like an open wound gone septic, like a dog raised in a pit that had finally realized the gate was only wood. Dangerous like a girl who no longer believed freedom would repair anything.
That was the strangest part. She had escaped Hubble Bay and Slam City, twice reaching open air with a stolen weapon in her hand and blood cooling on her sleeve, only to discover that freedom was merely a larger room full of people who wanted something from her. Bounty hunters, prison trackers, mercenaries, men with old grudges, women with newer ones, entire systems carrying her face in their databases and rewards attached to her breathing.
Freedom was a joke people told themselves when the lock was on someone else’s door. Joy was worse, because joy belonged to people who expected mornings, while Audrey expected ambushes.
She had stopped wanting anything clean. There were no more dreams of water whispering in a courtyard or of a life beyond the next fight, the next transport, or the next fool who tried to put hands on her. There was only the game now, and the question at the center of it was always the same.
Who was the better killer?
Prisons understood it. Mercenary crews understood it. Men in cages understood it best of all, though they dressed it up as rank, respect, territory, or survival. Strip away the stories, and it always became the same choice: you or me?
Audrey had become very good at answering.
The ship’s lights dimmed as it entered long-haul burn, and the other prisoners shifted in their seats with the restless unease of men who hated being contained but were not yet brave enough to test the locks. There were six of them in the hold, each separated by restraint bars and watched by armed guards. Two kept glancing toward Audrey as though trying to decide whether the stories were true, but one man had been staring since launch.
He was broad, with shaved brows and prison muscle packed across his shoulders, carrying the bored confidence of someone accustomed to being the worst thing in any room. Audrey watched him as steadily as he watched her. There it was again, the game.
He smiled first. She did not.
Leaning forward as far as his restraints allowed, he said, “You’re Jeon’s girl?”
The name went through her like a blade beneath the ribs. It no longer wounded her the way it once had, but it still made every part of her wake. The guards stiffened slightly. They knew the name. Everyone did. Jungkook Jeon had been gone for five years and remained threaded through the ugliest parts of her life like rot through wood.
Audrey turned her head slowly. “What did you say?”
His smile widened. He mistook the softness of her voice for weakness, which meant he was already dead in at least one possible future.
“I said you’re Jeon’s girl. That what they call you? His little death-planet pet?”
The collar at Audrey’s throat hummed as her pulse quickened, and the guards raised their rifles a fraction. She saw everything at once: the angles, the distance, the floor lock, the cuffs, the man’s restraints, and the placement of the guards’ hands. The younger one was still nervous. The older one was meaner but slower. An emergency panel sat behind the left bulkhead, and beneath Audrey’s seat, one bolt had nearly rusted through.
That was what anger gave her when it was pure enough. Not blindness, but clarity.
She could not reach the man yet, so she smiled. It was small, but it was enough to make his grin falter.
“No,” Audrey said. “I’m the thing he should’ve killed when he had the chance.”
The hold fell quiet, leaving only the low vibration of the engines and the rush of blood in her ears.
If Audrey ever saw Jungkook again, she was going to kill him. She had decided that in Slam City after waking from a fever dream with his name in her mouth and another man’s blood beneath her nails. Not because his death would repair anything, since she had stopped believing in repair, but because the desire had become part of her, as ordinary as hunger.
She wanted to put him on the floor and watch surprise break through that smug stillness. She wanted him to understand that leaving had consequences beyond a child’s wounded feelings. He had not merely abandoned Leo. He had left a spark in a dry room and walked away as though the fire had nothing to do with him.
Whatever he had spent the last five years doing, whether running, hiding, killing, or breathing free air while she learned the architecture of cages, no longer mattered. His reasons, his silence, his myth, the shine in his eyes, and the way men spoke of him as though he were death’s favorite son could all remain his.
Audrey wanted the rest.
She would become more infamous, more vicious, and more difficult to cage. She would make enough noise in the underworld that even Jungkook, wherever he had disappeared to, would be forced to hear it. Let bounty boards carry her face. Let prison blocks trade her name. Let mercenaries spit before saying Audrey Nakamura because she had cost them brothers, crews, money, and pride. One day, Jungkook would look up and realize that the little girl he had abandoned had become a rival ghost.
Then he could come find her.
The thought warmed her more than any blanket until another memory rose with it: Namjoon’s face.
Audrey lowered her eyes before he could fully take shape. She could not bring Namjoon into this hold or let him exist in the same breath as chains, metal, armed men, and bloodlust. He belonged to a courtyard beneath kinder stars, to water and prayer, to a wife who had once fed a feral girl without making her feel watched. He belonged to a child who must be older now, perhaps old enough to ask about the strange girl who had lived in their house and vanished before morning.
She hoped he was well, and the gentleness of the thought made her angry. She hoped his wife had survived childbirth and that their child was healthy. She hoped the blue door still opened onto peace. Most of all, she hoped no one had ever carried one of her bounty notices to his house or forced him to see the names Trinity, Audrey, and Nakamura beneath the words armed and dangerous.
Audrey tried to close the thought down, but Y/N slipped through the crack it left.
Y/N walking into the dark. Y/N turning back. Y/N, selfish and frightened and human, then brave when bravery mattered. That was the part Audrey could not forgive, because bravery placed a burden on the living. It said: be worth what was spent.
Audrey had not been worth it.
Had Y/N lived, would she have taken her in? The thought was childish, but it came anyway. Perhaps Y/N would have cut her hair evenly instead of leaving Leo to butcher it with trembling hands. Perhaps she would have taught Audrey to fly properly rather than forcing her to learn through frantic guesses in stolen cockpits. She might have recognized the anger early and called it grief before it curdled into something harder.
Maybe she would have loved her, not perfectly or gently all the time, because Y/N had been too sharp for that, but honestly and practically, with irritated sighs, food pressed into her hands, and orders to sleep before she collapsed. Bindi might have been there too, loud, bright, and impossible to frighten. There could have been a ship, a crew, and women who knew how to survive without turning every room into a killing floor.
Maybe life could have been different.
Audrey clenched her hands until the cuffs bit into her skin.
That road was poison, every imagined life another blade turned inward. Y/N was dead, Bindi was dead, Namjoon was far away, and Jungkook was somewhere beyond her reach, still breathing air she had not yet poisoned. There was no mother, no father, no house, and no untouched version of Audrey waiting beneath the ruin with clean hands.
There was only this: chains, transport, Crematoria. A prison planet so hot by day and so cold by night that even murderers spoke its name carefully. Another cage, another set of walls, another place convinced it could hold her because every place before it had managed for a while.
Audrey leaned back as far as the restraint bar allowed. The transport hummed around her, and beyond the hull, the stars stretched cold and indifferent. Somewhere ahead waited Crematoria’s impossible heat, its underground prison, its guards, inmates, and rumors. Somewhere beyond that, perhaps, waited Jungkook.
Or perhaps he did not. Maybe she would never see him again. Maybe she could drown whole worlds in blood and still fail to drag his shadow close enough to cut.
What then? What was the point of living?
The question opened beneath her without warning. It was neither sad nor dramatic, only empty. She had outlived every version of herself that might once have answered. The Audrey of Taurus 1 would have said family. Leo might have said survival, though in his weakest moments he would have said Jungkook and hated himself for it. Trinity would have chosen revenge because revenge was easier to carry than despair.
This Audrey had no answer. She knew only that she was not finished, and perhaps that was enough. Perhaps the point was to make the universe regret ever putting teeth in her mouth, to keep breathing out of spite until everyone who had mistaken her for prey learned better.
Perhaps the point was murder.
Not because killing was holy, healing, or righteous. It was none of those things. It was ugly. It clung to the skin and returned in dreams wearing familiar faces. But murder was a language the world had taught her first, and Audrey intended to become fluent.
She closed her eyes without sleeping. Sleep belonged to people who trusted the dark, and Audrey trusted nothing. At nineteen, chained to the floor of a prison transport and hollowed out by rage, she let the ship carry her toward Crematoria.
The world had made an animal of her. Fine. Animals did not ask to be understood. They did not beg fathers to turn around, brothers to come back, or dead women to rise from the darkness and lead them somewhere safe. Animals bit, survived, and killed when the cage opened.
Audrey breathed slowly through her nose and imagined Jungkook Jeon finally hearing her name. Not Leo. Not Trinity. Not some abandoned girl left behind in a holy man’s house, but Audrey Nakamura, a new breed of evil with a reputation full of teeth, a storm rising from every prison that had failed to keep her buried.
Let him hear it. Let him wonder. Let him come close.
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader
Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon
Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only
Word Count: 27.8k+
Summary: After escaping M6-117, Jungkook, Leo, and Namjoon are captured by the mercenary ship Dark Fury. Its owner, Lorelai Youngblood, freezes notorious criminals alive and displays them as art. She considers Jungkook her ultimate masterpiece, but first, she wants to watch him kill.
Warnings: Strong Language, Side Character Death, Violence, Blood, Talks About Past Characters Dying, Trauma, Graphic Injury scenes, Jaded Characters, LIGHT Religious Themes (I mean no harm and do not want to offend anyone), EXTREME violence, graphic death, psycho characters, bounty hunters, collecting people, guns, knives, aliens killing people, let me know if i missed anything...
A/N: Thanks for reading!
masterlist
Jungkook leaned against the edge of the pilot’s console with his arms folded tightly across his chest, his eyes fixed on the stars sliding past the viewport. Their slow drift did nothing to calm him. If anything, the silence made the cockpit feel heavier, as though the galaxy itself were holding its breath.
Namjoon stood a few steps away. Whatever he had needed to say earlier already hung between them, exhausted and unresolved. When he finally spoke again, his voice was low.
“It’s sad,” he said, looking out into the void. “Leaving her down there like that. Her family’s never gonna get anything. No closure. No funeral.” He exhaled slowly through his nose. “She deserved better.”
Jungkook said nothing. His jaw tightened, but he kept his attention on the stars as though they might offer him something in return. They did not.
Namjoon gave a small nod, more to himself than to Jungkook, and rested his hand briefly against the console before turning away. The door closed behind him with a soft hiss, leaving Jungkook alone with the low, steady hum of the ship and the mechanical breathing of its systems.
After a while, he pushed himself away from the console and headed down the corridor. His boots made little sound against the metal floor. The ship always seemed larger during the artificial night cycle, full of too much empty space and too few living people.
He slowed when he passed the berth where Leo slept. Her nightmares had returned, loud and violent enough to carry through the thin door. She screamed in her sleep and tore at the sheets until her nails split. Jungkook paused outside, considering whether to check on her, then decided he would come back later and make sure she had not clawed herself bloody again.
He continued down the corridor, though his mind remained somewhere behind him.
Frenchie. That was what Y/N had called herself. He had never asked why. He had assumed the story would come eventually, when things slowed down and they were no longer fighting for air, light, or another hour of survival. It had never occurred to him that there would be no time at the end. He had believed she would be aboard this skiff with him.
They had known one another for a day, perhaps a little longer if he counted the way time had stretched and bled together on that planet. One day should not have mattered. It should not have been enough for her to carve herself into him more deeply than people he had known for years, but it had been.
By the time he reached his quarters, the lights had already dimmed. He left them that way and lowered himself onto the narrow cot, folding his arms behind his head as he stared at the ceiling. He wanted something solid to hold onto, some thought he could examine without it changing shape beneath his hands, but there was nothing.
She remained with him anyway. Not her face exactly, because faces blurred and shifted in memory, but the shape of her presence. The weight of her beside him. The way she had looked directly at him without flinching, as though she had seen something worth dragging back into the light.
A short breath escaped him, almost a laugh. He wondered whether, wherever the dead ended up, she was wearing that crooked little smirk of hers, the one that always appeared before a joke or a fight she fully intended to win.
Look what I did to you, Jungkook. You’re not such a complete bastard after all.
The thought nearly pulled a smile from him.
He had loved that mouth. It was sharp and relentless, incapable of letting anything pass without comment, even when silence would have been safer. He could still remember the feeling of it against his own, the kiss branded into him with a clarity that made the rest of her absence harder to bear. Charm could not alter the truth, though. Memories did not die with the people who made them. They stayed behind, quiet and heavy, waiting for the moment they could do the most damage.
She had been wrong about him. He had not changed, not in any way that mattered. Perhaps she had made him hesitate. Perhaps, for one brief and dangerous moment, she had made him hope. It would not have lasted. If she had survived, if they had somehow escaped that rock together, he would have ruined whatever existed between them. He would have ruined her, not because he wanted to, but because destruction was the one thing he understood how to do without trying.
She had gotten too close. She had made him forget who he was and what he had been built to survive. Worse, she had made him consider things that had no place in his world. A future. Loyalty without payment. A life in which someone knew what he was and chose him anyway.
That kind of thinking was dangerous.
Y/N had looked at him as though something human remained buried beneath everything else, and she had believed it with a certainty he could not understand. He could still hear her voice, soft and steady, touched by sadness when she told him, “I thought maybe some part of you still wanted to be human.”
She had meant it. God help her, she had truly believed he could return from wherever he had gone, and that frightened him more than anything with claws or teeth ever had. She thought he had stayed with the group, with her, Leo, and Namjoon, because she had pulled him back.
Perhaps she had. Perhaps that was the worst part.
He told himself it had been tactical. There was safety in numbers and a better chance of rescue if they stayed together. If rescue never came, he would outlast them. He always did. That was the story he had clung to until Leo looked up at him through ash, blood, and sweat and said, “Never had a doubt.”
He had believed her.
She trusted him, just as Y/N had.
Y/N had protected him. She had lied for him, not to save herself or preserve the peace, but because she believed he deserved a chance. No one had ever done that for him before.
Now she was gone.
Everything he had not said and could never say settled over his chest like a second gravity. He had not saved her. He had not even tried. When the moment came, he had frozen and watched it happen. He had watched her turn back for him.
He did not know how he was supposed to feel about that. Part of him hated her for it, for being reckless enough to return and foolish enough to believe there was something in him worth dying for. Another part loved her for exactly the same reasons. The contradiction worked through him more viciously than any wound he had ever carried.
Lying in the darkness with the ship’s hum filling his ears, Jungkook realized he could not even name what he felt. Grief, guilt, and rage had tangled together until he could no longer tell one from another. She had died going back for him, and he could not find a single reason why she would have done it. Not for him. Not for what he was.
He rolled onto his side, and the cot creaked beneath his weight. The thin blanket lay cool against his skin. It had been only three days since they left M6-117, yet he thought of her more with each passing one, her face becoming clearer the farther he traveled from the place where she had died.
The first night after M6-117, none of them had slept.
Leo had tried. She curled beneath a thermal blanket on the bench behind the cockpit and squeezed her eyes shut until the muscles around them hurt, but every time the skiff shifted or a loose panel clicked inside the cooling hull, she woke with both hands raised over her face. By the second time, she had found a utility knife and hidden it beneath the blanket. By the fifth, Jungkook had taken it from her without comment and left one of his smaller blades in its place.
Namjoon noticed. He noticed most things, even when grief left his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the walls of the ship, but he said nothing about the exchange. He merely sat on the deck beside Leo until her breathing slowed, his back against the bulkhead and his prayer beads looped twice around his wrist to stop their faint tapping from waking her again.
Jungkook remained in the cockpit.
He flew because it gave his hands something to do. The skiff required constant correction after launch. One patched wing pulled against the other, the coolant pressure wandered whenever the drives heated, and the atmospheric seals around the rear hatch complained in a thin electronic whine that came and went without pattern. Each problem was small enough to survive but persistent enough to demand his attention, and he welcomed every warning light.
A dying machine was honest company.
When the systems finally stabilized, he found himself staring at the empty co-pilot’s chair.
Y/N should have been sitting there, swearing at the navigation array and informing him that whatever he had done to the engine was offensive to engineering as a profession. She would have propped one boot against the console despite knowing it irritated him. She would have inspected every repair he made, found three things wrong, and fixed two of them before he could tell her to stop touching his ship.
The thought had felt obscene then. It still did.
The skiff had been hers in every way that mattered. She had dragged it back from the dead, rewired its heart, patched its skin, and believed in it before it had given her any reason to. Jungkook had only taken the controls after she could no longer do it herself.
On the second day, Leo asked whether they should name the dead.
They were rationing water in the narrow galley, passing a single metal cup between them while the recycling unit strained behind a loose panel. Namjoon looked at her carefully.
“What do you mean?”
“All of them,” she said. “So we don’t forget.”
Her voice was quiet, stripped of the rough disguise she had worn on the planet. Without it, she sounded younger than fourteen. She sat with one knee drawn against her chest and stared into the cup as she began listing the names.
“Bindi. Peter. Kai. Yeonjun. Soobin. Lee.” She hesitated. “Deku. Shields.”
The final name made Jungkook’s hand go still against the galley frame. Leo looked toward him before adding, “And Y/N.”
He walked away before either of them could ask what he thought they were accomplishing.
Later, he discovered the list scratched into the underside of the galley table with the point of a blade. Leo’s letters were uneven, some carved too deeply and others barely visible. Y/N’s name came last. Beneath it, separated by a long stretch of untouched metal, Leo had carved one more word.
CAPTAIN.
Jungkook ran his thumb along the grooves until the metal grew warm beneath his skin.
On the third day, Namjoon tried to speak to him about burial rites. Different worlds handled their dead in different ways, he explained. Some returned bodies to the soil, others to fire or the vacuum of space. A few of the older pilgrim communities believed the manner of burial mattered less than the witness. A person was not truly abandoned so long as someone carried the final image of them and refused to allow it to become meaningless.
Jungkook told him it sounded like a good way to ruin the rest of your life.
Namjoon had answered, “Perhaps grief is what love costs after it has nowhere else to go.”
Jungkook nearly hit him. Instead, he returned to the cockpit and flew until the stars blurred behind the glass.
The alarm was not merely loud. It felt alive.
Its shrill, unbroken scream tore through the skiff and rattled the narrow corridor walls until the sound ceased to be noise and became pressure, something that had worked its way beneath Jungkook’s skin and fallen into rhythm with his pulse. Red strobes flashed overhead, washing the cockpit in violent bursts of crimson that burned his eyes. The light came too quickly and too unevenly, like the frantic beat of a heart that knew it was running out of time.
The control panel had dissolved into chaos. Warning lights crowded one another, blinking out of sequence as failures cascaded faster than the system could record them. Every screen and switch demanded attention at once. The navigation display had gone from unstable to nearly unreadable, spitting warped data in sickly orange text that jittered across the screen before vanishing.
“Hull breach contained. Engines operating at one hundred seventy percent capacity,” the onboard AI reported in a voice of perfect calm.
The ship did not care whether they survived.
Jungkook moved without hesitation, his hands quick and precise, guided by muscle memory rather than conscious thought. There was no panic in the way he worked, only speed and ruthless concentration. His jaw remained locked beneath his goggles, and sweat stung his eyes, but his fingers never slipped. He rerouted power from systems that barely had anything left to give, forcing the skiff to remain intact through sheer stubbornness.
It was still failing. He could feel it through the floor, each vibration beneath his boots more violent than the last. The frame groaned and flexed around them, metal protesting as though it already understood that this was not a fight it could win.
Behind him, Leo sat rigid in the co-pilot’s chair with her boots braced against the bulkhead, as though she could anchor herself by force alone. Her patched jumpsuit hung loosely from her narrow frame, making her appear even smaller beneath the flashing red lights. She was not screaming or crying, but she was nowhere near calm. Her mouth had hardened into a thin line, and her eyes were much too wide. She had stopped watching the controls.
She was watching Jungkook.
Across the cockpit, Namjoon remained unnaturally still. His fingers traveled slowly over a string of worn prayer beads, the movement steady and deliberate. His lips shaped silent words, as though maintaining the rhythm might somehow keep the ship from tearing itself apart.
“Engine and hull failure imminent under current parameters,” the computer announced, cool and untroubled.
The skiff lurched hard enough to throw Jungkook off balance. Metal shrieked as something deep within the frame twisted under the strain, and several panels rattled loose overhead. He caught himself against the console with one hand while the other drove a lever forward harder than necessary. The ship answered with a long, agonized groan, the sound of something being forced far beyond the limits of what it had been built to endure.
Then the Dark Fury filled the viewport.
It loomed before them, immense and unnervingly beautiful, the kind of vessel designed to inspire awe before terror had time to settle in. Its hull rose like the walls of a cathedral, sharp lines and gold-trimmed plating catching the distant starlight while gunmetal veins disappeared beneath polished armor. It did not appear to be pursuing them. It simply waited, already certain of the outcome.
A tether stretched between the two ships, taut and unforgiving, drawing the skiff closer with slow, deliberate certainty. It did not resemble a rescue cable.
It looked like a noose.
They had nothing left with which to resist it. The engines were finished, propulsion was gone, and there was no leverage to fight the pull. All they could do was hang there as dead weight while the Dark Fury reeled them toward its belly.
Leo leaned forward in her seat. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Her voice was low, edged with bitterness.
Jungkook did not look at her. There was no time, and there was no point. Bad feelings did not alter trajectory.
The cockpit lights dimmed as the remaining systems dropped offline one by one. Screens flickered and went black. The alarm cut off in the middle of its scream, leaving behind a sudden and unnatural silence, as though someone had reached out and lowered the volume of the universe itself. The engine produced one final wheezing cough, a last breath of heat and resistance, before falling quiet.
The skiff went still.
Jungkook exhaled and leaned back, his body only now beginning to register the absence of noise. The final weak glow of the dashboard reflected across his goggles, flickered once, and disappeared. In the darkness, he turned his head just enough to glance at Leo.
“First you’re a boy, then a girl, now a psychic,” he said. “Make up your mind, kid.”
Leo released a shaky breath. It might have been a laugh, or it might have been panic. In the dark, it was difficult to tell.
Before she could answer, a voice cracked through the communications system.
“Unidentified craft. State your purpose and contents.”
All three of them froze. Namjoon’s fingers stopped against his prayer beads, and Leo’s expression immediately settled into something guarded and carefully blank. Jungkook’s hands hovered over dead controls that could no longer even pretend to be useful.
Beyond the viewport, the Dark Fury opened.
Massive bay doors unfolded with precise mechanical grace, spilling white light into the darkness like a halo around a mouth far too wide. Inside, crew members moved with calm efficiency. They wore immaculate white uniforms, their faces concealed behind interface helmets as augmented displays shimmered across their armor. Data passed between them in real time while they prepared to receive whatever they believed they had caught.
The ship had belonged to Lorelai Youngblood long before the name attached to it had truly become hers.
That was how the oldest members of the crew told the story when they believed she could not hear them. Her father had purchased the Dark Fury as a mobile estate during the final years of the Hesperian conflicts, then filled its lower decks with soldiers, debtors, and specimens gathered from worlds whose governments lacked the money or influence to object. When he died, Lorelai inherited the vessel at nineteen and ordered every portrait of him removed before the hour was over.
The first body entered the conservatory three months later.
He had been a militia commander from a moon whose name no longer appeared on commercial charts. During a siege, he had killed forty-seven people and later boasted at trial that no prison could preserve him long enough for justice to be served.
Lorelai preserved him indefinitely.
The acquisition made her famous in certain private circles and monstrous in nearly every public one. Both outcomes pleased her.
Over time, the collection became less concerned with guilt and more consumed by rarity. Warlords, assassins, altered soldiers, failed saints, and engineered predators wearing human faces all found their way into her gallery. Lorelai wanted the living person behind the rumor and the precise instant before that rumor ended. She paid bounty hunters to deliver them breathing, bribed wardens, purchased sentences, and funded wars long enough to produce the kind of survivors she considered worth keeping.
Typhon had served her for eleven of those years.
He had watched fascination become appetite and appetite harden into doctrine. He no longer questioned whether a new acquisition belonged in the gallery. He calculated how many crew members it would cost to secure the subject and whether those losses could be replaced before the next port.
Jungkook Jeon had already cost more than most.
From the upper level, Lorelai watched him move through the containment foam and understood immediately that every report had failed to capture him. Reports reduced men to dates, bodies, escape routes, and psychological labels. They described Jungkook’s speed without conveying the economy of it, and they documented his violence without explaining how little emotion he appeared to require in order to commit it.
He did not rage when he killed.
He solved.
The distinction thrilled her.
Typhon mistook the intensity of her attention for simple approval. “He killed seven in under a minute.”
“Eight,” Lorelai corrected.
“The one against the support is still breathing.”
“Not for long.”
Below them, the injured mercenary twitched once and became still.
Lorelai smiled behind her veil. “Eight.”
At the center of the command deck stood Typhon, tall and unnervingly pale, his blond hair cut with almost surgical precision. Every line of him appeared designed rather than lived in. His boots echoed across the deck as he moved, each step unhurried and deliberate, as though the ship itself adjusted to accommodate him.
When he spoke, he did not raise his voice. He had no need to. It carried through the chamber regardless, threading through steel and circuitry alike.
“Unidentified craft. State your purpose and contents.”
Jungkook keyed the comms and kept his voice flat, casual enough to pass. “Name’s Lee. Just a hauler. Ship blew on a short run. Got two civvies onboard, no cargo, nothing worth selling.”
Silence followed, broken only by the faint hiss of data passing through systems too advanced to hear properly. Somewhere on the command deck, a technician tilted his head as red light flickered across his visor and the bounty surfaced before him.
Jungkook Jeon. 1,126,000 UDs. Dead or alive.
Typhon’s mouth curved almost imperceptibly, though the expression never reached his eyes. “Well then, Mr. Lee, what brings you this far out? There’s not much here but dust and wreckage.”
Typhon inclined his head as though considering the explanation. “Looks like we’re in the same business.”
On a raised platform at the rear of the deck, a woman sat motionless beneath layers of white fabric that shimmered like glass and concealed her face completely. She said nothing and made no gesture beyond a single, deliberate nod.
“Bring them in,” Typhon ordered.
The tether answered with a mechanical groan as it tightened, snapping away the last of the slack. The skiff jolted as its momentum shifted and began its slow pull forward, dragged through open space like a fish caught on a hook. Leo stared through the viewport as the Dark Fury’s hangar doors spread wider, metal panels peeling back like the petals of something enormous and carnivorous.
“They’re reeling us in,” she said quietly.
Jungkook did not answer. He braced one hand against the side panel as the skiff crossed into the docking bay, the landing clamps striking the hull hard enough to shudder through the floor. A sharp hiss followed as pressure equalized, then a second, heavier thud settled deep within the frame. When the bay doors slammed shut behind them, the sound rang through the ship like a final seal.
The Dark Fury had been built from several vessels and made no attempt to conceal it. Even from the skiff, Jungkook could see where different eras had been forced together: the armored spine of a military carrier, the broad docking chambers of a colonial transport, the narrow cathedral-like towers favored by pre-Unity dynasties, and engine housings large enough to have once belonged to an ore hauler. Gold plating traced the joins rather than hiding them. Whoever owned the ship wanted every scar displayed.
Namjoon studied the vessel through the viewport. “It’s older than it looks.”
“Everything expensive is,” Jungkook said.
“There are pilgrimage archives that mention ships like this. Traveling courts, private armies, nobles who refused to accept that borders applied to them.”
Leo leaned forward despite the restraint harness cutting across her chest. “So pirates.”
“Pirates with accountants.”
The Dark Fury’s outer lights came alive in measured rows, revealing the ship piece by piece rather than illuminating it fully. Weapon emplacements hid beneath decorative fins, sensor clusters rose like devotional spires, and narrow windows sat too high along the hull to offer any comfort. The vessel had been designed to make approaching ships feel small long before anyone aboard opened fire.
Jungkook recognized the intention. Prisons did the same thing with gates.
As the tether drew them farther into the bay, the skiff’s hull released a long metallic complaint that carried through the deck and into their bones. Leo’s hand found the edge of Jungkook’s seat before she seemed aware of reaching for it.
Leo nodded too quickly. She wanted to believe him badly enough that the effort showed on her face.
Jungkook turned back toward the viewport. He did not make promises. Promises were handles other people used to drag you where they wanted. Even so, he found himself counting the distances between Leo’s seat, Namjoon’s position, and the hatch. Three steps to the girl. Four to the preacher. Two to the emergency release. He filed each measurement away before the clamps locked around the skiff.
“Ship secure in Bay Three,” an automated voice announced, clipped and emotionless, offering confirmation but no welcome.
Jungkook struck a match. The flame caught at once, flaring orange in the dim cockpit and briefly illuminating his sweat-slicked face and clenched jaw. He touched it to the tip of a handheld torch, brought the flame to life, and dropped to one knee beside the bulkhead. Holding the heat against the internal fire sensor, he let it overwhelm the casing. The scanner would short just long enough to muddy the readings and scramble their signatures.
One final sleight of hand before whatever came next.
Namjoon leaned forward as the casing blackened. “That’s clever.”
Jungkook did not look up.
Leo watched the metal warp beneath the flame. “You think it’ll work? That it’ll be enough?”
He counted silently, pulled the torch away at the last possible second, and muttered just loudly enough for both of them to hear.
“Hold your breath.”
Across the hangar, the Dark Fury’s command deck remained sharp and controlled, stripped of anything unnecessary. The lighting was kept low so that the walls of data glowed brighter by contrast. Readouts curved around the chamber, streaming information without pause: structural integrity, atmospheric levels, biometric scans. Every display showed the skiff docked, motionless, and exposed as the Dark Fury’s systems peeled it apart line by line, cataloging its damage and searching for anything alive inside.
Typhon stood at the center of it all, perfectly balanced and utterly still. He did not fidget or shift his weight. When he spoke, it was because he expected an answer.
“Report.”
Freddy leaned closer to the main terminal and narrowed his eyes at the overlapping data. “Two adult heat signatures. Weak. There’s a third, but it’s inconsistent. Could be residual heat or a juvenile.” His fingers hovered over the controls. “Could just be engine wash.”
Typhon did not react. “Find out.”
Inside the skiff, the torch sputtered and died. Jungkook resealed the panel and drew his hand away. Leo sat rigidly in her seat, shoulders hunched and breathing shallow, her arms wrapped tightly around her torso as though she could hold herself together through force alone. Beside her, Namjoon murmured a prayer beneath his breath, the words too quiet to distinguish. It might have been for them. It might have been for whoever came through the hatch first.
On the command deck, Freddy leaned closer to the screen as his frown deepened. “Running a tighter sweep.” He paused. “Wait.”
Typhon did not turn. “What is it?”
Freddy blinked and tapped the display again, as though the information might return if he pressed hard enough. “They’re gone.”
“Gone,” Typhon repeated.
“All three heat signatures vanished. It’s like they were never there.”
Typhon’s jaw tightened once, not with irritation but recalculation. “Full breach protocol. Prepare the team.”
The order rippled through the ship. Far below, a low alarm rolled along the corridors as a hatch snapped open and boots struck steel in synchronized strides. A dozen mercenaries moved quickly and efficiently, armor plates locking into place with sharp clicks. Mag-locks sparked as they engaged beneath their boots, anchoring each step. Typhon fell into pace with them, his unhurried calm almost jarring against the urgency around him, as though the breach were merely another meeting already marked on his schedule.
The hangar was ready when they arrived. Two sentries guarded the perimeter. Gunner lounged against the wall with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and his armor scuffed and half unzipped, wearing the careless look of someone who had survived long enough to stop pretending he gave a damn. His smirk seemed permanent. Beside him stood a woman with a sharp buzz cut and a black patch covering one eye. She neither shifted nor leaned, her expression fixed and unreadable.
Typhon stopped between them. “Anything?”
Gunner shrugged. “Locked it myself. No motion, no breach. Atmosphere’s flatlined.”
Typhon stepped toward the observation window and studied the skiff. It sat small, scarred, and silent beneath the bay lights.
“Pressurize.”
Air entered the hangar with a low hiss, gentle at first before steadily building into a tight, whispering hum. A green indicator illuminated beside the outer seal.
“Green for breach,” Gunner said. “Oxygen’s thin, but it’ll hold.”
Typhon nodded once, and the team advanced in a tight formation with their rifles raised. One mercenary broke away from the others, smaller and quicker than the rest, a sleek zero-gravity rig fitted closely around his frame. He used the bay floor like a springboard, bounding forward through the reduced gravity until three controlled strides carried him onto the skiff’s hull. His magnetized boots locked down with a heavy metallic thud.
He crossed the curved wing with spiderlike speed, the servos in his suit humming softly as he approached the hatch. No one shouted orders, and no alarms sounded. There was only the muted click of tools being unpacked and the quiet pulse of machinery.
A puck-shaped device slapped against the hatch lock, blinked once, and began to spin. The mercenary leaned back while his fingers moved rapidly across the magnetic bypass interface. A moment later, the seal disengaged with a low hiss.
Then the hatch blew outward in a concussive burst.
The charge was not strong enough to tear through the metal. It had been engineered to stun. Thick white foam erupted from the opening in a dense, violent wave, driven forward by pressure and striking the waiting mercenaries before any of them could react.
Three dropped in the first instant. One slammed into the wall and stayed there, his body folding at a sickening angle on impact. The other two disappeared beneath the churning white mass as it surged across the deck and swallowed their outlines. The lockpicker was thrown clear, skidding hard across the bay with ropes of foam stretching from his gear. He clawed at his faceplate and choked as panic finally broke through his training.
“What the hell is this?” he rasped. “Foam?”
Typhon tracked the spread without moving, studying its speed, density, and the way it behaved less like an accident than something released with purpose. His expression remained unchanged, but his eyes sharpened.
“A trap,” he said. “Fall back. Now.”
A handful of mercenaries managed to retreat. The others never had the chance. The foam was not passive. It writhed as it expanded, chemically active and thickening by the second, dragging bodies beneath its surface with slow, merciless force. A scream tore free for half a breath before the compound smothered it, flattening the sound into silence. It was fire suppressant repurposed into something vicious and efficient, designed to steal the air from lungs and kill noise before it could spread.
The surviving mercenaries tightened the perimeter, rifles trained on the shifting surface while the bay lights flickered and the backup systems engaged. Typhon did not retreat with them. He remained where he was, hands loose at his sides, watching the foam churn.
“They have to breathe sometime,” he murmured.
Leo burst through the surface with a sharp, desperate inhale, her eyes wide and unfocused. A mercenary fired on instinct, sending a tight burst through the space she had occupied a heartbeat earlier. She vanished beneath the foam again as the rounds tore into the froth.
Namjoon surfaced next, gasping and blinking hard as though the world had not caught up to him yet. Gunfire split the air, and he disappeared almost as quickly as he had emerged.
For one suspended breath, there was nothing but shifting foam and the slow movement of tracking muzzles.
Then Jungkook erupted from it like a missile.
He moved without hesitation or sound, stripped down to speed and instinct. The first mercenary collapsed before he could register the threat, Jungkook’s elbow crushing his windpipe with a short, efficient blow. The second tried to turn, but Jungkook knocked the rifle from his hands, caught it in midair, and drove the butt into the man’s throat. Another stumbled backward and caught a kick square in the chest that sent him flying into a support beam, the impact ringing through the bay.
Jungkook vaulted onto the ledge where two more waited. He tore a weapon from one before the man could react, swung it across the other’s helmet, and pinned him to the bulkhead with his forearm while bringing the rifle up in his free hand. The entire sequence was smooth and quiet, each movement following the last as naturally as breath.
Leo broke the surface again, soaked and coughing, dragging a rifle behind her. She managed one desperate breath before shouting, “That’s nothing, scarecrow! He’s gonna kick your—”
A round screamed past her head close enough to make her yelp. The foam shifted beneath her and dragged her under in the middle of the sentence, cutting off her voice as though it had never been there.
Behind the glass, Typhon watched with the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth.
“You certainly know how to make an entrance,” he said over the comms, his voice calm and precise enough to cut cleanly through the chaos.
Jungkook did not answer or look up. A mercenary charged him with a baton, but Jungkook caught the swing in mid-arc, drove a knee into the man’s ribs, and threw him into the wall like discarded equipment. Blood drifted free in the reduced gravity, forming small dark spheres that turned lazily through the air and caught the light like scattered rubies.
By then, Typhon had stopped watching Jungkook.
His attention settled on Leo as she dragged herself upright, coughing foam from her lungs. She barely had time to see him step forward before his boot struck her squarely in the chest. The blow knocked her flat and drove the air from her in a sharp, involuntary grunt. She lay stunned with her arms half raised and her chest heaving while Typhon lifted his pistol and sighted down the barrel with one narrowed eye.
“Stay down.”
Her hands trembled, and her breathing hitched, but she did not look away. She held his gaze with her jaw clenched in stubborn defiance, the kind that refused to yield even when yielding would have been easier.
Jungkook’s voice carried across the hangar, low and flat with menace.
“Call off your lapdog.”
Typhon did not turn, though his finger tightened slightly against the trigger.
Jungkook stepped forward with one of the mercenaries pinned beneath his knee and a curved shiv pressed to the man’s throat. It was not standard issue. The blade had clearly been carried for a long time, its edge worn by use and its surface marked by a history no one present needed explained.
“Before him trying to impress you gets him killed,” Jungkook said, never taking his eyes from Typhon.
For a moment, the entire bay seemed to hold its breath. Foam drifted in slow spirals through the air, thick and clinging, tangled with bodies and streaks of blood that had not yet settled. Rifles remained raised, fingers hovered near triggers, and no one dared move.
Jungkook stood amid the wreckage with his breathing steady and his posture loose, the ease in him failing to hide how ready he remained. Tension lived just beneath the surface, coiled and waiting, but none of the destruction around him seemed unusual. Noise, smoke, blood, bodies. This was familiar ground. Chaos did not overwhelm him. It settled into him as naturally as muscle memory.
Movement above drew his attention.
A woman stepped into the light on the upper level, her pace unhurried and her presence controlled, like someone entering a room she already expected to own. A bone-white robe flowed behind her, impossibly clean in a hangar thick with smoke, foam, and blood. The fabric did not catch on the debris or drag across the floor. It followed each movement neatly, as though it had been designed for this exact entrance.
Beneath the hood, jet-black hair fell in a glossy sheet down her back, untouched by sweat or ash. Her skin was pale and cool-toned, unmarked and stark against the scorched steel and dark stains below. As the robe shifted, it revealed brief glimpses of the exo-frame beneath, sleek, polished, and unmistakably expensive. It was neither bulky nor utilitarian, but sculpted to a tall, slender body built for precision rather than brute strength.
The technology looked almost obscene in a place like this, the kind conceived in quiet, controlled rooms far removed from blood, panic, and the people expected to die in its path.
The woman turned slightly, and the overhead lights caught her face. She had sharp cheekbones, a straight nose, and a narrow jaw set with effortless certainty. Her eyes were a pale steel gray, steady and observant as they traveled across the hangar without hurry. They passed over the bodies without lingering, and nothing in her expression suggested surprise.
“Am I that easy to spot?” she asked lightly, amusement touching her voice. “You make it sound as though I enjoy the drama.”
Jungkook’s attention fixed fully on her, his jaw tightening. “Call it whatever you want. Just tell him to lower the damn weapon.”
She moved closer with unhurried grace, surveying the wreckage with mild curiosity, as though she were assessing an untidy room rather than a battlefield. Her smile was polite but thin, worn more from habit than warmth.
“You’ll have to forgive Typhon,” she said. “He gets ahead of himself sometimes. Occupational hazard.” Her gaze dipped toward the bodies as casually as if she were noting a spill on the floor. “Still, I can’t say I blame him.”
When she looked back at Jungkook, her attention sharpened. “You have a reputation.”
He gave her nothing.
“Yes,” she continued more softly. “I know your name, and more than just that.”
The careful way she said it made the words sound almost considerate, as though they shared some private understanding.
Jungkook’s voice dropped into a warning. “Keep digging and you’ll find something sharp.”
She laughed quietly. The sound was almost warm.
“I’m not here to fight you,” she said. “Not unless you insist.” With a loose gesture, she indicated the foam-slicked floor and the bodies scattered through it. “But if putting that blade down saves me another cleanup crew and a public relations headache, I’d appreciate it.”
His grip tightened by a fraction. “Not gonna happen.”
Her smile did not disappear, but something in it cracked. She glanced subtly toward Typhon.
The weapon at Leo’s forehead shifted just enough to break the skin. A thin line of blood welled beneath the barrel. Leo did not scream, but her breath caught, and her raised hands began to tremble.
“The girl doesn’t matter to me,” Jungkook said flatly.
One of the woman’s eyebrows lifted. “Then help me understand. Why risk this much for someone you don’t care about?” Her gaze moved briefly to Leo before returning to him. “Unless she got to you.”
Leo’s breathing stuttered. Her shoulders shook as she fought to hold herself together. Nearby, Namjoon had finally dragged himself free of the foam, his clothes soaked and streaked with blood and suppressant. He remained silent, his expression taut as he watched the exchange.
Jungkook did not move. The sounds of the hangar seemed to dull around him beneath the weight of Leo’s stare. She was not begging or pleading. She only watched him, as though she needed to know, right then, what kind of man he truly was. A single tear escaped and caught the light as it slipped down her cheek.
“She’s a cover story,” Jungkook said quietly. “That’s all.” His eyes remained fixed on Typhon. “You shoot her now, you’re saving me the effort.”
The woman’s mouth twitched, the faintest suggestion of a smile tugging at one corner. “Then I have your blessing.”
Typhon adjusted his grip. The barrel shifted, and his finger began to tighten against the trigger.
Jungkook’s shiv left his hand with a hard metallic thunk.
The blade crossed the space between them in a clean arc and struck the barrel just as the weapon fired, snapping it upward. The round buried itself in the ceiling with a sharp crack, sending sparks raining across the deck. Leo gasped and threw her hands over her face. The shot had missed, but not by enough.
Typhon did not flinch. He showed no reaction at all, though his finger eased from the trigger.
The woman had already turned away. Her robe swept silently behind her as she walked, as though the confrontation had lost her interest the moment it ended.
“I think I know you better than you know yourself,” she said over her shoulder. “And I think you’re lying.”
Jungkook watched her go with his jaw clenched, refusing to give her anything more. “Now’s not the time,” he muttered, the words meant less for her than for himself.
The mercenary still trapped beneath his boot made a weak grab for freedom, fingers scraping uselessly against the deck. Jungkook shifted his weight. A dull, wet snap followed, and the body went limp beneath him.
“Lock them down,” the woman in white ordered, her voice carrying easily across the bay. “We’re finished here.”
Typhon stepped back and holstered his weapon. Before turning away, he gave Leo one final look, flat and professional, as though he had already dismissed her from his mind. Blood traced a narrow line from her temple, bright against her skin.
More mercenaries flooded into the hangar with the smooth coordination of people who had performed this task too many times to think about it. Leo did not resist when one of them seized her by the collar and hauled her upright. Her boots scraped along the floor as they dragged her away. Her gaze had gone distant, not broken but somewhere far beyond the room, and she neither struggled nor cried.
Jungkook offered no resistance either. His eyes never stopped moving, though. Anyone who understood men like him would have recognized the calculation behind them: doors, weapons, spacing, exits. Every detail was being measured and filed away.
Typhon fell into step beside Lorelai Youngblood, lowering his voice beneath the steady echo of boots on steel. “My apologies.”
She gave a short, humorless laugh. “Typhon, you know what those are worth to me. You followed orders. A few bodies are an acceptable cost.”
He inclined his head. “What about him?”
Youngblood slowed just enough for him to notice. Her mouth curved into an expression suspended somewhere between amusement and intent.
“Bring Mr. Jeon to the conservatory. I have something in mind.”
When Typhon asked about the others, Lorelai dismissed the question with a careless movement of one hand. “Thaw more mercenaries. Replacements are easy.”
The skiff that had carried Jungkook, Leo, and Namjoon away from M6-117 was ejected from the bay without ceremony. It clipped the Dark Fury’s engine housing, tumbled once, and spun into open space. Jungkook caught a final glimpse of it through the narrowing doors before it vanished, taking with it the last familiar thing they had left. A moment later, the view was gone, replaced by the hard, enclosed corridors of the cruiser.
He had been locked into an immobilizer with his arms pinned and his chest restrained, leaving him able to move little more than his head. He did not fight it. He watched.
Ahead of him, Namjoon and Leo were marched down a corridor illuminated by flickering strips of white light. Matte-black walls pressed in on either side, cold and utilitarian, built for efficiency rather than comfort. Leo was dragged by the collar, her boots scraping over the floor as though she weighed nothing. Namjoon walked under his own power with his wrists bound and his posture straight. His calm did not resemble courage so much as refusal.
“Ever seen a ship like this?” he asked quietly.
“Plenty,” Jungkook said. “Just trying to figure out how they stitched it together.”
Namjoon studied the walls, where cryopods stood in long, repeating rows. Some were empty. Others held vague human shapes behind frost-clouded glass, men and women suspended in unnatural stillness.
“Plantation model,” he said. “They leave port stocked with mercenaries and contracts, then stay out for months. Years, if the structure holds.”
“Growing soldiers instead of crops.”
Namjoon nodded. “Bodies in. Labor out.”
“Just add heat,” Leo said without looking back. Her voice was thin but steady.
Jungkook glanced at her. She looked exhausted and shaken, but she was still there. He turned his attention back to Namjoon. “You know a lot for a holy man.”
“I wasn’t always a holy man, Mr. Jeon. You’re not the only one among us who has been to prison.”
A brief smile touched Jungkook’s mouth and vanished. “Takes a special kind of desperate to sign up for this.”
The guard beside him stopped and turned, his bulk nearly filling the corridor. Without warning, the butt of his rifle smashed into Jungkook’s face. The crack rang through the narrow passage, snapping his head sideways and splitting his lip. Jungkook spat blood onto the floor, then looked the man over slowly.
“That wasn’t about what I said,” he observed. “You just needed a win.”
A short, bitter laugh escaped Leo before she could stop it. It did not last, but it was there.
Namjoon had been inside cryo once before.
The memory returned as the guards marched him past the frost-clouded pods, unwanted and exact. He had been twenty-three then, not yet holy, chained among political prisoners in the hold of a transport bound for a labor moon. Cryo had been cheaper than feeding men during a long journey. The sedative failed halfway through the flight, and he woke beneath the ice unable to move or fully open his eyes, capable only of hearing the slow machinery around him and the occasional muffled scream of another prisoner waking in the pod beside his.
He had spent six days trapped inside his own body.
Afterward, he told himself he had found God in that darkness. The truth was less graceful. He had found terror first and rage second. Faith came only after both had exhausted themselves.
Now, as the preserved faces passed on either side, he understood what Lorelai Youngblood’s collection truly was before Jungkook ever entered the conservatory. It was not death, and it was not art.
It was endless waking.
Leo stayed close enough that their shoulders brushed whenever the guards turned them through a narrow section of corridor. She had stopped asking where Jungkook was. Namjoon knew that kind of silence. It was not surrender. She was saving the question until she could survive the answer.
“Breathe slowly,” he murmured.
“I am.” Her next breath came deeper, followed by another. “Are they going to freeze us?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re supposed to lie when kids ask things like that.”
“I have never been particularly skilled at lying.”
“That’s not true. You told us everything would be okay.”
Namjoon looked at her. The words might have been an accusation, but her face held only exhausted sorrow.
“I said we would keep moving,” he replied. “Sometimes that is the closest thing to okay that exists.”
Leo swallowed and stared ahead. “He’ll come.”
Namjoon did not ask whom she meant. “Yes.”
This time, the lie came easily.
The corridor opened into a broader passage lined with guards. The air changed as they crossed the threshold, becoming sterile and scrubbed too clean, like a morgue prepared for inspection.
“Split ’em,” someone called.
A broad-shouldered man with red hair stepped forward, his hands more alloy than flesh. He seized Leo by the shoulder and pulled her aside, firm but not careless. The name stamped across his armor read BYRNE. Leo stiffened beneath his grip but held her ground.
Namjoon inclined his head, his expression calm and unreadable. “I’ll pray.”
“For me?” Jungkook called, half a laugh pushing through the blood on his mouth.
Namjoon did not look back. “Not for me.”
Jungkook snorted.
Byrne shoved Leo toward a side corridor. “Move.”
She twisted in his grip just enough to look over her shoulder. “I’m not leaving you, Jungkook. I’ll find you!”
Her voice broke as it echoed down the passage.
Jungkook did not answer. Something tightened around his eyes, too quiet to be mistaken for fear or pain. It was for her. He knew Leo well enough to believe she meant it, and in a place like this, that kind of promise was a death sentence.
The guards rolled him onward without ceremony. The immobilizer glided over polished floors that gleamed far too cleanly for a ship like this, reflecting the overhead lights in sterile, controlled lines. Jungkook barely noticed the motion. His attention had narrowed to what mattered: the rhythm of the boots behind him, the distance between doors, the quiet blink of cameras hidden in the corners, and the places where the light thinned enough for shadows to gather.
A heavy door slid open with a low hiss, like a lung emptying itself of stale air, and the room beyond made him still.
It was immaculate in a way that felt deliberate, almost hostile. Every surface gleamed beneath cold clinical lighting, but the color was wrong. Not white, but a deep electric blue that flattened depth and softened every edge, making solid objects appear faintly unreal. The longer Jungkook looked, the less the room resembled a physical place and the more it felt like a carefully maintained illusion, as though everything within it might blur or dissolve if he stared too closely.
Then the air reached him, thin and sharp, cold enough to sting his lungs and so dry it felt engineered for preservation rather than human comfort. It was the kind of atmosphere designed to prevent anything from changing.
That was when he noticed the figures arranged along the walls and in the corners, illuminated from below by recessed floor lights. At first glance they resembled statues, but the illusion weakened the longer he studied them. Most were human in shape, yet the details were wrong. Limbs bent at angles that strained belief, rib cages flared too widely, and faces were trapped in expressions too precise to be decorative. Mouths hung open in silent screams, eyes fixed in the final instant of terror.
This was not art.
At the center of the room stood a tall conical structure, matte black and unnervingly smooth. It did not reflect the blue light so much as consume it, its surface shimmering faintly as though it absorbed everything around it. The frozen figures appeared to have been arranged around the cone, all of them facing inward.
“Set him down and leave,” Typhon said.
The guards released the restraints and stepped back without a word. The immobilizer rolled away as smoothly as it had entered, disappearing through the doorway before the door sealed behind it with a dull, final thud.
Jungkook rose slowly and rolled his shoulders to work out the stiffness left by the restraints. The floor responded immediately, a faint glow blooming beneath each step. He disliked that more than he cared to admit. The technology felt too precise, too aware of him.
He had taken only a few steps when one of the figures caught his attention. It stood closer than the others and was nearly life-sized, its posture wrong in a way that made his skin prickle. The shoulders were hunched, the head tilted, and the arms half raised as if the body had been caught in the middle of reacting and never allowed to finish. There was unmistakable strength in it, muscle still drawn tight beneath the surface, but something collapsed in the posture as well, suggesting that whatever it had once been had not gone quietly.
A plaque at the base read:
KILLER OF MEN: FURYA.
Jungkook’s mouth twisted. He knew the name.
He stepped closer, narrowing his eyes at the surface. The precision was unsettling. Every muscle striation and pore remained visible with impossible clarity. This was not sculpture or even replication. It was preservation, a body held in place while time locked around it.
Without realizing what he was doing, Jungkook raised one hand and let his fingers hover near the figure’s mouth. A tongue flicked out, quick and wet, and brushed across his fingertip.
Jungkook recoiled as though he had touched a live wire, jerking his hand back. “What the fuck is this shit?”
“You like it?” a smooth voice asked behind him, touched with faint amusement.
He spun around.
The woman stood in the doorway, framed by the blue spill of light. She carried a glass filled with something dark red, the liquid catching the illumination with a faint oily shimmer. Her robe trailed softly behind her, pristine and unhurried.
Behind Jungkook, the Furyan figure turned its head toward her.
Typhon moved before Jungkook could react, too quickly to track. A sharp jolt flared at the base of Jungkook’s neck as something pierced his skin. His knees buckled, and he caught himself on both hands, the impact driving pain up his arms while a cold burn raced down his spine. His muscles seized once and then released.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
The woman crossed the room at an easy pace, as though nothing unusual had happened. She placed her glass on a slender chrome pedestal with almost domestic care, like this was a sitting room rather than something pulled from a nightmare.
“Precaution,” she said lightly, flicking her fingers as though dismissing the matter. “Should you get any ideas, such as trying to kill me, I press a button and the implant Typhon just gave you ends the conversation. Quickly.”
Jungkook pushed himself upright with care and reached for the back of his neck, where the skin still burned. “You’re not freezing me like one of these,” he said, glancing toward the figures lining the room.
Her smile was effortless and sharp at once. “Of course not. You’re for my private collection, Jungkook.”
She gestured toward the dark cone at the center of the room. As the light shifted with her movement, whatever trick of perspective had been shaping the space seemed to fall away. Shadows resolved into forms he had not fully seen before, and the room appeared to open around him.
There were dozens of them. Perhaps more.
They were not statues but people, or what had once been people, bodies caught mid-motion and suspended in moments of panic, fury, or surrender. Every face bore the imprint of its final thought.
Jungkook took them in without speaking.
“I’m Lorelai Youngblood,” she said with practiced warmth. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Jeon.”
She did not wait for an answer. Youngblood turned and moved deeper into the room, her robe whispering over the floor. The lights adjusted to her presence, brightening in a smooth ripple ahead of her path. The effect was subtle but unmistakable. The gallery responded to her.
Jungkook hesitated for only a fraction of a second before following. As he moved, the figures seemed to close in, their frozen expressions changing beneath the shifting angles of light. Up close, the illusion of sculpture disappeared completely. Skin retained its translucence. Hair clung as though still damp with sweat. Even the tension in their hands looked recent, unfinished.
“This way,” Youngblood said, lifting one hand in a guiding gesture that assumed obedience rather than requested it.
She slowed just enough to force him beside her rather than behind. From that distance he could feel the cold radiating from her and detect a faint metallic note beneath whatever perfume she wore.
“This gallery is very private,” she continued conversationally. “You should consider yourself honored.”
Her eyes flicked toward him in brief appraisal before returning to the rows ahead.
Youngblood moved through the gallery like a host conducting a private tour. There was no hesitation in her step or tension in her posture. She walked at an easy pace, occasionally lifting one hand as she spoke, polished and practiced, almost charming. Her tone belonged at an auction or an exclusive showing, not in a chamber lined with preserved monsters.
Jungkook followed a step behind, moving more slowly. He neither rushed nor wandered, but his eyes never stopped searching. Some of it was curiosity, and he would not insult himself by denying that, but most was instinct, old and deeply ingrained, the kind that recognized danger even when it stood perfectly still. He kept his shoulders loose and his arms close, as though brushing too near any of the displays might cost him more than skin.
Typhon remained behind them.
The gallery smelled wrong. Not of rot or chemicals, but something colder and more sterile. A faint metallic tang clung to the recycled air, stale and unmoving, as though the room had been holding its breath for years. Frost traced the seams of the cryo-casings in thin white veins.
Jungkook folded his arms, his jaw tightening. “So let me get this straight. You spend a fortune catching people alive just to freeze them and put them on display.”
Youngblood passed another figure, this one twisted so badly its outline barely resembled a human body. Its spine bowed at an impossible angle, and one arm had fused halfway into its torso, as if the body had tried to fold in on itself and failed. She smiled faintly, admiring it like a rare sculpture.
“You’re missing the point.”
“No,” Jungkook said. “I see it. You hoard killers like souvenirs.”
She stopped before a pair of bodies locked together in something grotesque and almost intimate. One face was pressed into the other’s neck, teeth bared and jaw frozen halfway through a bite. Their limbs overlapped, ribs crushed together, skin fused where the cryo had caught them in motion. Whatever violence had been unfolding between them had never reached an end. It had simply stopped.
Youngblood extended a hand and brushed her fingers along the rigid curve of one shoulder. The touch was slow and almost gentle, as though she were soothing something skittish.
“You see waste,” she said. “I see legacy. These are not corpses. They’re monuments.”
Jungkook felt his stomach turn.
“Every one of them was the most dangerous thing in their corner of the galaxy,” she continued. “Entire systems wanted them erased. The lives they took—”
“Don’t care,” Jungkook cut in. “Dead men don’t get better because you frame them nicely.”
Her hand stilled against the frozen shoulder. When she turned toward him, her eyes had sharpened.
“I don’t waste history.”
“Yeah,” he said flatly. “You pickle it.”
For the briefest moment, something colder slipped beneath her smile.
“They’re not dead.”
Jungkook looked again at the figure beside her. This time, he ignored the posture and the injuries, the violence written so clearly into the body, and concentrated on the face.
The expression was wrong. Too calm to be pain, yet too still to be peace. It looked paused rather than ended, a moment interrupted and held in place. The eyes were parted just enough to feel unfinished, the pupils slightly off-center, caught somewhere between one blink and the next.
“Still breathing,” Youngblood said softly. “Cryo slowed until time barely moves. No sleep. Only thought.”
Jungkook did not answer immediately. His gaze lingered longer than he intended, and in that extra second the reality settled over him. A body held motionless while every muscle screamed without release. Lungs moving so slowly that each breath barely qualified as one. Awareness trapped behind eyes that would never fully close.
“So they’re awake,” he said at last.
“Conscious,” she corrected. “Every second.”
She turned and continued deeper into the gallery. Jungkook followed, the temperature dropping around them so gradually that he noticed it only after the cold had already crept through his clothing and into his skin. The air grew heavier, layered with sterilized chill and an iron tang that clung stubbornly to the recycled atmosphere, like old blood worked too deeply into metal to ever be cleaned away. The hum of the cryo-units deepened as they walked, no longer background noise but a constant pressure vibrating through the soles of his boots.
The bodies became less recognizable the farther they went. Spines bent sideways at angles joints had never been meant to hold. Hips twisted beyond the limits of anatomy. Limbs fused where they should not, hands melted into chests, fingers locked around throats they would never finish crushing, knuckles frozen white with effort that could never resolve.
One figure’s mouth had been stretched impossibly wide. The jaw was dislocated, the tendons drawn so tightly they looked ready to tear, and the lips had split at the corners. Whatever scream had forced its way through that throat must have shredded the muscle before time stopped, yet the face remained trapped in that soundless howl, tongue pressed flat and eyes bulging in a plea that would never be answered.
Another was missing most of its face. The skin had warped backward as though fingers had dug in and peeled, leaving the remnants stretched thin and translucent. Teeth showed beneath, not bared in aggression but exposed by desperation, as though the body had tried to claw its way out of its own skull and failed.
Jungkook felt his skin crawl. He resisted the urge to clench his hands or reach for anything that might ground him in movement because he understood that reaction was part of the design. This place was not meant to be viewed comfortably. It was meant to be endured.
Some of them had tears frozen on their cheeks, clear tracks cutting through grime and blood at the exact moment grief had overwhelmed restraint. Others had droplets of blood suspended in midair inside the cryo-casings, hanging like obscene constellations that would never fall or dry. Red arcs curved through the chambers where arteries had burst, preserved in perfect and merciless stillness.
Most of the damage had not killed them. Much of it had not even come close. These were not fatal wounds but interruptions, violence frozen midway through the act and never allowed to finish. Pain that never resolved. Fire that could never burn itself out. Screams trapped in minds that could not black out, dull, or forget. Each body remained locked in its worst second, forced to inhabit it without relief.
They stopped before a curtain.
It was thick and heavy, a deep blood-red that swallowed the light instead of reflecting it. The fabric neither swayed nor rippled. It hung perfectly still, worn smooth in places where too many hands had brushed across it over the years. It felt less like a barrier than a threshold, something that remembered everything carried through it.
Youngblood turned toward Jungkook, her posture straightening by the slightest degree, the subtle change of someone preparing to reveal something precious.
“Their minds are trapped in the same moment,” she said quietly. “Over and over.”
The light caught in her eyes, leaving behind a faint, unsettling gleam that lingered too long.
Jungkook’s jaw tightened. “You leave a man alone in his own head long enough, he doesn’t come out right.”
Her smile returned, slow and deliberate. “I disagree.”
He released a short, humorless breath. “Figures. You’ve got shit taste.”
She neither bristled nor corrected him. Instead, she gave a small nod of acknowledgment and said, “Typhon.”
He stepped forward without a word and raised one gloved hand. A click followed, clean and final.
The curtain lifted.
The air changed immediately, becoming heavier and charged, pressing against Jungkook’s chest as though the room itself had leaned closer.
What lay beyond was not a gallery.
It was a pit.
It stretched wide and deep beneath them, its rim enclosed by metal railings slick with condensation. Red lights pulsed beneath the grated floor in a slow, steady rhythm, bathing everything below in a sick, living glow. The sound was low and constant, more vibration than noise, like a heartbeat traveling through the structure.
Two mercenaries stood guard on either side. Jungkook recognized one immediately, the pig-faced bastard who had smiled too much during the last fight, the one who had laughed while breaking another man’s ribs.
Jungkook stepped to the edge and stopped. Below him, suspended over open space, were Namjoon and Leo. Both were barefoot, balanced on smooth spheres barely wider than their feet, their polished surfaces gleaming slickly beneath the red light. One shift of weight or involuntary tremor would be enough to send either of them over.
Their hands were cuffed behind their backs, and thin suspension cords had been looped around their necks. The cords were not tight enough to choke them outright. They did not need to be. If either of them slipped, gravity would finish the job.
Namjoon’s head hung low, his shoulders shaking as he fought to steady himself. His breath came in short, controlled bursts, sweat shining across his skin. Every small correction of his balance pulled the cord tighter against his throat. Leo’s knees trembled openly, but she kept her chin lifted in stubborn defiance, her jaw clenched so tightly that Jungkook could see the muscles jumping beneath her skin. Her eyes searched the shadows, wide and glassy, fear warring with sheer will as she forced herself to remain upright.
Youngblood stepped beside him, as composed as ever. “This,” she said softly, almost fondly, “is the difference between you and me.”
Jungkook did not look at her. His attention remained fixed on the pit, on Namjoon’s bare feet trembling against the slick curve beneath him and the thin cord tightening with every measured breath. He watched Leo’s knees shake hard enough to make balance itself seem like a losing fight.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “You’re fucking cracked.”
Her fingers brushed his cheek, light and deliberate. There was no force behind the touch and no obvious threat, which made it worse. Jungkook stiffened on instinct, every nerve firing at once. The contact felt invasive and possessive, as though she were claiming something that had never belonged to her.
“You don’t understand beauty,” she murmured, her thumb lingering a fraction too long. “Not yet.”
He slapped her hand away. “Don’t touch me.”
She laughed softly, indulgent, as though he had said something clever. “You already belong to the piece.”
His jaw locked. “I’ve killed a lot of things,” he said, his voice low and flat, held together by will alone. “Never called it art.”
Below them, Namjoon’s foot slipped. The sphere rolled only slightly, but it was enough to pull the cord tighter around his throat. Leo gasped and shifted her weight, her arms straining behind her as her fingers flexed uselessly against the cuffs. Her balance faltered, caught, and wavered again.
Youngblood did not even look down. Her smile remained unchanged. “You carve stories into bodies every time someone tries to stop you,” she said thoughtfully. “I simply make sure they last.”
Jungkook turned fully back toward the pit. Every muscle in his body had drawn tight, his pulse pounding so hard it nearly drowned out the machinery. Heat gathered in his chest, thick and suffocating, while rage narrowed his thoughts into something sharp and singular.
Leo looked up at him. Her legs were shaking violently now, sweat and fear shining beneath the red light, but her voice held.
“I told you I’d find you.”
The words struck him beneath the ribs. Jungkook could not answer. His jaw clenched until his teeth ached, and he forced his breathing to remain slow while he wrestled the surge of fury back under control. When he finally turned toward Youngblood, he did so with deliberate care, every movement restrained, as though anything too sudden might break something he could not afford to lose.
She stood several steps away, completely at ease, one arm resting loosely across her waist while the other cradled a glass of dark red wine. The liquid caught the pulsing light and flashed like something alive as she rolled it between her fingers, watching it climb the crystal and slide back down. Her attention never left him. It was not the gaze of a commander assessing a subordinate or a hunter studying prey, but that of a patron admiring something she had invested too much in to see damaged.
“What do you want?” Jungkook asked.
Youngblood’s smile came slowly, untroubled. “I want to see you move.”
She drifted closer, her heels whispering over the polished floor, each step measured and intentional. “I’ve spent ten years chasing men like you,” she continued. “I’ve seen what you leave behind. Bullet holes, burn scars, piles of dead.” Her gaze locked onto his, bright with something sharp and unstable. “But it’s always after. Cleaned up. Quiet.”
Her voice softened until it was almost reverent. “Now I want to watch what comes before.”
Typhon stepped beside her without a word and pressed one hand against the control panel built into the wall. A deep mechanical groan rolled through the chamber as ancient systems ground awake. At the far end of the pit, thick steel doors began to separate inch by reluctant inch, the sound climbing the walls and vibrating through bone and gut.
Below them, Leo went pale. Her shoulders hitched as she fought to stay balanced, her breathing breaking into short, panicked pulls. Namjoon’s entire body locked rigid, every muscle straining as the sphere shifted beneath his feet and the cord at his throat drew tighter, biting into his skin while he hovered one mistake from the edge.
The red lights quickened their pulse.
Youngblood raised her glass and took a slow sip, satisfaction settling across her face like a sigh, as though the performance had finally begun. “I want to see what everyone is so afraid of,” she said. “I want to see you, Jungkook. At your peak. At your worst.”
He held her gaze in silence. One corner of his mouth lifted, not quite a smile but close enough to a warning. He crossed the space between them at an unhurried pace, moving slowly enough to make his intention unmistakable, until she could feel the heat rolling off him and the tension packed beneath his skin.
“If I get out of here,” he said quietly, “you won’t need a show.”
He leaned closer, allowing the threat to settle between them.
Youngblood neither blinked nor retreated. Instead, she raised one hand and tipped his chin upward with something small and gleaming held between her fingers.
His shiv.
She handled it with intimate precision, resting the point beneath his jaw against the soft, vulnerable hollow of his throat. There was not enough pressure to break the skin, only enough to promise that she could. She let the blade linger until the gesture became invasive, almost obscene, forcing him to feel every trace of sweat, rainwater, and blood clinging to his skin.
Then she released it.
The shiv struck the floor with a sharp metallic crack, the sound far too loud in the open chamber. It ricocheted off steel and glass and echoed down into the pit like a starting gun.
“I’m not interested in threats,” Youngblood said, smooth and composed. “I want your masterpiece. An artist is nothing without his tools.”
Jungkook stepped back. His expression emptied, becoming neither calm nor afraid, only blank. His gaze dropped to the blade and rose again with slow deliberation, as though he were filing the moment away for later.
Typhon moved without ceremony. There was no rush or showmanship in it, only one heavy step that placed him squarely between Jungkook and the shiv. Armor, mass, and presence combined into a wall that required no explanation.
Jungkook did not retreat. He looked Typhon over the way a butcher might inspect a carcass, measuring reach, angles, blind spots, and timing. The quiet mathematics of violence.
“When we meet again,” he said evenly, as though discussing a future appointment, “I’m gonna stab your fucking eye out.”
Typhon gave no answer.
Jungkook stepped around him and bent to retrieve the shiv. The grip settled into his palm with the ease of muscle memory. As he straightened, he rolled his shoulders once and pulled his goggles down over his eyes. The pit’s red glow caught across the lenses, reflecting back something stripped of restraint and dulled to a predatory sheen.
“Let him in,” Youngblood said.
Her voice cut cleanly through the hush.
Two mercenaries approached, their boots ringing over the metal floor. Jungkook neither resisted nor stiffened. He allowed the first to drift behind him, his posture loose and his head slightly bowed, every line of his body suggesting compliance while the red light breathed upward through the grating beneath them.
Then he pivoted.
The movement was sudden and exact, one sharp twist that drove his boot into the pig-faced mercenary’s skull. Bone gave way with a brittle crack, like fired clay breaking under a hammer. The man collapsed where he stood, striking the floor in a limp heap.
The second mercenary was still processing what had happened when his weapon began to rise. Jungkook was already on him, closing the distance in a blur. The shiv slid beneath the ribs in one smooth, practiced motion, with no hesitation or wasted force. It sank deep and found something vital. A wet, startled gasp left the man before he folded forward, and Jungkook tore the blade free, splashing warm blood across his sleeve.
A groan sounded behind him.
The first mercenary forced himself upright, his ruined face twisted with panic and rage. He lunged on instinct alone. Jungkook met him head-on, and their bodies collided hard at the edge of the platform.
For one suspended heartbeat, gravity seemed to reconsider. The pit yawned beneath them, red light reaching upward while machinery breathed somewhere far below.
Then the hesitation broke, and they went over.
The mercenary screamed as they fell, the sound high and ragged, torn loose without permission. His limbs flailed while his boots scraped uselessly at the air. Jungkook remained silent. Midway down, his body snapped into motion and both boots slammed into the man’s chest hard enough to fold him inward. The air burst from the mercenary’s lungs in a wet choke as he spun away into open space.
Jungkook struck the edge of the platform hard. His hands caught the metal at the last instant, fingers screaming beneath the sudden pull of his weight. Skin split across his palms, and blood slicked the rail beneath his grip. For a moment he hung there with his arms trembling and shoulders burning, dark droplets falling from his knuckles and disappearing into the pit.
Above him, Youngblood leaned over the railing with her wine still in hand. Her eyes held neither fear nor anticipation. They shone with rapture, as though she were finally being fed.
Something moved in the depths below him. Shapes passed through the red-lit dark, slow and fluid, aware of one another and the space they occupied. Heat rolled upward, carrying a stench that tightened Jungkook’s throat: old blood, rot, and recycled breath trapped too long without anywhere to go. Metal dragged against metal. Chains scraped across stone. Beneath it all came a sound that belonged to neither machine nor animal, something warped in rhythm and tone, wet and broken and drawn out just long enough to crawl beneath the skin.
Jungkook hauled himself upward in one violent motion. His boots shrieked against the edge as he threw himself back onto the platform and landed low, crouched and ready, the shiv clenched tightly in his hand. His chest heaved while rainwater, sweat, and blood ran together down his arms, but his eyes never left the pit.
Youngblood straightened beside him, pleased in a way that felt intimate and deeply wrong.
“There it is,” she murmured. “The beginning.”
The floor gave way beneath them with a grinding roar, and gravity tore Jungkook’s feet out from under him. The drop swallowed everything at once, air, sound, and direction collapsing into a single screaming rush. Instinct took over before thought could catch up. He twisted in midair, snapping his body into alignment as the mercenary struck the floor below him.
The impact drove the breath from the man in a raw, choking wheeze. Jungkook landed a heartbeat later with both boots planted across his chest, pinning him in place while the shiv flashed through the red light and stopped just short of his throat. The mercenary stared up at him with wide eyes, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly.
Jungkook did not finish him. He rose instead and stepped off the man as though he were already dead, leaving him sprawled across the floor and fighting for air.
High above, Youngblood remained perfectly still. She set aside the remote linked to Jungkook’s implant with deliberate care and picked up a second device, a pair of slim, polished optic lenses fashioned like old-world opera glasses. Delicate filigree curled along the frame, elegant enough for a private theater and obscene in a place like this.
“Switch it,” she said calmly. “Ultraviolet.”
The pit had hosted performances before. Old blood still darkened the seams between the floor plates despite repeated sterilization, and shallow cuts scored the railings where previous prisoners had tried to climb free. Lorelai could have replaced every surface. She had chosen not to. History, in her mind, required residue.
Through the ultraviolet lenses, she watched Jungkook assess the chamber and recognized the instant he understood its design. Namjoon and Leo were not merely leverage. They were an audience he could not ignore and a clock he could not stop. Every violent movement below threatened their balance, while every hesitation gave the shrill more time to map him.
The creatures had been taken from a moon without a visible sun, a world buried beneath sheets of mineral ice. Their species hunted through changes in pressure, ultraviolet distortion, and chemical trails left in the air. Six mercenary teams had entered the caverns where they nested. Only two had returned. Lorelai had purchased the survivors, the bodies, and every viable egg they managed to recover.
The shrill had killed three handlers during maturation. She considered that proof of quality.
Typhon stood at her shoulder while technicians monitored the containment field. “If he damages the cores, the neural fluid could contaminate the lower ventilation system.”
“Seal it.”
“That will suffocate the maintenance crew.”
“Then evacuate them.”
“There isn’t time.”
Lorelai raised the opera glasses and adjusted the focus. “Then they should work quickly.”
Typhon looked at her for a beat too long. It was the closest he ever came to open disobedience.
Below, Leo called Jungkook’s name, and his entire posture changed. It was almost imperceptible, no more than the lowering of his left shoulder and a subtle shift in the way he held the shiv, but the empty calculation in his face suddenly acquired direction.
Lorelai inhaled softly.
There it was. The flaw every masterpiece required.
The blood-red illumination drained from the pit and was replaced by a sickly violet haze. Edges sharpened while depth twisted, making distance difficult to judge. Every surface snapped into brutal clarity, as though the chamber itself had been flayed open. Jungkook blinked behind his goggles, and the darkness ceased to be empty.
At first, the creatures appeared only as distortions along the edges of his vision, ripples like heat trembling over metal or oil spreading across water. The distortions swelled and gathered shape until they became massive, fluid forms defined by long, drifting limbs.
At the center of each creature pulsed a core that was neither head nor body, but something closer to a brain suspended in translucent jelly. It rotated slowly, threaded through with veins of dim bioluminescence, while the rest of the creature refused to settle into a fixed shape. Shadow and substance slipped through one another as though the thing could not decide where it belonged.
There were two of them.
Jungkook exhaled slowly through his nose. “Namjoon. Start praying.”
Namjoon’s voice drifted up from below, distant and hollow. “I was on a pilgrimage,” he muttered. “Just a damn pilgrimage.”
Leo swallowed hard, her face drained of color. “This is bad, huh?”
Jungkook did not look at her. “Give it a minute.”
One of the creatures shifted. Its limbs dragged across the floor, leaving behind shimmering filaments that unraveled and disappeared seconds later. Ultraviolet light bent around its body, warping the outline so violently that looking directly at it made Jungkook’s eyes ache.
A tentacle lashed through the air and wrapped around the wounded mercenary before he could finish screaming. His rifle bucked in his hands, firing panicked bursts that tore uselessly through empty space. The limb tightened and dragged him across the floor. Bone snapped with a hard, final crack, followed by a scream that shredded itself halfway out of his throat.
Needle-fine barbs punched through his skin, and something flooded his veins. His body locked and convulsed as flesh swelled beneath his armor. Veins rose thick against his skin and began to glow faintly violet while the substance spread through him. His scream collapsed into a wet gurgle.
Then his body failed.
He tore apart from the inside, blood and liquefied tissue bursting outward in a luminous mist that painted the floor in obscene arcs. Wet fragments struck the metal and slid until they lost momentum. Something that might once have been a hand skidded near the edge and came to rest.
Leo gagged and turned her face away. Namjoon remained rigid on the sphere beneath him. Jungkook did not blink.
The second shrill angled toward him, its core brightening as the pulse within it quickened and its long limbs unfurled with unmistakable intent. It surged forward without hesitation, and Jungkook met it in motion.
He dropped low and slid beneath the first strike as a tendril cracked through the space where his head had been. His boots screamed across the slick floor. Another limb snapped toward him, and he caught it on instinct, his fingers locking around a surface that shifted beneath his grip, half solid and half liquid, resisting like something alive and furious.
The creature reacted at once and hurled him across the pit.
Jungkook became dead weight in flight, his body tearing through the air before slamming into the sphere beneath Leo’s feet. The impact rang through the chamber like a struck bell. The orb lurched violently and spun out of alignment, wrenching a sharp, panicked scream from her.
The cord around her neck snapped tight and jerked her backward, stealing her breath as the sphere bucked beneath her. Her boots skidded uselessly across the polished surface while her arms strained behind her, the collar biting deeper into her throat.
“Leo!” Namjoon shouted.
He moved without thinking. Kicking off hard, he sent his own sphere rolling sideways and drove his shoulder into hers just before she tipped beyond the point of recovery. The collision knocked the breath from both of them but stopped the spin. They clung to each other by instinct, Namjoon braced and trembling while Leo gasped against him, both barely upright as their muscles strained to hold them there.
Jungkook struck the floor hard enough to jar his bones and drive the breath from his chest. He rolled with the impact, allowing the momentum to carry him across the stone before snapping back to his feet in one clean motion. The shrill was already reshaping itself, its outline blurring as it slid sideways to circle him and search for an opening.
He gave it none.
Jungkook stepped inside its reach and cut. The movement was short and exact, the blade biting into whatever passed for flesh. A violent hiss burst from the wound, sharp and pressurized, like gas escaping from a ruptured line. The creature recoiled, its form folding inward and flickering before dragging itself back together in a wet ripple that bent the air around it.
He stayed close, driving through the ultraviolet haze with his boots splashing through glowing residue. Every movement had been stripped down to purpose. There was no flourish and no wasted effort. Each strike forced the creature to react, knocked it off balance, and kept it defending rather than thinking.
The other shrill’s core flared brighter as it turned. Its long limbs swept outward, and its attention moved past Jungkook to the unstable spheres beneath Namjoon and Leo.
“Move!” he shouted.
They were already trying. Namjoon and Leo clawed at the cords around their necks with shaking, clumsy fingers, working the tethers together as they kicked off at the same time. Their spheres rolled as a pair, and they leaned into one another to stay upright while barreling directly into the creature’s path.
The shrill hesitated just long enough to matter. Its limbs tangled as it recalculated, tentacles colliding in mid-motion.
That was all Jungkook needed.
He sprinted toward it, boots hammering against the stone while his lungs burned. Without breaking stride, he vaulted upward and came down hard across the creature’s back as it tried to recover. Its surface shifted beneath him, half solid and violently resistant, but he planted his feet and drove the shiv down with both hands, burying it in the pulsing core.
The shrill convulsed. Its limbs thrashed against the floor while light surged through the core and then collapsed inward. A sound tore from it, high, fractured, and utterly wrong, before its body lost cohesion. It broke apart into twitching muscle, liquid shadow, and fading light that splattered across the stone.
The collapse threw Jungkook clear. He struck shoulder-first, rolled, and came up on one knee with the shiv still locked in his grip. Nearby, Leo and Namjoon tumbled from their spheres in a breathless heap, shaking as their hands scraped against the floor and they dragged air back into their lungs.
“Get her up,” Jungkook said.
His voice was tight and clipped. He was already moving, sweeping his goggles across the edges of the pit without pausing to offer comfort.
“I can’t see,” Namjoon coughed, his voice raw and his eyes squeezed shut.
“You don’t want to,” Jungkook muttered.
His goggles caught the movement first, a faint shimmer at the edge of the ultraviolet field. It had motion but no clear shape, distortion passing across the chamber without sound.
The remaining shrill circled them slowly. Their bodies phased in and out of sight, their outlines warping as tentacles dragged across the stone like liquid shadows. They moved in coordination, each path anticipating the next, herding their prey rather than rushing it.
One attacked without warning.
Jungkook slipped sideways, allowing the limb to pass inches from his chest, then turned into the motion and braced as it came around again with crushing force. His restraint chain rose on instinct, muscle memory moving before thought could intervene.
The impact struck like a freight transport. Metal screamed, and the chain burst apart, links scattering violently across the pit and ringing against the stone like shrapnel.
The blow should have dropped him. It did not.
Pain arrived late and distant, reduced to information rather than warning. His boots skidded, found purchase, and held while his body absorbed the force and adjusted. By the time his weight settled, he was already moving.
The shiv rose before the thought had fully formed. Jungkook bared his teeth and fixed his gaze on the creature’s flickering core.
“You wanna go?” he muttered. “Let’s go.”
The shrill surged forward, and Jungkook met it head-on. Steel cut into semisolid flesh, the resistance spongy and elastic beneath the blade, but the strike landed cleanly. A tentacle sheared free and struck the floor with a wet slap, still writhing as its surface flickered wildly, as though it had not yet realized it was no longer attached.
The shrill screamed, and the other creature faltered. It lasted only a moment, but the hesitation was enough to expose the connection between them. Their eerie synchronization fractured, slipping from perfect coordination into uncertainty as they shifted, repositioned, and recalculated.
They thought.
Above the pit, Youngblood leaned over the railing with her wine forgotten in one hand, her fingers whitening around the metal. Her breath caught, reverent and thrilled.
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
Typhon stood beside her, unmoving, his gaze fixed below. “The shrill are an exquisite species.”
She did not look at him. “I wasn’t talking about the shrill.”
Below, Jungkook dropped into a low crouch with the shiv angled forward. His lungs burned, but his breathing remained measured as he studied the creatures, reading every subtle change in posture and light. One slid sideways and placed itself between him and the wounded shrill, its limbs spreading into a wall of pulsing glow.
“They’re gonna kill him!” Leo choked, starting forward.
Namjoon caught her arm and dragged her back before she could run onto the floor. His hands were shaking, but his grip remained iron.
“Wait,” he said tightly. “Just wait.”
The creatures separated with deliberate slowness. One peeled away in a wide arc and began to circle while the other remained near its wounded companion, its limbs weaving through intricate patterns of feints and misdirection. They were not attacking blindly anymore. They were steering him.
Jungkook eased back half a step, shoulders tight, shiv steady, eyes unblinking.
“Jungkook!” Leo shouted.
He moved at once. Seizing one of the balancing spheres, he hurled it with both hands. The orb struck the wounded shrill with a hollow metallic clang, knocking it sideways as the light within its core stuttered.
Jungkook closed the distance in a burst of speed and slashed hard while the creature’s form was still unstable. The blade tore through it, and its structure failed all at once. The shrill folded inward like wet fabric losing its tension, then struck the floor in two uneven halves. Both pieces continued to glow faintly as the light bled away and their flesh sagged into stillness.
He stood over it with his chest heaving. For no more than a heartbeat, his mind lagged behind his body.
It had gone down too quickly.
Too easily.
“Huh?”
The sound barely escaped him before Leo screamed his name.
Jungkook turned, but the second shrill was already on him. It struck with crushing force, wrapping him in a net of muscle and ultraviolet light. Tentacles cinched around his arms, chest, and throat until his joints locked and the air vanished from his lungs. His boots scraped uselessly across the stone as he fought for leverage, but the pressure only tightened.
Namjoon shouted for Leo to stay back, but she had already torn free of his grip. She ran toward them, slipping once and then again on the slick floor, fear drowned beneath the thunder of her pulse. The severed tentacle lay nearby, still twitching where it had fallen. She seized it with both hands and swung with everything she had.
The limb wrapped around the shrill’s neck and pulled a piercing scream from its core. For one brief instant, the creature’s hold on Jungkook loosened. Then another tentacle snapped outward and struck Leo across the body, hurling her aside as though she weighed nothing.
She hit the floor hard and skidded across the stone, pain exploding through her shoulder. For several seconds, the fight dissolved into a collection of impossible details.
The cords around her throat still smelled faintly of antiseptic. The sphere beneath her feet had been colder than the deck, polished so smoothly that her toes had found no purchase. Namjoon’s breathing came from somewhere to her right, measured until it wasn’t. Above them, Youngblood’s glass had caught the ultraviolet light whenever she raised it, a tiny domestic sparkle amid everything monstrous.
And Jungkook kept getting back up.
Every impact looked final. Each time one of the shrill flung him across the pit, Leo’s body prepared for the sight of him remaining where he landed. He never did. He rolled, rose, and recalculated. Blood spread across his clothes, but the violence seemed to strip him down rather than weaken him, removing everything that was not essential.
She understood why people feared him.
She also understood that fear had never been the whole story.
On M6-117, he had pretended she was bait because pretending had kept her alive. In the hangar, he had claimed she meant nothing while moving before Typhon could pull the trigger. Now, whenever the creatures turned toward the suspended spheres, Jungkook placed himself between them and her without looking, as though his body had made the decision somewhere beyond thought or language.
Leo had spent years learning that what people called you mattered less than what they did when no one rewarded them for kindness. Boys who called her little brother had left bruises beneath her shirt. Adults who promised protection had stood by while doors closed. Jungkook called her kid, mocked her, threatened to abandon her, and kept coming back.
The contradiction was almost enough to break her.
Then she saw the shiv lying near her hand.
She did not think about bravery. She thought about the names scratched beneath the galley table, about Y/N’s name and the word CAPTAIN carved below it. She thought about another person disappearing because Leo had been too small, too frightened, or too late.
Not again.
Her fingers closed around the blade, slick with blood and black ichor.
Jungkook saw it too. His vision had begun to narrow, and the taste of metal flooded his mouth as the creature crushed tighter around his chest. Still, one arm strained toward her on instinct.
“Jungkook?” she rasped.
His eyes locked on hers.
“Here!”
The throw was not perfect, but it did not need to be. The blade spun once through the air, and Jungkook caught it cleanly. A heartbeat later, the shiv flashed through the ultraviolet haze and sliced through the restraint around his wrist in one practiced motion. The pressure eased just enough to matter.
The shrill reared back, its stinger rising and coiling for the strike.
Jungkook did not retreat. He grabbed the severed tentacle Leo had dropped, looped it around his forearm, and used the creature’s own weight to drag himself forward. There was nothing cautious left in the movement. He committed fully, hauling himself within reach before driving the shiv straight into the core.
The shrill locked instantly. Every limb froze, and every pulse stopped. Its bioluminescent center collapsed inward before bursting apart in a violent flare of ultraviolet light that washed the pit in white-violet brilliance. The sound stretched thin and unbearable, like glass bending beneath too much pressure, before snapping into silence.
Then the light went out.
Darkness swallowed the pit so completely that depth and distance disappeared. For one breathless instant there was nothing, until the overhead strips shuddered back to life. They came on unevenly, dull industrial bands buzzing awake one after another, their yellowed glow dragging itself across steel, blood, and the torn floor below. Old wiring hummed overhead, steady and indifferent, like the chamber exhaling after violence.
Applause cut through the quiet.
It came slowly and deliberately, hands meeting with measured precision. It was not celebration so much as confirmation, the sound given when something performed exactly as expected.
Leo lay curled on her side, her chest hitching as she fought for air that tasted of metal and burned ozone. One arm remained locked around her ribs, fingers digging into her side as though holding herself together required conscious effort. Her hair clung to her face, damp with sweat and grime, and her eyes were glassy and unfocused.
Nearby, Namjoon had fallen to his knees with both palms pressed against the floor. He blinked hard as he tried to steady the room around him, his hands trembling while the adrenaline drained from his body in uneven waves.
Jungkook remained where he had landed, his head bowed, one knee raised and a hand braced against it. His goggles were cracked, fractures webbing across the lenses, but they still clung to his face. Blood streaked both forearms, and black ichor had dried in ugly smears across his knuckles. He stayed there one heartbeat longer than anyone else before forcing himself upright.
There was no flourish and no acknowledgment of the bodies cooling at his feet.
Above them, Youngblood and Typhon stood motionless on the steel balcony, their shadows stretched long and warped across the far wall by the harsh industrial lighting, two dark silhouettes cast like judgment.
“Bravo!” Youngblood called down, her voice rich and sharp, balanced somewhere between mockery and awe. “The grace. The detail. The sheer violence of it. Exquisite.”
Leo swallowed against the bile rising in her throat and glanced toward Namjoon. “Is she serious?”
He did not answer. His attention had already fixed on Jungkook.
Jungkook stood several feet away, breathing slowly through the pain, his shoulders set and his spine straight. He was not visibly winded, but his gaze had not left Youngblood for even a second. He opened his mouth, stopped, and tightened his jaw before trying again.
“Give me the knife.”
Namjoon hesitated only briefly before nodding. He pushed himself upright and crouched beside what remained of the shrill, gagging once as he forced his hand into the split torso. His arm vanished into the slick cavity, and when he finally tore the shiv free, it came loose with a wet sucking sound that splattered black fluid across his sleeve.
He tossed it underhand. Jungkook caught it without looking.
Above them, Youngblood continued as though nothing else in the chamber deserved her attention. “Such raw beauty,” she murmured, tilting her head while she studied Jungkook like a living exhibit. “But it does leave me with a dilemma.”
Leo stiffened. “She’s not gonna say it.”
Youngblood’s smile widened, slow and poisonous. “How does one mount you in a way that does you justice?”
The words crawled beneath Jungkook’s skin, cold and invasive. He did not answer or give her the satisfaction of a reaction. Instead, he lowered the shiv and pressed its point against the side of his neck, just beneath the jaw where the skin thinned and the implant lay hidden like a parasite.
Leo drew a sharp breath and stepped forward before she could stop herself. “Wait. Jungkook, what are you doing?”
He did not look at her. The blade slid beneath his skin with ruthless precision, and blood surfaced immediately, hot and vivid, spilling over his collarbone in thin branching lines before soaking into his shirt. A hiss forced itself through his teeth, but he kept his jaw locked and angled the blade deeper, carving carefully around something hard and foreign.
Pain detonated through him, bright and electric. His muscles seized, and his shoulders began to shake, but he kept working by feel, guided by memory and instinct. The resistance was unmistakable now: metal buried in flesh, fine wires pulling like nerves that had never belonged to him.
Above, Youngblood lurched forward. For the first time, her composure cracked, and a sharp breath tore from her as something beneath Jungkook’s skin flared in frantic silver-blue pulses. He closed his fingers around it, braced himself, and ripped it free.
The pain was grotesque, the kind that tilted the world and turned the body against itself, like tearing out something that had burrowed deep and decided it belonged there. Jungkook stumbled as the device came loose, slick with blood in his palm. It struck the floor at his feet with a hard metallic clink, small and misshapen, still twitching faintly as sparks sputtered and died across its surface like signals from a severed nerve.
Youngblood’s smile did not merely disappear. Her face broke apart. Fury twisted through her, raw and feral, as she lunged for the remote at her waist.
Jungkook’s breathing had gone ragged, blood still running steadily down his neck. “Show’s over,” he snapped. “You crazy bitch.”
Her reply came thin and brittle through the haze. “Looks like you’ll have to be an abstract.”
Jungkook did not wait. He snatched up the implant and hurled it toward the balcony in one sharp motion, sending it spinning end over end.
“Down!”
Leo and Namjoon moved on instinct. Leo dropped hard and threw her arms over her head while Namjoon slid across the floor and dove behind a broken section of railing, his boots scraping as he disappeared from sight. The implant struck just beneath the balcony’s edge.
Youngblood slammed the button.
The explosion tore the chamber apart. Heat punched through the pit like a physical blow as white-orange light erupted outward, blinding and absolute. Shrapnel screamed through the air, fragments of metal burying themselves in walls and railings and tearing through anything in their path. The shockwave lifted Jungkook clear off his feet and hurled him backward. He struck the floor with bone-jarring force, pain ripping through his spine as his vision flashed white, then black, before filling with sparks.
The thunder of the blast collapsed into a roaring silence.
Smoke swallowed the chamber, thick and acrid, churning with ash and the stench of burning insulation. Somewhere above, metal groaned. Something buckled, and another piece tore free with a shriek that cut through the ringing in Jungkook’s ears.
Youngblood emerged from the smoke coughing hard, ash streaked across her cheek and hairline. Fury had sharpened her face into something nearly unrecognizable as she leaned over the shattered railing and searched the haze below.
“Find them,” she rasped. “Now.”
The smoke thinned just enough for Typhon to step into place beside her. His armor was scorched black along one side but remained intact, and his expression stayed carefully neutral as he surveyed the wreckage below. He was already calculating, already rearranging the future in his head.
Leo did not wait for permission. She began crawling toward Jungkook before the air had fully cleared, moving on hands and knees through blood she could no longer distinguish as his or anyone else’s. Her hands shook when she reached him, fingers catching in his sleeve.
“You good?” she asked, breathless, fear tightening every word.
Jungkook groaned and forced himself onto one elbow, the movement pulling a sharp sound from his chest. Pain rippled through him, but he spat blood onto the floor, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and squinted up at Leo.
“Been worse.”
Namjoon was already on his feet. He neither spoke nor hesitated. His attention had fixed on the far wall, where the explosion had torn a jagged opening through layers of steel and plating. Metal curled outward like broken ribs, and smoke poured through the gap in slow, labored breaths.
It might have been an exit. It might have been something waiting for them.
He did not stop to decide.
Namjoon ran, and the others followed as alarms finally found their voice. Sirens screamed to life while red lights strobed through the haze, and the structure groaned around them as failing systems sent shudders through the walls. The facility seemed to be coming apart in uneven waves, each failure setting off another somewhere deeper within the ship.
Youngblood’s scream cut through all of it.
It was sharp and saturated with fury, shrill enough to pierce the alarms, smoke, and protesting steel. The sound ricocheted off the chamber walls and tore down the branching corridors.
“We’ll need a full pursuit force!”
Typhon did not flinch or turn his head. He stood amid the wreckage like a fixed point, his armor scorched but his posture loose, hands folded behind his back as though they remained in a gallery rather than the aftermath of an explosion. One brow lifted with slow deliberation.
“With what personnel?”
Youngblood spun toward him, her eyes blazing. “All of them. Every last one. Even the Golls. I don’t care if it holds a weapon or breathes through a tube. I want it moving now.”
She lashed out, grinding the heel of her boot down against his with enough force to send a sharp metallic ring through the chamber. Typhon gave no reaction. He did not even look down.
The facility answered for him.
Cryopods began to open, the sound spreading through the chamber in uneven waves. Hydraulics released with heavy, concussive clunks, seals cracked apart in sharp exhalations, and pale mist spilled across the floor. It rolled low and thick, curling around boots and ankles like fog creeping over a battlefield.
Figures stumbled from the pods. Mercenaries emerged half-conscious, their bare feet slapping against cold metal and their skin mottled from cryo. Some collapsed immediately, coughing hard as their lungs seized and dragged air back in by force. Others swayed where they stood, blinking beneath the emergency lights while their minds struggled to catch up with their bodies.
Weapons came up on reflex, faster than thought. Hands reached for rifles, sidearms, and shock batons mounted beside the pods. One mercenary nearly fired before another knocked the barrel aside and shouted something hoarse and panicked. Another dropped to his knees and retched onto the floor, only to be dragged upright by the collar and shoved toward a rack of gear.
Orders cut across one another through the chaos.
“Move!”
“Eyes up!”
“Check your seals!”
“Where the hell are we?”
Armor clattered as suits were pulled over half-dressed bodies. Helmets slammed into place, power packs locked home, and their rising whine threaded through the noise. Red status lights blinked, hesitated, and turned green one after another, like a heartbeat stuttering back to life.
The Golls emerged last.
They were tall and wrong in their proportions, their harnesses fused with tubes and respirators, their faces hidden behind opaque visors that reflected the chaos in warped fragments. They moved more slowly than the others, but with deliberate certainty. When they raised their weapons, it was with the steady inevitability of machinery coming online.
Youngblood stalked among them like a general in a burning war room. Her hands opened and closed at her sides as she watched the force assemble, her gaze snapping between screens already filling with live feeds of corridors, exterior approaches, and thermal signatures blooming red wherever bodies ran hot.
“Seal the outer decks,” she ordered. “Flood the lower levels with trackers. I want every exit watched and every shadow treated as hostile.”
A technician shouted confirmation without looking up.
Typhon finally moved, stepping forward just far enough for his voice to carry through the din. “They’re heading for the structural weak points,” he said evenly. “He always does.”
Youngblood bared her teeth. “Then collapse the corridors behind them.”
“That will kill your people.”
She did not hesitate. “Then wake more.”
Deep within the facility, something massive shifted. Bulkheads began to move, and doors slammed shut with bone-jarring force. The red lights strobed faster as layered sirens built over one another, turning the chamber into a pulse of crimson, smoke, and noise.
The hunt had begun.
Youngblood faced the main display, where Jungkook’s last known position flashed angrily at the center of the map. Her breathing had gone fast and shallow, excitement threaded through every breath.
“Run,” she whispered, almost fondly. “Let’s see how long you last.”
Behind her, the pursuit force surged into motion. Boots pounded against steel, weapons charged, and breath fogged the insides of visors as the station woke around them.
Commander Cassidy Hitchcock moved down the corridor as though it belonged to her. Her boots struck the grated deck in a steady metallic rhythm, unhurried and exact, the sound traveling the length of the passage before folding back on itself. The green-and-gray environ-suit she wore bore the marks of long service: scuffed forearms, seams bleached pale with stress, and patches sewn over older repairs where replacements had never been approved. On the Dark Fury, gear stayed in use until it failed, not until it looked tired. Function came before comfort. Always.
The corridor carried the particular cold only ships seemed capable of producing. It was more than temperature. It had a disposition to it, something sterile and withholding. The recycled air had been scrubbed so clean of scent and warmth that it felt sharp in the lungs. Frost-sealed cryo-chambers lined both walls, their surfaces clouded with ice and their status lights dark. They did not resemble storage units so much as graves waiting for permission to open.
Hitchcock reached the wall-mounted control panel without breaking stride. Her fingers moved from memory, entering the command sequence with practiced ease. The screen flared to life and washed her face in pale blue light, sharpening the planes of her cheekbones and jaw. There was nothing ornamental about her. No makeup, no softness, nothing that did not serve a purpose. She looked like a woman built for command.
“Typhon,” she said into the room’s communication system. “Which one do you want?”
“King,” his voice answered through the speakers. “Youngblood wants to play with her new toy.”
The display changed.
REVIVE: MARCEL KING?
STATUS: SEALED / RESTRICTED
Hitchcock tapped YES.
The ship responded with a low, displeased groan that seemed to rise from deep within its frame. Hydraulics hissed behind the walls as internal locks disengaged, and the vibration traveled through the deck into her boots. One chamber slid free on mechanical arms, frost cracking from its surface in brittle sheets. It moved slowly and reluctantly, as though the Dark Fury itself objected to what it had been ordered to wake.
Inside the tube, the figure shuddered.
At first, the movement was small, little more than the nervous twitch of muscles forced awake before the mind had caught up. Then his back arched hard enough to strike the curved interior of the chamber. His hands curled into fists beneath the frost, nails biting into palms softened by months of suspension, while the tremors running through him sharpened into violent convulsions.
The seal ruptured with a crack of pressure, and Marcel King was expelled from the chamber as though the ship had grown tired of holding him.
He struck the floor at full force, bare skin slapping against freezing steel as his body folded onto its knees in the decontamination bay. Cryo-fluid streamed from his hair, shoulders, and chest, tracing the thick muscle of his arms before pooling beneath his hands. Breath tore from him in ragged, desperate gasps that sounded raw and wrong in the sterile quiet. For several seconds, there was nothing human in the noise.
His lungs had forgotten what they were for. His heart hammered too quickly, stumbled, then lurched back into rhythm. The cold had buried itself so deeply that he could feel it around the bones and inside the joints, turning every nerve into a live wire. The world returned in pieces: white light, steel beneath his palms, the chemical sting of the chamber, and the faint outline of someone waiting beyond the glass.
Instinct surged up to fill everything memory had not yet reclaimed.
King launched himself forward with a feral snarl and drove his shoulder into the partition hard enough to rattle the reinforced pane in its frame. Frost broke loose from the walls and scattered around him in glittering fragments. He struck the glass a second time, lips peeling back from his teeth like an animal dragged too abruptly into the light.
“Miss me?” he rasped.
His voice was shredded, the words scraping their way out. He had been trapped in the tube for months. Perhaps a year. Perhaps longer. Time meant little in cryo, and that was part of the arrangement. Lorelai Youngblood woke him when there was work worth doing and put him away when there was not.
King had never objected.
Storage was storage. Whether a man slept in a bunk, a prison cell, or a refrigerated tube mattered less than whether his account continued to grow while he was inside it. Food cost money. Air cost money. Liquor cost money. Cryo cost Lorelai Youngblood money, which meant it cost him nothing.
That was the only arithmetic Marcel King had ever trusted.
Commander Hitchcock stepped back one measured pace and pressed a gloved finger to the controls. Steam erupted into the chamber in violent jets as the automated systems flooded King with decontaminants from every angle. The force hammered his body, scalding, stripping, and sterilizing. He tipped his head back and endured it with half-lidded eyes and a slack jaw, his expression hovering somewhere between indifference and something disturbingly close to pleasure.
Pain had always come more easily to him than patience. He had learned that young on Lupus 5, a planet with little worth exporting beyond hard men, cheap weapons, and a steady supply of people willing to hunt one another for money. Most settlements had grown around bounty exchanges, mercenary barracks, and private landing fields where ships arrived carrying contracts and departed with fresh recruits. Children learned bounty codes before multiplication tables. Tavern walls displayed more wanted notices than decoration, and everyone knew which guilds paid clean, which ones shaved percentages, and which employers buried their hunters alongside their mistakes.
King had grown up watching professionals pass through the recruitment yards. They arrived scarred, armed, and loud, scattering money across bar counters while telling stories about fugitives tracked through asteroid colonies, plague stations, and prison moons. To a boy raised with empty cupboards and creditors at the door, they looked like royalty, not because they were free, but because they were paid.
He signed his first contract before he was old enough to carry the rifle issued with it legally. No one on Lupus 5 cared. The guild took its cut, the quartermaster falsified the date, and King returned three weeks later with a fractured hand, half an ear, and enough coin to keep his mother’s rooms heated through the winter. He had been hunting ever since.
When the decontamination cycle finally disengaged, the steam tore away with a screaming hiss. King shook himself hard, flinging water from his brown hair and shoulders as he rose to his full height. He dragged one hand through his dripping hair, blinked the last of the cryo-fog from his dark eyes, and rolled his neck until something cracked.
A grin spread across his face as though it had been waiting there the entire time. “Mmm,” he muttered, his voice rough with amusement. “Fresh as a fuckin’ daisy.”
The chamber doors slid open, and he stepped out barefoot and half naked without hesitation, water trailing from him and spattering across the deck. He did not cover himself or slow down. Shame, modesty, and nerves were luxuries that had never found much room in Marcel King.
He rolled his shoulders with deliberate care, joints popping softly as he tested his range of motion. After flexing both hands, he bent his fingers backward until the tendons pulled tight, then shifted his weight onto the old scar crossing his right knee and listened for any complaint from the joint. It was the same way he inspected a weapon after long storage. There was nothing sentimental in it, only function. King had survived long enough to understand that every body was equipment, and equipment failed when a man stopped paying attention.
Hitchcock tossed him a duffel. It struck his chest with a dull thud before dropping into his hands.
“Suit up. Report in.”
Her tone was flat, already disengaged. Hitchcock had never liked him, and King considered that reasonable. Plenty of people disliked him. Most found him loud, vulgar, greedy, and impossible to manage. Commanders, employers, ex-lovers, and one magistrate whose desk he had broken during a disagreement over his percentage had all called him pigheaded.
The accusation had never troubled him. Pigs survived on anything.
King let the bag fall to the floor and tore it open. He dressed as he moved, each piece settling into place with quick, familiar efficiency: pants, undershirt, armored vest. He tightened the straps until pressure settled against his ribs, locked the buckles, and struck the chest plate twice to ensure it sat correctly. Then he shoved his feet into his boots and stamped once, testing the soles against the deck.
The habit came from his first mentor, a one-eyed hunter named Sato who recruited boys from Lupus 5 by the dozen and expected only one or two to survive long enough to become useful.
Check your boots, Sato used to say. A bad rifle might miss once. A bad boot kills you all day.
King remembered Sato’s lessons more clearly than he remembered the man’s face: tracking, leverage, entry points, payout structures, and the exact number of hours a frightened fugitive could go without sleep before judgment began to fracture. He also remembered finding Sato dead in the snow on Tarsis Minor and collecting the bounty anyway. Sentiment, after all, did not pay burial expenses.
When King finished dressing, Hitchcock handed him a compact scatter rifle fitted with a folding stock and reinforced barrel, the kind of weapon built for close quarters, boarding actions, and arrests that ceased to be arrests the moment someone reached for a gun.
He accepted it with something close to reverence, rolling the rifle once in his hands before checking the chamber and testing the stock. It locked into place with a solid, satisfying click. A weapon spoke through balance, weight, and resistance, and this one said it had been designed to break rooms apart.
King liked it immediately.
“Youngblood asked for you,” Hitchcock said. “The man you’re going after is already onboard. File’s been uploaded. Must be a big deal if she had us thaw your sorry ass.”
King looked up, his eyes clear now, alert and hungry. The cryo sickness had burned away, leaving behind the old appetite.
He could not remember when he had first met Youngblood, though that seemed to trouble other people more than it troubled him. What remained were fragments: a private auction beneath violet lamps, a burning station rotating above a gas giant, a white robe moving through gun smoke while someone screamed in another room. He remembered receiving money from her before he remembered learning her name.
Perhaps they had met on Lupus 5. Youngblood had recruited there more than once, as everyone did. The planet’s bounty exchanges produced hunters the way factory worlds produced engines. She might have found him in one of the contract halls, leaning over a counter and arguing about hazard pay. She might have bought out one of his employers, inherited his contract, or simply offered him twice what someone else had.
The details had been buried beneath too many jobs, too many jumps, and too many years spent sleeping between them. None of it mattered. Youngblood paid, and she paid on time. She did not haggle after blood had already been spilled, and she understood that loyalty was a service rather than a virtue. King had never pretended to love her, worship her, or believe in whatever strange philosophy kept her collecting monsters across the galaxy. She supplied the target, and he supplied the result.
As long as the coin arrived where it belonged, Marcel King was the most loyal man in the room.
A slow, dangerous grin spread across his face. “Sister,” he said, his voice low with anticipation, “I certainly hope so.”
Hitchcock watched him for another moment, her expression tightening faintly. “You’ve been under almost a year.”
King checked the rifle’s ammunition readout. “Did I earn interest?”
“No.”
“Then you woke me up late.”
“Youngblood kept you frozen because there wasn’t anything worth wasting you on.”
That pleased him more than he allowed to show. King had worked longer than most hunters lived. He had tracked fugitives through ruined mining colonies where the air corroded lung tissue, followed a syndicate accountant across five systems using nothing but fuel receipts, and once spent eleven months embedded with a separatist militia because the target refused to leave his mountain.
Younger mercenaries mistook speed for skill. They kicked doors too early, trusted scans too easily, and believed a bounty ended when the target stopped breathing.
King knew better. The hunt began with money and ended when the money cleared. Everything else was inconvenience.
He shouldered the rifle. “Where’s the terminal?”
Hitchcock jerked her chin toward the adjoining bay. “Try not to break this one.”
“No promises.”
King crouched before the outdated terminal with his boots planted wide. His cracked fingers moved quickly over the keys until the screen sputtered, glitched, and finally flared to life, washing his face in tired blue light.
A profile loaded onto the display. The image showed a man with hard features, black hair, and eyes that seemed to hold the camera itself in contempt. Dense columns of information appeared around him: known aliases, prison escapes, confirmed and suspected kills, military service, stolen ships, and a long list of facilities that had failed to keep him contained.
King read every word.
His brashness made people assume he was stupid, and he encouraged the mistake whenever it proved useful. He laughed too loudly, talked over commanders, and treated every briefing as though he had already heard it. Beneath the performance, however, his attention moved with relentless precision.
He studied Jeon’s preferred fighting range, his habit of turning restraints into weapons, and his tendency to target pilots, exits, and environmental systems before anything else. The footage emphasized speed, but King looked beyond that. He watched the way Jeon shifted his weight before striking, which side he protected when injured, and how often he used an opponent’s fear to steer them exactly where he wanted.
Good. Very good.
The bounty figure expanded across the display.
1,126,000 UD.
King leaned closer and let out a low whistle. “Well,” he murmured, “aren’t you expensive.”
The number warmed him more effectively than the decontamination steam had. A bounty that large was rarely about justice. It meant a government had been embarrassed, a corporation had lost valuable property, or someone wealthy had been frightened badly enough to pay for peace of mind. King did not care which. Moral outrage had no reliable exchange rate.
Even after Youngblood took her percentage, the ship charged its fees, ammunition was deducted, and the quartermaster invented whatever fresh expense occurred to him, it would still be the largest single payout King had seen in years.
He smiled at Jeon’s image. “You and me are gonna get acquainted.”
Boots rang against the grated floor behind him, sharp and deliberate. Commander Cassidy Hitchcock stood in the doorway with her arms folded, her posture rigid and her expression set in the same hard lines she seemed to bring everywhere.
King had heard that she and her sister, Angel, had both served in the military once. Cassidy had ended her contract and joined Youngblood a few years after he did, while Angel was supposedly still enlisted somewhere near Aguerra Prime, maybe? He had never cared enough to verify it. King asked few questions unless the answers affected his pay, and Hitchcock was not inclined to offer much even when asked.
“You wanna explain what the hell you’re doing?”
“Just browsing,” King said without turning. “Reading the file. Little light reading.”
“Cut it.” She stepped farther into the room. “We’ve got runners. Orders are clean. Shoot on sight.”
King’s fingers stopped above the terminal. “Runners from where?”
“Containment.”
“Jeon?”
“We don’t know.”
Only then did he look over his shoulder. “Then the orders ain’t clean.”
Hitchcock’s eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
“If Jeon’s among them, shooting on sight turns one million credits into a corpse somebody else gets paid to identify.” King rose and brought the rifle with him. “Dead or alive might look the same on a warrant, Commander, but living men answer questions. Living men lead you to stashes, contacts, and bigger numbers.”
“You were told to shoot.”
His grin returned, broad and entirely unapologetic. King had spent most of his life balancing orders against profit, and experience had taught him which one deserved his loyalty. Orders changed, commanders died, and employers lied about bonuses. Coin, at least, was honest.
Hitchcock stepped close enough that the front of her armor nearly touched his. “Youngblood owns the contract.”
“Then Youngblood decides whether he’s worth more breathing.”
“She decides everything.”
King’s expression remained amused, though something harder settled behind his eyes. “Sure she does. Long as my share arrives.”
Hitchcock had never liked Marcel King, and a year in cryo had done nothing to improve matters. She held his gaze for another beat before jerking her head toward the corridor.
“Move.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He gave her a lazy salute and folded the rifle stock against his shoulder, failing to hide his smirk before she turned sharply and strode away.
The terminal continued to glow behind him. Jungkook Jeon stared from the screen with silver eyes fixed forward, looking less like a man waiting to be captured than someone already planning the hunter’s funeral. King glanced back once, and his grin widened.
He had hunted desperate men, clever men, soldiers, killers, and rich cowards who believed distance could protect them. Most ran because they were afraid to die. The best ran because they believed they could win, and those were the ones King remembered long after the money cleared.
Those were the ones worth waking up for.
“Come on, then,” he muttered as he followed Hitchcock into the corridor. “Let’s see what you’re worth.”
The Dark Fury was too vast. Its corridors wound around sealed gardens, weapons decks, cryogenic barracks, galleries, machine chapels, and private apartments no ordinary crew member had ever entered. Emergency shutters turned familiar routes into dead ends, gravity failed in one section and doubled in the next, and the vessel seemed to rearrange itself around their escape. Every sealed door felt like another attempt to drive them back into Lorelai’s hands.
Jungkook navigated by damage. Smoke drifted toward active ventilation, blood marked the routes guards had taken, and fresh boot prints revealed which passages had already been searched. He chose the worst-looking corridors because mercenaries favored clean lines and predictable cover. Leo stayed close behind him with Typhon’s weapon clutched in both hands, while Namjoon brought up the rear, one arm pressed against his ribs and a stolen shock baton held low.
They passed a cryogenic barracks during a power fluctuation. Frosted doors clicked open and shut in sequence, briefly revealing rows of sleeping mercenaries behind the glass. There were hundreds of them, replacement bodies waiting for heat.
Leo slowed. “We should destroy them.”
Namjoon looked from the pods to Jungkook. “They haven’t done anything yet.”
“They will.”
Jungkook studied the emergency controls. One command would vent the entire bay. Another would overheat the suspension fluid and boil every sleeper where they stood. For a moment, he thought of Lorelai’s gallery and the conscious bodies trapped forever inside a single second.
“No,” he said.
Leo stared at him. “Why?”
“Because she’d do it.”
That was all he gave them. He moved on before either could make more of the answer than he wanted it to contain, leaving the barracks doors behind them to continue their slow mechanical breathing.
The next corridor had lost gravity and was choked with drifting debris. Broken panels, loose cables, and fragments from the blast spun lazily through the air. Jungkook pushed off and moved through it with controlled, economical motions. Namjoon followed closely, palms grazing the walls as he guided himself forward. Leo came last and struggled to stay centered. She kicked off too hard, spun sideways, and bounced off a pipe with a muffled clang.
“I hate this,” she muttered, flailing once before catching herself.
“Focus,” Jungkook said, already angling toward the next junction.
Behind them, the pursuit force poured into the wrecked section. The first mercenaries dropped into the chamber like angry insects, boots clanging and bodies colliding as their flashlights swept across the burst shrill, the gore-streaked walls, and the scorch marks still smoking along the floor.
King landed in the middle of it and immediately stepped into something wet. He looked down and grimaced. “Ugh. What was that?”
“Shut up and take point,” Hitchcock barked.
He wiped his boot against a jagged piece of paneling before glancing toward the observation deck. Youngblood stood above them in silhouette, hands locked around the railing and her knuckles bleached white. King tipped her a casual salute. She did not acknowledge it.
“Burn them,” Hitchcock ordered.
King exhaled and rolled his shoulders as he brought the scatter rifle up. “All right, boys,” he said lightly. “Time to get sweaty.”
Gravity returned without warning.
Jungkook took the impact first, folding into a tight roll that bled off the force before he came upright and kept moving. Namjoon landed a step behind him with solid control. Leo stumbled and barely remained on her feet, grabbing a broken conduit that sparked weakly beneath her hand.
Something deep and ugly rolled through the walls. It was less a sound than breath being forced through metal, low enough to vibrate through the deck.
Leo went still. “What the hell was that?”
Jungkook raised one hand, palm outward. “Don’t move.”
The silence shattered almost immediately. Trackers flooded the far corridor, their boots hammering the deck while flashlights cut through the smoke and weapons rose into firing position. Behind them came the source of the sound, and it was worse than any of them had imagined.
The creature advanced with a heavy, uneven clank, metal limbs driving its bulk forward while hydraulics whined beneath the strain. The rest of it was flesh: stitched muscle, exposed nerves, and thick cables disappearing into a skull barely contained by its own hardware. It lowered its head and sniffed with wet, eager breaths, like a starving animal catching a scent.
Its handler dropped into a crouch, smeared blood from the floor across the feeding plate fixed to its snout, and hissed, “Let it go.”
Six Golls held the restraint lines. Five released them. The sixth barely had time to react before the creature lunged and jerked him forward with brutal force. His scream ended abruptly as he vanished into the dark.
Jungkook did not wait. He was already climbing, boots scrambling up a twisted support beam toward a catwalk that looked one hard impact from collapse. His muscles burned with every pull. When he reached the top, he leaned over the edge and thrust one hand down.
“Come on!”
Leo caught his arm just as flashlight beams settled across her back. Jungkook hauled her upward with a grunt and flipped her over the ledge. She struck the catwalk hard beside him, gasping as she scrambled to get her feet beneath her.
Below, King’s voice crackled over the comms. “What the—”
Gunfire cut him off. A round clipped Jungkook’s shoulder, twisting him sideways as blood bloomed through his sleeve. He caught the railing and turned with a sharp hiss.
“You’re hit,” Namjoon said, already checking the angles below.
“Him?” Leo shot back, still breathless. “That thing nearly ripped me in half.”
“It’s a graze,” Jungkook said, dismissing it even as his jaw tightened.
The sound came again, closer and faster now. Metal shrieked while flesh dragged across the deck.
“That bitch,” King muttered as he began retreating. Then he raised his voice. “Move!”
He shoved past another mercenary and broke into a run, following the route Jungkook had carved through the wreckage.
-
Jungkook slowed beneath the half-collapsed catwalk and stopped on a stretch of grated flooring, turning to face the corridor they had torn through. His breathing remained controlled, drawn steadily through his nose while his eyes searched the darkness behind them. The metal beneath his boots thrummed with distant impacts that traveled through the ship without ever resolving into a clear direction.
Leo stumbled up behind him, pale and slick with sweat, loose strands of hair plastered to her cheeks. She was still moving, still forcing one foot in front of the other, but her legs had begun to shake. Every breath came quick and shallow, her body already giving more than it had left.
“We can’t stop,” Namjoon said, glancing back over his shoulder.
“We’re not outrunning it,” Jungkook replied. His voice was calm and absolute. “Not all three of us.”
Leo straightened instinctively, pulling her shoulders back even as her knees trembled beneath her. “What? I can keep up.”
At first, he did not look at her. When he finally did, something in his expression softened without weakening the edge in his voice.
“Maybe someday.”
His gaze lifted toward the structure above them. Half hidden among the docking bay’s shadowed support beams, a narrow maintenance crawlspace cut through the ship’s frame. It would have been easy to miss unless someone knew exactly where to look.
“Get her up there,” Jungkook said, pointing toward it. “The flight deck’s close. Upper level, aft side.”
Namjoon nodded immediately. “I know the way.”
“You wait until whatever’s chasing us passes underneath,” Jungkook continued, already turning his attention back toward the darkness. “Then you go. No looking back, no matter what you hear.”
Leo stared at him. “We’ll wait for you.”
He offered no answer. His focus had already shifted beyond her, tracking something neither of them could see. Jungkook stepped away with the shiv drawn, its edge catching the light in one brief glint before the shadows swallowed him.
A moment later, blood struck the floor in heavy, deliberate drops. He had drawn the blade across his own arm in a clean line, opening the skin just enough to leave a trail. He did not flinch. The pain grounded him, sharpening everything that followed.
Far down the corridor, mercenaries advanced through smoke and grime, their flashlights skating across rusted walls and scorched panels. Namjoon pulled Leo into the crawlspace and held her close as her breathing turned shallower, her hands twisting tightly in the sleeves of her jumpsuit.
Below them, King crouched beside the blood trail. He pressed two fingers into the fresh smear and lifted his hand, studying the shine of red across his glove.
“Smart bastard,” he muttered.
His eyes followed the trail before flicking toward the squad behind him. He did not wait for orders. He moved at once, pursuing the blood with the certainty of a predator that had finally caught a scent.
Leo shifted beside Namjoon. “Where do we—”
His hand settled gently over her mouth. “Shh.”
Leo froze as the ship fell into a silence too complete to be natural. A second later, heavy footfalls rolled through the hull, each metallic impact traveling up through the deck with slow, deliberate force.
Something was coming.
Her eyes widened, and her fingers dug into Namjoon’s sleeve. He remained perfectly still beside her, barely breathing, while a long, guttural roar traveled down the corridor and rattled steel and bone alike. The footsteps passed beneath them and gradually receded, their vibrations fading one by one into the distance.
Only when the final tremor disappeared did Namjoon shift enough to peer through the slats. The corridor below appeared empty, at least for the moment.
“We have to help him,” Leo whispered, her voice trembling. “He won’t make it alone.”
Namjoon looked at her for a long moment before shaking his head. “Sometimes helping means leaving.”
Far below, floodlights snapped on and flooded the corridor with harsh clinical white, stripping the shadows of anywhere to hide.
The mercenaries obeyed at once, spreading through the passage with practiced precision. Rifles rose as they cleared doorways and blind corners without another word. Hitchcock took the lead, moving along the wall until something near the floor caught her attention.
“Something here.”
She crouched beside a torn strip of fabric darkened with blood, her fingers hovering over it before she lifted it carefully from the deck. King moved closer, his shoulders tightening as he recognized the trap a moment too late.
“Don’t—”
Hitchcock turned the cloth over before he could finish. Her expression changed immediately.
“Oh, shit.”
The deck shuddered beneath their boots as a low rumble rolled through the corridor, deeper than anything they had heard before. It resonated through steel and bone alike, approaching without haste because it had no reason to rush.
The Goll rounded the corner.
It advanced with a heavy, uneven gait, its limbs striking the floor like dropped anvils. Metal plating framed slabs of exposed muscle, while thick tubes pulsed beneath its skin and pumped fluid directly into open flesh. Its malformed jaw split wide, revealing rows of metal teeth that flashed beneath the floodlights.
King backed away quickly, snapping his weapon into position. “Guns up!”
The warning came too late.
The Goll struck the squad like a battering ram. Rifles cracked in frantic bursts, muzzle flashes strobing through the corridor, but the rounds barely slowed it. The creature pushed through the gunfire as though walking into rain.
One mercenary disappeared beneath its first swing, lifted from the floor and hurled into the wall with a sound that ended everything at once. The Goll tore through two more before anyone could adjust, shredding armor and flesh as though both were soaked paper. Its claws gleamed beneath the emergency lights, slick with blood and something darker.
King dropped low and rolled behind a shattered support bulkhead. He risked one glance over the edge and immediately regretted it. The humor vanished from his face as he watched the creature carve through the formation, scattering trained mercenaries faster than they could regroup.
He fired once, not at the Goll but at the wall beside it. The round ruptured a sewage pipe with a violent hiss, blasting black water and chemicals through the passage. King dove directly into the surge and let it sweep him down into the darkness without hesitation.
Hitchcock never got the same chance.
The Goll caught her in the middle of an order. It lunged, striking with enough force to crush bone beneath armor. When the movement stopped, only torn fabric and a dark smear remained across the deck.
Then the ceiling exploded inward.
Jungkook dropped through the opening without a sound, nothing but weight and intent. He landed hard across the Goll’s back and drove the shiv downward with both hands, forcing the blade through the softer tissue beneath its armored spine.
The creature reared with a fractured roar as pain overtook fury. Its legs buckled, but Jungkook held on, twisting the blade deeper until something inside gave way. Electrical systems shorted in violent bursts, muscle spasmed beneath him, and the Goll collapsed into a twitching heap.
Jungkook tore the shiv free and rolled aside before the body finished falling. He came up in a crouch, breathing hard and already scanning the sudden quiet. Blood had soaked through the sleeve around his wounded shoulder, but he appeared not to notice.
His gaze settled on the corpse of a cyborg half buried beneath the debris, one arm missing but most of its torso armor still intact.
“Not strapping that tank back on,” he muttered.
He examined the remaining equipment more carefully, then reached toward it. “But that might do.”
Elsewhere, Namjoon wedged his fingers beneath the warped edge of a loose floor panel and pulled until the metal groaned. It resisted for several seconds before giving way with a sharp pop. Beneath it, a short service tunnel ran through the deck and opened only a few meters away onto the flight deck, which appeared quiet and empty beneath low blue guide lights.
Namjoon dropped through without hesitation, landed in a crouch, and began crawling forward. He had barely cleared the opening when something struck the back of his head.
The world pitched violently. He folded and hit the deck in a heap, his cheek striking hard enough to send stars bursting across his vision.
Leo followed close behind, her hands already reaching for the edge of the opening. She had just enough time to see the tunnel below and Namjoon sprawled at its far end before a hand closed around the back of her neck and tore her sideways like loose cargo. Her feet left the ground, and the deck spun beneath her as Typhon lifted her with effortless strength.
She kicked wildly, the toes of her boots scraping sparks from the metal while she twisted and clawed at his arm. Panic flared hot and immediate in her chest. She drove one fist into his jaw and struck him again, pain shooting up her arm each time her knuckles met something solid and unyielding, but the blows barely slowed him.
His grip shifted from the back of her neck to her throat. He did not squeeze at once. That would have been easier. Instead, his fingers closed with slow, deliberate pressure, testing the angle of her neck and measuring her resistance as though calculating exactly how much force it would take to crush the cartilage and end her cleanly.
Leo’s legs jerked beneath her. Darkness crept inward from the edges of her vision while her heartbeat thundered in her ears, frantic and overwhelming, until it drowned out everything else.
“Let her go.”
Typhon’s eyes moved first. He released Leo with the same calm he had shown while taking her, lowering her until her knees struck the deck. She collapsed forward, coughing violently, both hands clawing at her throat as she dragged air back into her lungs in ragged, tearing gasps.
Jungkook stepped out of the shadows.
His posture was loose, almost careless, but the tension beneath it was unmistakable, coiled like a spring wound too tightly. Blood streaked his neck, and the emergency lights flashed across his goggles. The shiv rested easily in his right hand, the blade angled forward and already alive with intent.
“You want me,” he said quietly. “Not her.”
He took one step closer. “You want a shot at the title?”
Typhon’s mouth twitched, the faintest trace of amusement crossing his face.
Jungkook answered with violence.
He drove his fist into the steel wall beside him. The impact rang through the corridor, sharp and brutal, echoing like a warning bell. He never looked away or blinked. His breathing remained slow and controlled, as though what moved through him was not rage but permission.
Typhon stepped forward to meet him, unhurried, as if this were where the path had always been leading. He shrugged out of his long coat with mechanical precision and let it fall to the deck.
Jungkook’s shiv was already raised.
Typhon drew his sidearm, but instead of aiming it, he dismantled it as he walked. The magazine dropped first, followed by the slide. The pieces scattered uselessly across the floor with a series of metallic clatters. He had chosen something else.
A curved blade came free next, hand-forged, clean, and perfectly balanced. It gave off a faint hum as he raised it, the sound belonging to a weapon made for use rather than display.
They faced one another without another word. There were no taunts or countdowns. The air between them tightened until it felt charged, like the breath held before a lightning strike.
Jungkook moved first, closing the distance in a blur before stopping just outside Typhon’s reach. It was not hesitation but a test, and Typhon answered at once. The sword snapped forward in a sharp, surgical thrust. Jungkook slipped past it, pivoted, knocked the blade aside with a kick, and surged inside his guard.
The fight collapsed into close quarters. Steel rasped while knuckles struck muscle and bone, breath tearing from both men in short, brutal bursts. Typhon fought with discipline, every movement economical, his angles precise and his energy carefully conserved. Jungkook fought to end it, sharp, ugly, and relentless.
He drove for Typhon’s throat. Typhon ducked and spun, trying to take his back, but Jungkook turned with him, caught his forearm in mid-swing, and twisted hard. Bone popped. The sword slipped free and struck the deck with a ringing clang, and Jungkook kicked it out of reach before Typhon could reclaim it.
Typhon answered with force. An elbow crashed into Jungkook’s ribs, followed by a knee driven hard into his leg. Pain flared deep and hot. A grunt tore from Jungkook as he staggered, but he stayed upright with his teeth bared.
They separated for the space of a breath, sweat slick across their skin and blood dripping onto the deck while they stared each other down and recalculated.
Then they collided again.
Whatever finesse remained disappeared. Jungkook split Typhon’s lip with his knuckles. Typhon slammed him into the wall hard enough to rattle his teeth, steel biting into his spine. Jungkook rebounded from the impact and drove his shoulder into Typhon’s stomach, lifting him just enough to steal his balance.
They went down together, boots scraping uselessly for traction before their bodies struck the deck with a hollow clang that jarred Jungkook’s spine. The impact knocked the breath from him. Pain burst through his wounded shoulder, hot and blinding, and stars exploded behind his eyes as something heavy crashed into his ribs. An elbow, then a knee. Blood flooded his mouth when he finally dragged air back into his lungs.
A kick landed squarely in his center. His grip spasmed, and the shiv flew from his hand, skidding across the debris-strewn floor with a ringing clatter before spinning beyond reach. Jungkook rolled on instinct and came up on one knee as Typhon tore free and surged upright.
Typhon was already retrieving his sword. His fingers closed around the hilt with practiced certainty as he advanced, his breathing steady and controlled. Blood ran from his split lip and dripped from his chin, but it did nothing to slow him. He moved like momentum given shape, each step efficient and inevitable.
Jungkook’s eyes flicked once across the blade, the distance between them, and the fact that he was unarmed. Then he noticed the severed power line near the wall, coiled and twitching like something alive. Blue-white arcs snapped against the deck, and the sharp reek of ozone filled his nose.
Typhon raised the sword. Emergency light flashed along the edge as it came down.
Jungkook dove beneath the descending blade, close enough to feel the air shear past his cheek. His hands closed around the severed power cable, and he whipped it up and over Typhon’s head in one violent motion before hauling backward with everything he had.
The wire bit deep. A raw, animal roar tore from Typhon as the current ripped through his body, sparks bursting across armor and skin while blue-white electricity crawled over him in frantic veins. His eyes went wide, teeth bared and tendons standing out along his neck, until the sword slipped from his numb fingers and clattered across the floor.
He clawed at the cable while his muscles locked and released in violent spasms. The stench of burned insulation mingled with scorched flesh, thick enough to turn the stomach. His boots scraped uselessly across the deck as he slammed backward again and again, trying to break Jungkook’s grip.
Jungkook leaned away and held fast. His arms screamed under the strain, his shoulders burned, and his jaw clenched until his teeth ached. He dug his heels into the floor and refused to yield, muscles trembling as sparks rained around them. Typhon twisted hard, throwing his weight backward, and his free hand flashed. A utility blade caught the light for a fraction of a second before slicing through the cable.
The power surged once.
White light exploded behind Jungkook’s eyes, and the room vanished into darkness.
The blackout was complete. There were no alarms, no residual glow, not even the fading hum of damaged systems. Only breath, too close and too fast, and the stink of burned wiring layered with blood. Jungkook remained still long enough to let the blindness settle, his body shifting into something older and sharper. Sight was gone, but everything else remained.
Metal scraped softly to his left. Typhon was shifting his weight, resetting by sound and instinct alone. The faint whisper of fabric told Jungkook enough. He was not retreating.
He was hunting.
Jungkook exhaled through his teeth and dropped low just as Typhon lunged. The rush of displaced air tore over his head, and Jungkook rolled beneath it before driving his shoulder into Typhon’s thigh hard enough to break his balance. The grunt that followed held more surprise than pain. Jungkook was already inside his reach, too close for the sword to swing cleanly.
They collided in the dark. Forearms slammed together as Typhon reached for Jungkook’s throat. Jungkook turned into the grab, driving his elbow beneath Typhon’s arm before the hold could close, then surged forward chest to chest. Weight and momentum forced Typhon back one grinding step at a time.
A blind backhand came fast. Jungkook absorbed it across the shoulder, his teeth rattling, and leaned into the blow instead of away from it. The contact told him everything he needed: the heat of Typhon’s breath, the hitch in it, the exact distance between them.
Close enough.
Jungkook hooked his left hand into Typhon’s jaw, fingers digging into cheek and bone as he wrenched the man’s head backward. His right arm moved without conscious thought, the shiv driving upward from below, guided by touch and muscle memory rather than sight.
The blade met soft tissue first, then bone. The socket gave way with a wet, brittle crack, and Typhon’s scream lasted less than a second.
Jungkook completed the thrust and buried the shiv to the hilt. A violent shudder tore through Typhon’s body as everything essential failed at once. For a moment they sagged together in the darkness, locked in place, until the weight against Jungkook went completely dead.
The emergency lights flickered back to life in dim pulses of red, beating through the corridor like a failing heart.
Jungkook stood over Typhon as the emergency lights pulsed dimly around them. Up close, there was no room for doubt. Shock had fixed itself across Typhon’s face, one eye stretched wide while the other had been destroyed around the hilt of the shiv buried deep in the socket. Fractured bone framed the blade where it had punched through, the handle pressed flush against torn flesh.
Blood seeped slowly now, thick and dark, spreading beneath Typhon’s head in a widening pool. His body twitched once with a meaningless reflex before going completely slack.
Jungkook’s hands were slick to the knuckles, the blood still warm against his skin. Pain screamed through every part of him, but his breathing remained steady as he looked down at the body.
“I told you that was coming,” he said, almost casually.
He planted one boot against Typhon’s shoulder and tore the shiv free. Bone cracked again beneath the force of it, but the body gave no response.
Namjoon surfaced slowly, dragged back into himself by pain that moved through him in uneven waves. A low groan escaped before he could stop it. His head throbbed with a sharp pulse drilling behind his right eye, and for several disoriented seconds the world was nothing but blurred bands of light swimming across the ceiling. Cold metal pressed into his palms. The air tasted wrong, thick with smoke and something burned, sharp enough to sting the back of his throat.
Leo lay beside him, far too still.
His breath caught as he turned toward her. One arm felt heavy and distant, as though it belonged to someone else, and his reach came slow and clumsy. He brushed her shoulder with careful fingers, barely daring to touch her.
“Leo,” he murmured, his voice rough.
She did not move.
Panic flared hot and sudden, squeezing his chest until it hurt. Namjoon leaned closer, searching her face for any sign of life, and then he saw it: the faint rise and fall of her chest. Her breathing was shallow but steady.
Alive.
Relief struck so quickly it left him lightheaded. He sat back on his heels and drew in a shaky breath before forcing himself upright, every joint protesting from whatever had sent them both to the floor.
The hangar slowly resolved around him. Broken lights hung uselessly overhead, while twisted debris littered the deck in jagged piles. Smoke clung to the room without moving, as though the air itself had not yet decided where to go.
Then his gaze found Jungkook.
He was coming toward them at a slow, uneven pace, one arm clamped tightly against his ribs as though it were the only thing keeping him upright. Blood had soaked through his shirt in dark, glossy patches that caught the flickering lights whenever he moved. He did not look down or check the damage. His face had gone pale beneath the grime, his jaw locked so tightly it looked painful, and his boots scuffed softly across the deck as though even walking demanded more than he had left.
Namjoon pushed himself fully upright and steadied Leo as Jungkook approached. The air felt heavy in his lungs, thick with smoke and the metallic stink of blood. His mouth was so dry that the words scraped on the way out.
“Where are you going?”
Jungkook glanced up without slowing. For a fraction of a second, his eyes looked distant and unfocused. Then something sharp returned to them.
“Getting the ship ready,” he said. “We’re leaving.”
Namjoon nodded as the meaning settled heavily in his chest. Leaving meant survival. It meant this place would not get another chance to finish them. It meant walking away from the wreckage, the bodies, and everything that had nearly killed them.
“So it’s over?” he asked quietly.
Jungkook’s gaze moved past them toward the bay doors, the shattered lights, and the scorched metal beyond. He tilted his head slightly, listening to footsteps echo somewhere behind the walls.
He already knew who they belonged to.
“Not yet.”
Metal groaned as the doors to the launch corridor began to open. The sound came low and strained, like something being forced apart against its will. The gap widened inch by inch, spilling harsh white light into the hangar.
Jungkook went rigid and snapped his head toward the doorway.
Youngblood stood framed within it.
Her black hair clung to her face and neck in dark, blood-soaked strands. The white robe she wore like armor had been torn and scorched, hanging from her in ruined pieces and stained so thoroughly that nothing ceremonial or pure remained. She seemed held upright by spite alone, her eyes fever-bright as they fixed on Jungkook. The smile stretched across her face was too wide and too tight, as though maintaining it hurt and she refused to let it fall.
“You thought you’d just leave?” she asked.
Her voice carried strangely through the hangar, sharp and hollow at once as it echoed from the metal walls and broken fixtures.
The gun trembled in her hand when she raised it. Her knuckles had gone white around the grip, and her wrist shook as exhaustion and rage bled together.
“Should’ve mounted you when I had the chance.”
The shot tore through the room.
Jungkook jerked as the round struck low. His leg collapsed immediately, pitching him forward before gravity finished the job. He hit the deck shoulder-first, and his head struck the metal with a dull crack.
He lay still.
“Stinking savage,” Youngblood spat as she staggered closer, the gun still raised even as the trembling in her arm worsened.
Namjoon froze.
Youngblood stopped several paces from Jungkook’s motionless body and lifted the barrel toward his head. Her breathing came fast and uneven, her chest hitching as she stared down at him, almost as though she expected him to rise again. Her finger tightened slowly against the trigger.
The second shot never came.
Another gunshot split the air.
Youngblood’s head snapped back with sharp, unnatural force. For one suspended instant she remained standing, as though her body had not yet understood what had happened. Surprise crossed her face, raw and unguarded, before her legs folded beneath her. She crumpled onto the deck in a boneless heap, and the gun slipped from her fingers, skittering across the metal with a hollow clink.
Smoke drifted lazily from the barrel of the weapon in Leo’s hands.
Her arms trembled, locked stiff with shock, but she did not lower the gun. She said nothing. She only stood there and stared at the body.
Namjoon moved at once. He dropped beside Jungkook and hauled him upright with a strained grunt, bracing him beneath the shoulders. Blood soaked through Jungkook’s waistband and spread darkly across his hip, slick and warm beneath Namjoon’s hands. Jungkook sagged against him, drawing breath in short, uneven pulls, but he was breathing.
“Damn,” Jungkook rasped, his eyes half-lidded and his voice thin. “You always this dramatic?”
Leo finally tore her gaze from Youngblood’s body. Her chest rose and fell too quickly.
“She was going to kill you.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
A quiet snort escaped Namjoon before he could stop it. Leo did not smile.
Jungkook did, barely. One corner of his mouth lifted, but then the pain caught up with him. His breath hitched, and a sharp hiss escaped as his body tensed and he tried to shift his weight.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Maybe a little dramatic.”
Above them, the hangar lights flickered and buzzed as they struggled to stabilize.
The shuttle tore free of the Dark Fury’s gravity like something finally permitted to exhale. Hours later, when the ship had dwindled into nothing more than a dark shape behind them, Leo woke screaming Y/N’s name.
The weapon discharged into the ceiling before Jungkook could reach her. The round buried itself in a support brace, filling the cabin with the bitter smell of scorched metal. Leo fought him when he took the gun, all elbows, teeth, and blind panic, until Namjoon caught her face between both hands and forced her to look at him.
“You’re here,” he repeated. “The floor is beneath you. The ship is moving. You’re not in the canyon.”
Her resistance collapsed without warning. She folded against him and wept with the exhausted silence of someone who had already spent every louder form of grief.
Jungkook stood over them with the weapon in his hand, remembering Y/N in the skiff doorway, soaked through and asking him to go back. He remembered holding out his hand and telling her no one would blame her. More than anything, he remembered how wrong he had been.
Leo eventually fell asleep again, though Namjoon remained beside her. Jungkook repaired the damaged brace, unloaded Typhon’s weapon, and placed it beneath the bench where she would still be able to see it when she woke.
He kept the ammunition. It was the only compromise he understood how to make.
Space opened around them, black, cold, and immeasurable, while the wreckage they had escaped dwindled into a drifting shadow behind the engines. Inside the shuttle, the hum of the drives settled into a low, steady rhythm. There were no alarms and no overlapping voices, only machinery doing its job and the strained quiet of people who had not yet decided what survival was supposed to feel like.
Jungkook sat slouched in the pilot’s chair, exhaustion dragging the tension from his body. One arm rested against his chest in a sling torn from whatever cloth they had managed to salvage, the fabric already darkening near the shoulder. His goggles remained on, their lenses scratched and smeared with grime. Perhaps it was habit. Perhaps he simply did not want to see too clearly, either what waited ahead or what they had left behind.
He had not spoken in some time.
Namjoon came up from the corridor carefully, as though too much noise might fracture something fragile in the cabin. He stopped several paces behind the pilot’s chair.
“Jungkook.”
There was no answer.
“Jungkook,” he tried again, quieter.
Jungkook tilted his head just enough to show he had heard, though his gaze stayed fixed on the stars. “We got a problem?”
“No. Not back there.” Namjoon rested his fingers against the edge of the console and glanced toward the rear display, where the last scraps of debris still glittered faintly against the void. “It’s what’s in front of us I’m worried about.”
Jungkook looked at him briefly, his expression unreadable, before his attention shifted past him.
Leo lay curled on the narrow bench intended for equipment rather than people, an old thermal blanket drawn tightly around her shoulders. One hand remained wrapped around Typhon’s unloaded weapon, her knuckles pale as though she had anchored herself to it in her sleep. Her breathing was even, but her fingers twitched every few seconds, a quiet sign that her body had not yet accepted the idea of rest.
Namjoon followed his gaze. “She’s changed,” he said softly. “I don’t know if she knows how to come back from this.”
Jungkook watched her for a moment longer than necessary. “She’ll end up like me.”
Namjoon did not contradict him. He lowered his gaze, his jaw set, and the silence that followed was neither heavy nor awkward. It was simply what remained when there was no gentler way to tell the truth.
Jungkook settled farther into the pilot’s seat, the torn leather stiff beneath him. His injured arm stayed tucked close while his free hand brought the console to life, each movement precise and automatic. Muscle memory handled what the rest of him no longer had the strength to think through.
Green indicators blinked across the dash, washing his face in muted blue and dull green. Nothing flashed urgently. Nothing demanded immediate attention. The systems were online and stable, their quiet persistence almost unsettling after so much noise.
The navigation display buzzed to life and unfolded into a starmap, constellations scattering across the glass like oil over water. Jungkook moved through them with deliberate care until he reached a small, unremarkable system tucked far from the major lanes.
“UV system,” he muttered. “Ice planet.”
Namjoon leaned slightly over his shoulder. “Where’s that?”
Jungkook did not answer. He entered the coordinates, locked them in, and leaned back as the shuttle adjusted course and slipped deeper into the dark.
Namjoon studied him for a long moment but did not press. He simply waited until Jungkook broke the silence himself.
“I’m dropping you and Leo at New Mecca.”
Namjoon’s brow creased. “New Mecca?”
“Yeah. That was the plan, right? Safe port. Clean exit. It’s yours.”
Jungkook kept his eyes on the forward display, though he could feel Namjoon’s attention settle on him, quiet and weighted with everything he was not saying.
“And you?”
“I won’t be there for docking.” Jungkook shifted his fingers against the controls. “If the seals hold, I’ll take the lower chute and slip out before anyone notices. You tell them I went down with the Dark Fury. Keeps it simple.”
Namjoon took a step back, concern tightening his face. “You don’t have to do that.”
Jungkook’s hand went still. “I do.”
“You think this is how you protect us.”
A tired breath escaped him, almost a laugh. “Am I wrong?”
Namjoon did not answer immediately. He looked down at the floor between them before meeting Jungkook’s gaze again.
“You saved her,” he said. “You didn’t have to. You could’ve run.”
Jungkook lifted his uninjured shoulder in a slight shrug. “Didn’t feel like it.”
Namjoon’s mouth curved into something faint and sad. “You say that like it was nothing. It wasn’t. Not to her.”
The engines shifted into a deeper, steadier hum as the course locked in. Beyond the viewplate, the stars stretched into thin lines and slid past like rain across glass. Behind them, the Dark Fury continued to shrink, broken and burning, until it became another scatter of debris swallowed by the black.
Jungkook watched it disappear.
Namjoon turned toward the corridor but paused at the entrance. “If you change your mind,” he said softly, “there’s room on that planet for all of us.”
Jungkook kept his gaze fixed ahead. “Some people don’t get to come back. I’m not bringing mercs to your house, Namjoon. It’s better for everyone if I stay away.”
Namjoon stood there a moment longer before giving a quiet nod and walking off. The sound of his boots faded down the corridor, leaving Jungkook alone with the steady hum of the engines.
He remained at the controls with one hand resting on the throttle, watching the stars stream past while his thoughts lingered on the people who had never made it out.
The flight deck had gone still. Not calm, just empty. No alarms, no chatter over comms, only the faint crackle of burned circuitry and the lazy wobble of a damaged fan overhead. It was the kind of quiet that settled after violence, when even the ship seemed unsure whether it should keep breathing.
King stood near the edge of the docking threshold, arms folded, his weight resting on one blood-caked boot. The other was planted in something tacky that had once been a person. He did not bother looking down. It did not matter anymore.
Behind him, the hangar lay open and ruined, smoke clinging to the ceiling, lights stuttering and dimming as if they were tired of trying. The place looked hollowed out, like something gutted and left to cool.
He watched the shuttle pull away.
At first it was only a glint against the black, a brief movement that caught the eye. Then it slipped out of view, swallowed whole by the dark. King did not turn away. He stayed where he was, jaw tight, brows drawn together, a vein ticking faintly at his temple.
“Jungkook Jeon,” he muttered.
The name scraped on the way out, tasting like rust and something unfinished. He dragged his tongue across the cut on his lip, then leaned forward and spat over the edge. The blood struck metal with a dull, final sound.
“We ain’t done,” he said quietly.
King did not move or shift his stance. He just stood there, hands still, boots rooted in the wreckage, eyes fixed on the place where the stars had closed around the shuttle and taken it from sight.
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader
Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon, Captain!Taehyung, Doctor!Jimin,
Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only
Word Count: 20.2k+
Summary: Aboard the transport vessel Hunter Gratzner, a three-person crew is responsible for carrying fifty passengers across a twenty-eight-week journey. Among them is Jungkook Jeon, a notorious convicted criminal traveling under guard. As co-pilot Y/N prepares to enter cryosleep, the voyage appears routine, but she can't shake the feeling something is going to go terribly wrong.
Warnings: strong language, extensional crisis, depression, bickering, arguing, science jargen, team bonding, this is really a tame chapter, just setting the scene, let me know if i missed anything...
A/N: This is a little prologue chapter for PB to get to know the crew a bit better before they passed away. If you haven't read Pitch Black, I'd highly recommend it as it all takes place within this universe, but it's not really necessary in order to enjoy this story. Just might make it a bit more interesting. I hope you enjoy!
masterlist
The Hunter Gratzner had a heartbeat.
Y/N never said that where other pilots could hear her. Pilots were a particular breed of insufferable when you gave them even the smallest opening. They could take a harmless sentence, turn it over like a suspect component, and spend three hours arguing about whether it was superstition, bad engineering, or a cry for help. Someone would lean back over a cup of station coffee, squint through the steam, and say, Ships do not have hearts, Y/L/N. Ships have reactors.
She knew the difference. She also knew that when a fusion core pulsed beneath five layers of scarred deck plating, and that pulse climbed through the pilot's chair and settled into the bones of her hands, the distinction began to feel less like science and more like arrogance. The Hunter Gratzner did not breathe, exactly. She did not sleep, and she did not dream. But she trembled with the stubborn insistence of something that intended to continue, and over the years Y/N had learned to trust that kind of sound.
The thrum lived everywhere, running along the bulkheads in a low, private murmur, buzzing faintly in the throttle grips, humming behind the console faceplates and trembling through the soles of her boots. After enough hours alone on the bridge, it got inside her ribs and kept time with her own pulse until she could no longer tell which one was leading and which one was following.
There were other sounds too, small ones, shy ones, the sort a ship only made once the formal business of departure had ended and everyone aboard had given up pretending they were not nervous. The environmental ducts clicked as temperature differentials crawled along the corridor walls. Somewhere aft, a coolant valve gave a thin metallic sigh every time pressure equalized. The navigation glass made a faint electrical purr, too high for most people to notice and too steady for Y/N to ignore. The old pilot's chair creaked when she shifted her weight, not because it was broken, but because three generations of flight crew had taught it complaint as a second language.
She knew them all, and that was the trouble with being someone who listened. The world became crowded. People thought noticing meant control, but it did not. Noticing meant the universe had more ways to reach into you. A sound could hook a memory. A flicker could start a dread. A smell could put you back on a planet you had not seen in months, with dust between your teeth and grief moving under your ribs like something looking for a way out.
The bridge smelled of old plastic warmed by circuitry, metal polish Teddy insisted on using even though nobody from corporate inspection ever cared, and the bitter coffee Y/N had brewed too strong two hours earlier. A strip of amber light ran along the ceiling seam, set low for the pre-cryo shift, turning every surface softer and more sinister than it deserved. Controls glowed blue and green. Diagnostic text flowed down the left-hand panel in neat, disciplined rows. Beyond the forward glass, the stars looked small enough to be harmless.
That was one of deep space's nastier jokes. From a distance, everything that wanted you dead looked like glitter.
Silence was what frightened her. She still remembered the first time a ship had gone dead around her, back when she had been sixteen, maybe seventeen, all knuckles and stubbornness and the kind of confidence that came from not yet understanding how many ways the universe could kill you. The training hauler had been old enough to have opinions. It smelled of hot dust, hydraulic oil, and the stale breath of a thousand nervous students. One moment the cockpit had been full of noise: reactor hum, conduit chatter, fan-whine, relay ticks, the ugly dependable music of machinery doing its job. Then the main bus failed, the reactor dropped into emergency isolation, and everything stopped.
Her own breathing sounded monstrous in the cockpit. Emergency lights washed the walls red. The nav glass went black. Outside the hull, Helion Prime's upper atmosphere curved away in gold and shadow, beautiful in that cruel way dangerous things could be beautiful when there was nothing useful to do but notice them. For six seconds, nobody spoke.
Uncle Sean leaned over from the instructor's seat, slapped the manual reset with two grease-browned fingers, and said, perfectly calm, "That's bad."
The sentence saved her from panic because it gave panic a shape. A problem had entered the room, and problems could be named, measured, sworn at, and, if all else failed, struck with a wrench. That was the mercy of machines. They were honest, once you knew how to listen.
People were harder. People hid their failing circuits. They smiled when they were leaking pressure. They could sit across from you in a mess hall, chew the same miserable protein loaf, laugh at the same terrible joke, and still be carrying a rupture inside them wide enough to swallow a room. Y/N had seen kind people become cruel under fear, brave people fold under shame, brilliant people make stupid choices because loneliness had chewed them hollow. Machines gave warnings. Human beings gave performances.
Uncle Sean used to say the trick was learning which alarms mattered and which ones were just a thing getting old. "You listen long enough," he told her once, half under a freighter belly with a hydrospanner clenched between his teeth, "you hear the difference. Fussing. Dying."
"And people?"
Sean slid out on the mechanic's board, face streaked with grime, white hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He considered that longer than she expected. "People lie first," he said finally. "Usually to themselves."
At sixteen, she had thought that was a useful answer. At thirty, she knew it was only the door to a larger and more unpleasant room.
Years later, alone on the bridge of the Hunter Gratzner, Y/N caught herself checking the engine readouts every time that memory rose up out of whatever locked cabinet in her mind she usually kept it in.
Green. Green. Green.
Coolant pressure steady. Containment stable. Reactor output holding at forty-one percent. The old ship sounded exactly as she should: stubborn, tired, alive. Y/N trusted that sound more than she trusted most people.
Her right hand moved over the console without her looking down. She nudged a trim value by two-tenths of a degree, correcting a tiny lateral drift the autopilot had flagged as too small to matter. Pale blue numbers shivered across the screen, recalculated, and settled into their new obedience.
The Hunter Gratzner was old in the way certain machines became old after enough people had decided, independently and against all reasonable advice, that they were worth saving. Nothing aboard her matched cleanly. Her engine housings were Aguerra-built; her aft coolant manifolds had come from a decommissioned survey vessel whose name had probably been painted over three owners ago; and the environmental scrubbers had been rebuilt so many times their serial numbers were more rumor than record.
The portside gravity regulator coughed every seventeen minutes and nine seconds. Y/N had timed it. The number mattered. If it ever became seventeen minutes and eight seconds, she was going to start asking impolite questions.
She knew every compromise aboard the H-G. The galley heater made the navigation display flicker if both ran above seventy percent load. The lower deck hatch stuck in cold cycles unless you kicked it low on the left side, hard enough to shame it but not hard enough to crack the hinge. The number three cryo-monitor reported phantom humidity spikes whenever someone used the forward shower. The aft corridor lights dimmed during full engine diagnostics, which had scared a junior technician so badly last month he had dropped an entire crate of sterile tubing and tried to blame the crate.
Was any of it ideal? No. Was any of it surprising? Also no. Ships were not built once. They were negotiated into continuing.
She had inherited the Hunter Gratzner the way some people inherited old houses: with affection, resentment, and a private list of things she absolutely intended to fix once money stopped being imaginary. Every pilot had a theory about what made a vessel difficult. Some blamed age. Some blamed maintenance budgets. Some blamed corporate greed, which was always a safe bet and rarely the whole answer. Y/N blamed accumulation. A ship collected history the way a body collected scars. A bad landing once made the port strut temperamental forever. A cheap replacement part installed during a dockworkers' strike could cause twenty years of strange little workarounds. A careless engineer in a hurry might cross-label two access panels, leaving every person after him to inherit his laziness like a family curse.
The H-G was full of those inheritances. Behind panel twelve-B, someone had written DONT OPEN in black marker. Behind panel twelve-C, someone else had added TOO LATE. The forward shower worked perfectly until the water recycler entered sterilization mode, at which point it became an excellent machine for producing either steam burns or spiritual humility. The galley table was bolted slightly crooked to the floor, not enough for corporate to care but enough that loose cups drifted left under low gravity and Shields complained about it as if the table had personally disappointed him.
Y/N loved the ship in the reluctant way one loved anything that required too much tending. It was not romance. Romance was for people who had never crawled through an access shaft at two in the morning with a flashlight between their teeth and a cooling alarm screaming in their ear. Love was knowing the ugly parts and staying anyway. Sometimes, when she was very tired, she thought that was also the only definition of family she trusted.
Static cracked across the comm line.
"Hunter Gratzner," Y/N said, leaning toward the pickup. Her voice came out rough from disuse; she had not spoken to another living soul in almost two hours. "Last marker cleared."
Aguerra traffic control answered through a gray layer of interference. "Copy, Hunter Gratzner. Primary lane is yours. Main burn cleared."
There was a pause. Y/N could picture Silas on the other end, one elbow on the console, collar crooked, eyes half-open, coffee somewhere within reach and probably cold. His voice softened. "Sleep cold, H-G. Silas out."
Y/N smiled despite herself. Silas had worked traffic control for nearly six years, and every transmission he sent sounded like he had been awake since the invention of thrust. She had met him once during a cargo delay that lasted thirty-one hours, long enough for strangers to become either friends or enemies. Silas had chosen friend through the aggressive distribution of coffee and the kind of dry jokes that took three seconds to land.
"Find a hobby, Silas," she said after the line died.
She eased the throttle forward. The ship answered with a deeper roll of sound that rose through the deck, through the pilot's chair, through her spine. The stars beyond the forward glass shifted by fractions. Injector pressure climbed. Magnetic bottle stable. Thrust chamber temperature followed a clean, boring curve.
Boring curves were beautiful. Exciting curves were how people ended up in training videos.
The Taurus lanes ahead were unusually clear. Normally they were cluttered with dead satellites, cracked drone haulers, abandoned mining rigs, and old beacon buoys still blinking with the stubborn optimism of technology nobody had budgeted to retrieve. Tonight there was nothing but empty space.
The emptiness had texture if you knew how to read it. Navigation painted routes in clean lines, blue for commercial lanes, amber for hazard corridors, red for prohibited clusters, but those lines were lies the way all maps were lies. Useful lies, necessary lies, but lies all the same. Space did not care where NOSA said the lane began. Space did not care what was insured, registered, inspected, or overdue. Dust moved where old impacts sent it. Ice drifted for centuries. A shattered hull could tumble dark across a route long after its distress beacon died, turning slowly, waiting with the patience of all dead things.
Taurus had stories. Every lane did. Pilots collected them because fear liked company: a survey ship that vanished three days after reporting phantom radar returns; a mining tender found intact with all pods sealed and nobody inside; a hauler crew who swore they saw another ship pacing them for six hours without transponder, drive flare, or visible mass, just an absence moving against the stars. Most of it was nonsense, probably. Tired people staring too long at black windows. Bad sensors. Radiation ghosts. The mind trying to turn nothing into something because nothing was harder to survive.
Y/N believed in faulty sensors, not ghosts. She also believed that faulty sensors could kill you just as thoroughly.
The route briefing that morning had been too smooth, and that bothered her now, sitting alone under the low bridge lights. Smooth briefings were the administrative equivalent of a clean engine bay on a ship that had just come out of emergency repair. They did not mean nothing was wrong. They meant someone had worked very hard to make sure the wrong things were not visible.
Dispatch had called the Taurus run routine. Routine cargo transfer, routine passenger relocation, routine custody transport, routine long-haul sleep. The word had appeared on five separate screens before departure, as if repetition could become protection. Y/N distrusted routine on principle.
She had stood in the cargo bay with a tablet tucked under one arm while dock crews loaded settlement equipment, sealed medical crates, nutrient blocks, water reclamation filters, mining components, children's education kits, and six pallets of personal belongings wrapped in corporate-approved netting. People moving to New Mecca came with fewer possessions than hope required. A family of four had watched two loaders argue over the weight distribution of everything they owned. The youngest child kept asking whether her bed was in the big container, and her mother kept saying yes in a voice that got thinner each time.
Passenger loading always made Y/N feel intrusive. Crew saw people at their most transitional, and leaving was an undignified state. Everyone carried too much and not enough. Everyone looked back more often than they meant to. Even the excited ones had fear under their chatter, a quick bright current that flashed when they thought nobody was looking.
There had been miners traveling in a group of twelve, loud at first and quieter as cryo orientation began. A teacher with two cases of physical books because she did not trust New Mecca's network reliability. Three agricultural engineers arguing gently over soil amendments. A man transporting his dead sister's ashes in a sealed memorial tube, though the manifest called it personal mineral remains because bureaucracy could make grief sound like landscaping. The family with a fern. A young couple who kept touching each other's sleeves as if checking that the other had not vanished. A small group of traveling Christlams.
Then Lee arrived with the security pod, and the dock changed around him.
Nobody announced it. Nobody shouted. The loaders did not stop working, exactly; they only became more careful. Conversation thinned. Somewhere a wrench clanged, and the sound seemed indecently loud. The pod floated on a mag-sled between two contracted security officers who looked both bored and heavily armed, which was the standard expression of people paid to stand near danger they did not personally understand.
Y/N had been checking mass distribution. The numbers on her tablet remained numbers. Cargo was cargo. Weight was weight. But some objects made the air around them different.
The security pod was matte black, longer than a civilian cryo chamber, with reinforced ribs along the sides and a separate power pack locked beneath the base. Warning indicators pulsed red even in full dock light. Its glass was opaque from the outside. You could not see the man inside, only the idea of him.
Marshal Lee walked beside it with one hand near his weapon and the other wrapped around a paper cup of coffee gone untouched. He had the look of a man who had slept badly in cheap chairs for most of his adult life: not sloppy, never that, just worn in a way rest could no longer fix.
Teddy met him at the bay line.
"Marshal."
"Captain."
The two men shook hands. It was a brief, functional gesture, less greeting than proof of transfer.
"You read the custody addendum?" Lee asked.
"Read it."
"Crew?"
"They know the lockout."
Lee looked toward Y/N, and then toward Shields, who stood near the cargo lift pretending not to be interested. "Procedures don't stop curious hands."
Y/N said nothing, which she felt was generous.
The security officers guided the pod toward the reinforced chamber. As it passed, cold from its independent system brushed Y/N's bare wrist, just a breath of it, enough to raise bumps along her skin. Inside that black shell, Jungkook Jeon slept.
Or maybe he did not.
That had been her first unhelpful thought, and she had disliked herself for it immediately. Sedation status had been confirmed. The medical telemetry was visible to custody systems, marshal systems, and ship systems with restricted crew access. There were fail-safes stacked on fail-safes. He was not awake simply because a story wanted him to be.
But the mind did not care about fail-safes. The mind saw a black pod and red lights and armed men, then filled the gaps.
Once the pod disappeared into the security section, the cargo bay grew loud again, though the noise sounded forced for several minutes. People joked too brightly. A loader cursed at a stuck pallet with theatrical enthusiasm. Shields vanished to navigation. Teddy checked the lockout twice. Y/N stood with the tablet and watched the weight distribution settle into an acceptable curve.
Routine, dispatch had said.
People who had never been in deep space thought empty space looked peaceful. Y/N had always found that sweet in a tragic sort of way. Empty space did not mean safe. Empty space meant the nearest help was far enough away that any distress signal you sent would arrive as an apology. Still, the numbers were clean. The vector was clean. The H-G's reactor thumped along beneath her like it expected to survive this, too.
Half a percent.
The figure glowed on the cargo compensation line in pale blue text. To corporate dispatch, half a percent was a rounding error, a crumb brushed from a table after richer people had eaten. To Y/N, it was another sliver of debt gone, another successful run, another inch toward options.
Options, if you stacked enough of them, could start to resemble freedom. That was the theory.
She wrapped one hand around her mug. The coffee inside tasted burnt, bitter, and faintly metallic, but she drank it anyway.
Twenty-eight weeks to New Mecca.
Most people hated voyages that long. The isolation got under their skin: the same corridors, the same recycled air, the same artificial lights pretending to know what morning was. Passengers in cryo slept through the whole miserable miracle, tucked away in cold blue dreams while the ship carried them like seeds through the dark. Crew did not. Crew lived in the gaps.
Y/N usually preferred the quiet. Tonight, the quiet gave her too much room to think.
Was it enough?
She had not trained her whole life to become a freight pilot. Freight pilots were necessary, skilled, underpaid, and routinely treated by corporations as replaceable equipment with opinions. But Y/N had been meant for colony work. Planetary adaptation. Surface biology. Atmospheric viability. Ecological assessment.
That work mattered. One overlooked spore, one harmless-looking vine with the wrong chemistry, one microorganism that treated water filtration membranes like food, and a colony could become a disaster with excellent paperwork. She had read reports like that. Everyone in her field had. The first pages were always so calm: survey conditions, initial findings, mitigation attempts. Only afterward came the dead, tucked into paragraphs with careful language, as if precision could make grief less obscene.
Y/N had been good at spotting those problems. Better than good. Yoongi Min used to say she read ecosystems the way navigators read star charts. She saw pressure, dependency, imbalance. She could look at a patch of alien moss under a field lens and tell whether the local biome was stable or quietly preparing to kill everyone through reproductive chemistry. It was useful work. Meaningful work.
Yoongi had appeared in her lab doorway looking like exhaustion had put on a uniform and asked her for help.
If he had pulled rank, she might have said no. Instead, he stood there with his sleeves rolled unevenly, his collar crooked, and his wife due any day, explaining that NOSA was short-staffed again. Khepri Outpost was desperate. The outer systems needed cargo capacity. Qualified pilots were locked into contracts, and the available ones were not people he trusted near a passenger transport.
"I need you on the Hunter Gratzner," he said. "Temporary."
Y/N should have known better. Temporary was how organizations pronounced forever when they were hoping you were too tired to notice. But Yoongi looked less like a director in that moment than a man being crushed slowly by too many responsibilities and not enough people willing to carry one, so she said yes.
One rotation, maybe two. A stopgap. By the time Starfire returned from deployment, NOSA would have someone trained. The colony mission waiting after that would need her. No team could legally establish contact without a certified flora and fauna specialist, and no one else aboard Starfire carried her full qualifications. The plan had been airtight. Plans often were, right up until they met actual events.
Now she sat alone inside the Hunter Gratzner, co-pilot on a better-paid route that had quietly eaten months of her life.
On paper, it made sense. Paper was good at that. Paper could make almost anything look reasonable if the margins were clean enough: better pay, cleaner contract, debt reduced by half a percent at a time, forward motion, progress.
But progress did not sit across from you in the mess during the dead hours between systems. Progress did not steal the last decent ration pack and leave a note that said for science. Progress did not argue about music at three in the morning, or know how you took your coffee, or recognize your footsteps in a corridor before you appeared. Progress did not keep loneliness away.
Y/N stared through the forward glass until the stars blurred.
Did I make a mistake?
The question had softened over time. It no longer arrived like a blade. Now it was more like a loose screw somewhere behind a panel: small, persistent, impossible to ignore once you heard it. She let it rattle. Some questions only got louder when you tried to fix them too soon.
Helion Prime came back to her whenever she was tired. White sun. White sky. Dunes rolling out in gold and bone. By day, the place had been heat, dust, cracked lips, and machinery too hot to touch. By night, it came alive with market lamps swinging in the wind, courtyard music, flatbread slapped onto hot stone, mechanics outside repair bays drinking tea sweet enough to reinforce hull plating, and children running barefoot beneath a sky crowded with stars.
Helion had been hard, but it had also been alive.
Her earliest memories of it were not clean memories. They were bright, fractured things: the sting of grit blown hard against her cheeks; Aunt Rose's hands smelling of cardamom and machine soap; Uncle Sean's laugh rising from beneath a half-dead rover; the white-hot shimmer of midday turning the whole world liquid at the edges. She remembered sleeping under a patched cooling unit that rattled like loose teeth and waking to the call of vendors in the lane outside. She remembered water ration tokens kept in a little blue tin above the stove, and how every adult in the settlement had a way of glancing at the sky when the wind shifted, as if weather were a debt collector coming up the road.
The colony had been poor in the way frontier places were poor: not empty, never empty, but always making do. A broken hinge became a handle. A cracked window became two smaller windows. Scrap became shelving, bracing, art if someone had enough time and softness left in them. Nobody threw away wire. Nobody wasted clean cloth. Children learned early that a cup of water was not a small thing and that shade belonged to whoever got there first unless someone older needed it more.
Y/N had hated parts of it with the purity only a child could manage. She hated sand in her bedding. She hated the way heat pressed down until every thought felt damp and slow. She hated that the wealthy districts near the corporate wells had misting arches outside cafes while her school rationed coolant and called it character-building. She hated the transport delays that kept medicine waiting in orbit because some paperwork clerk on Aguerra Prime had decided the right signature mattered more than a fever. But hatred was only one layer. Beneath it was the other thing, the thing she had not been able to name until she left.
Belonging.
Helion belonged to itself first, and if you wanted to survive there, you learned humility. Plants grew low and silver-leaved, hugging rock for shade, storing water in swollen stems protected by bitter skins. Burrowing insects built tunnels that could survive flash floods and drought in the same season. Night flowers opened only in the hour before dawn, pale as bone, their scent so sweet and sudden it made the air feel haunted. Every living thing had a strategy. Every living thing had made a bargain.
Y/N used to sneak beyond the western fence with a cracked field lens and a notebook too big for her hands. Aunt Rose pretended not to know as long as Y/N stayed within sight of the old pump tower. Sean pretended not to know because Sean believed some rules existed mainly to give responsible people the pleasure of ignoring them.
She would crouch in the sand until her knees ached, watching tiny lives conduct their business: a beetle carrying a seed husk twice its size, a root hair creeping along the underside of stone, a thread of fungus glowing faintly green in a crack where condensation gathered after sunset. Adults looked at the desert and saw lack. Y/N looked closer and saw negotiation. Helion was not dead. Helion was careful.
That was where she first learned to love systems. Plants made sense to her. They wanted light, water, nutrients, stability. Deny them, and they adapted or died. Roots found cracks. Seeds waited out drought. Survival had patterns.
People told stories about survival as if endurance were noble by itself. Y/N had never entirely believed that. Endurance could be ugly; endurance could turn people mean. But adaptation fascinated her, the quiet intelligence of a thing changing shape because the world demanded it, the stubbornness of life insisting on a way.
Flight came later. Uncle Sean put her in the pilot's chair of his old freighter when she was all elbows, knees, and terror. His hands rested over hers on the controls, broad and scarred from decades of mechanical work.
"Easy," he said. "Ship tells you what she wants."
She overcorrected a landing thruster and sent the freighter wobbling sideways. Sean laughed so hard he nearly spilled coffee into the auxiliary trim panel.
"You'll get out, kid," he said.
Y/N had been too busy trying not to kill them both to appreciate the sentiment. "Someplace with less sand, maybe."
"That's the dream."
The ground fell away. Helion shrank beneath them. The horizon curved. The sky deepened from white to blue to black, and something tight in Y/N's chest loosened. It was not freedom, not exactly. Even then, she knew freedom was a word adults used when they wanted children to stop asking about money. Fuel cost. Training cost. Docking cost. Licenses cost. The sky was not free just because it was big.
But for those first minutes above Helion, with Sean's hands hovering near hers and his old freighter rattling like a toolbox kicked down a stairwell, Y/N felt space open in her mind. The settlement became a pattern instead of a cage. Roads became lines. Dunes became movement. The well district, the market, the repair yards, the school with its sun-faded roof, the little house where Aunt Rose grew herbs in recycled nutrient foam: all of it shrank until the boundaries that had felt permanent became visible, and therefore temporary.
Sean watched her watching. "Forward, Fry."
Flight school gave that feeling discipline. It taught her that fear was data, not an order. Most cadets learned procedures. Y/N learned ships.
Jimin Park learned people.
That was one of the first things she noticed about him. He had an easy smile, yes, but the important thing was how he listened. They studied together, survived bad cafeteria food, worse coffee, and the shared delusion that exhaustion counted as personality. Both orphans. Both carrying grief so long it had become posture. They never needed to define what they were to each other. It simply arrived, set down its bags, and stayed.
Jimin had a habit of knocking twice on any doorway before entering, even if the door was already open: tap-tap, soft and quick, like punctuation. He folded napkins into precise squares when he was nervous. He apologized to maintenance drones when they bumped his ankles. He could charm a registrar into extending a deadline and spend the next hour feeling guilty about it. He was beautiful in the easy way that made strangers kind to him, and careful in the harder way that made friends stay.
The first week of flight school, Y/N found him sitting alone outside the simulator bay with his head tipped back against the wall and his eyes closed. She thought he was asleep until he said, "If you came to tell me I look dead, take a number."
"I came to say you're late."
His eyes opened. He looked at her for a moment and smiled. "Well. Fuck."
He had failed docking sim three times that morning, not because he lacked skill, but because the instructor had stood behind him breathing disapproval down his neck until Jimin's hands forgot they belonged to him. Y/N sat beside him without asking and offered half a ration bar.
"This tastes like floor padding," he said after one bite.
The following day, he brought her coffee so strong it made her see slightly into the future. From there, they were inseparable.
They studied in laundry rooms because the common areas were too loud. They shared notes, insults, spare socks, contraband spice packets, and the deep, humiliating fear that everyone else knew something they did not. When Y/N got angry, Jimin let her burn down until words became possible. When Jimin went quiet, Y/N sat close enough that he could reach for company without having to ask. It was not romance. Romance would have been simpler, and probably less durable. They became each other's emergency contact before either of them admitted aloud that was what had happened.
Sean called him nephew first. After that, it stuck.
When NOSA tried to shut Y/N out, Jimin was the first person who did not pretend the problem was procedural. "They're not passing because you lack the work," he said. "They're passing because they're cowards. I'll talk to Min."
"Not your fight."
"I know." Jimin leaned against the corridor wall, arms folded, looking at her with that maddening gentleness of his. "I'm doing it anyway."
He made noise. Uma Petrov, his girlfriend with deep pockets and an old money family, helped. Doors opened. Three days later, Y/N interviewed with Yoongi Min. She expected polite disappointment; by that point, she had a whole internal filing system for it. Instead, Yoongi read her file and saw what other administrators had missed.
She left with a contract. That was how she became Starfire crew.
Jimin. Armin. Hoseok. Val. Loud, irritating, loyal people who turned recycled air and long deployments into something like a life. Family, in the only version of the word that had ever made sense to her.
Starfire had been chaos with a hull. Armin labeled everything and still lost his own tools twice a week. Hoseok sang during diagnostics in a voice too good for the lyrics he chose and too loud for confined spaces. Val treated every mission briefing like a hostile negotiation and every injured crew member like a personal insult. Jimin made peace, made tea, and made everyone admit they had been idiots in a tone so gentle they thanked him for it.
Y/N had not known a ship could feel crowded in a good way. Starfire corridors were always full of someone's footsteps, someone's laughter, someone complaining about the scrubber filters or the shower timer or the fact that Hoseok had once again eaten the thing clearly labeled DO NOT EAT unless he wanted to spend the afternoon as a medical example. There were arguments, of course. Real ones. Ugly ones sometimes. People locked together by duty and metal developed sharp edges. But the anger usually had somewhere to go: a joke, a door slammed and opened later, an apology muttered into a coffee cup.
On Starfire, Y/N had been necessary in a way that fed some quiet hungry part of her. She knew the work, and the work knew her back. She could walk into a survey briefing and feel the room shift because people expected her to see what they missed. She liked that. She liked it more than she liked admitting.
The Hunter Gratzner took her in, and the H-G had room enough for loneliness to stretch its legs.
There were no late-night arguments over music in the galley. No one stole her socks. No one left field samples in the wrong refrigerator and tried to defend it as an experiment in morale. Teddy was kind, but he was captain first, always. Shields was Shields. Passengers were sleeping cargo with pulse rates. The ship had a heartbeat, yes, but it did not laugh.
Sometimes Y/N missed Starfire so fiercely it came out as irritation. She would snap at a minor fault, curse at a stuck hatch, spend twenty minutes reorganizing a supply drawer that did not need reorganizing, and only afterward realize she had been waiting for someone to lean around the corner and say, Fry, who are you threatening in there?
Nobody did.
The H-G had two other crew members, and Captain Theodore Marshall was one of them.
Everyone called him Teddy, which seemed at first like calling a bulkhead Fluffy. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and built with the practical solidity of someone who had spent decades moving through ships, lifting equipment, crawling through maintenance shafts, and occasionally convincing gravity to mind its manners. His beard had silver through it, and his brown eyes were steady in a way that made panic feel impolite. Y/N liked him almost immediately, which made her suspicious.
Teddy carried authority lightly. He did not bark unless barking would help, and it almost never did. He asked clear questions, listened to the answers, and had the rare command talent of making people want to meet expectations instead of merely avoiding consequences. He had come out of Strikeforce with medals, combat hours, and the careful silence of a man who had encountered ugliness no ceremony could fix. He did not talk much about those years. He did not need to. The shape of them was there in what he noticed, what he tolerated, and what he never let spill onto people who had not earned it.
At forty-eight, he had married Dwayne, a veterinarian with enormous glasses, soft eyes, and an apparent inability to let any injured animal remain unrescued. The first time Teddy mentioned home, Y/N asked, "How many cats, Marshall?"
Teddy sighed into his coffee. "Now? Seven."
"That seems excessive," Y/N said, grinning.
"One's missing a leg. Call it six and change."
Y/N laughed hard enough that coffee tried to escape through her nose. Teddy looked deeply satisfied, which was somehow worse. He showed her pictures anyway: Dwayne smiling faintly from behind his glasses while orange cats occupied every visible surface, one on top of a refrigerator, another draped across Dwayne's shoulders like a scarf. Teddy, decorated squadron leader and captain of a long-haul transport vessel, went home to a gentle man and a house ruled by rescued cats. It made Y/N trust him more.
Trust with Teddy had not arrived all at once. It had come in pieces, as trustworthy things usually did. The first piece came on her second run aboard the H-G, when a passenger from the mining decks decided that co-pilot meant decorative assistant and cornered Y/N near the water dispenser to explain thrust ratios to her using three wrong terms and the confidence of a man who had never been corrected by a woman he considered fully human. Y/N had been two seconds away from making a career-limiting remark when Teddy appeared behind the man with a mug in one hand and his captain's face on.
"Ivers," Teddy said mildly, "you flying my ship now?"
The man turned red. "No, Captain. Just talking."
"Good. You know enough to teach her, you know enough to take a watch. We're short-handed."
The man laughed, uncertain. Teddy did not.
"Walk away," he said.
After Ivers retreated, Y/N folded her arms. "I had him."
"I know."
"Why step in?"
Teddy sipped his coffee. "Wanted him to see who was watching."
That was the first piece.
Another came during a coolant alarm three weeks later, when Y/N made a bad call. Not catastrophic, not even particularly rare, but bad. She had trusted a pressure reading that turned out to be lagging by four seconds, and the correction cost them forty minutes and a full system flush. She expected Teddy to dress her down in the small, neat way captains did when they wanted disappointment to leave bruises without witnesses. Instead, he sat beside her in the maintenance bay, handed her a sealed water pouch, and said, "Talk it through."
So she did. She explained what she had seen, what she had assumed, and why the assumption had been wrong. He listened without interrupting. When she finished, he nodded.
"All right," he said. "Good chain. Bad link. Now you know where it broke."
"That all?"
"You need yelling?"
"No."
"Don't ask for it."
He left her with that, and somehow it stung more usefully than anger would have.
The piece after that was Dwayne. Not Dwayne himself, who existed mostly in photos, messages, and Teddy's rare unguarded smiles, but the fact that Teddy spoke of him without apology. Some people carried love like contraband. Teddy carried it like weather: private, ordinary, impossible to hide if you paid attention. He checked messages from home with his thumb resting unconsciously over the screen. He saved the best coffee for calls that crossed time lag badly. Once, Y/N had walked into the galley and found him watching a fifteen-second clip of Dwayne trying to give medicine to a deeply offended three-legged cat.
Teddy looked up, expression blank. Y/N looked at the screen. The cat knocked over a lamp.
"Classified," Teddy said.
"Clearly," Y/N said.
After that, trust stopped being something she evaluated and became something she used.
The third crew member was Gregory Shields. Y/N despised him.
She had tried not to, briefly, professionally, with paperwork-level commitment. Shields was an excellent navigator, which was irritating because it meant he could not be dismissed as decorative waste. He was tall and narrow, all sharp angles and restless limbs, with pale blue-gray eyes that rarely stayed on anything for long. Up close, he always looked half-starved and over-caffeinated. His utility jumpsuit hung wrinkled from narrow shoulders, his collar was usually unzipped, and his navigator's patch was creased like he had slept in it out of spite.
Technically, he was very good, which almost made him worse. Competence had become his excuse to be cruel. He carried entitlement visibly, carelessly, with the unspoken assumption that everyone nearby should make room for it. But there were cracks in him too: a tremor in one hand he tried to hide, bruised shadows under his eyes, a tightness in his jaw that never fully left. The workplace accident that had grounded him for nearly two years had done more than interrupt his career. Whatever had happened had left him angry, humiliated, and determined to make that everyone else's problem.
Koah used to fill rooms with warmth. Shields filled them with tension.
The worst part was that Y/N could imagine another version of him. Not a good version, necessarily; she was not generous enough to invent sainthood for a man who seemed to treat basic courtesy as a medical allergy. But she could see the outline of someone who might once have been funny in a way that did not draw blood. Someone sharp and quick, good at math, good under pressure, maybe even charming if you caught him before whatever had happened to him curdled into his bones. There were moments when he reached for humor and missed because his hand had learned cruelty first. Moments when he corrected a trajectory with effortless grace and looked almost peaceful for half a second before remembering the world had wronged him and he meant to stay loyal to the injury.
Y/N had read the official file because she was NOSA crew and because curiosity was one of her less charming survival traits. Workplace accident, the report said. Mechanical lift failure. Crush injuries. Neurological complications. Two years restricted duty. Cleared for navigation with recurring tremor under stress. Counseling recommended. Follow-up compliance incomplete.
Incomplete. Another paperwork word trying not to look at blood.
There were gaps big enough to walk through. No details about who had been at fault. No notes on whether he had sued, settled, or been quietly paid to go away. No mention of what it did to a navigator to lose his body's obedience for two years and get it back with conditions attached. She could guess. She was good at systems, and people were systems, however badly maintained. Take a man who built his worth on precision. Break his hands. Make him wait while younger, healthier people take the routes he wanted. Give him doctors who talk over him, administrators who call him a liability, colleagues who look away from the tremor. Hand him back a console and tell him to be grateful. It explained things. It did not excuse them.
Y/N had sympathy available somewhere, probably. It was just buried under a growing pile of reasons to keep her distance.
Shields had a way of finding soft spots. Not always accurately; sometimes he swung at shadows and hit nothing. But when he struck true, he knew it. He watched for the blink, the pause, the tiny breath that meant he had found a nerve. Once he found it, he pressed. It was ugly and efficient, a defense mechanism sharpened into a hobby.
The first time he called her Fry, she looked up so fast his smile widened.
"What?" he said. "That's your name, right?"
"Not from you."
"Private club?"
"Closed membership."
"Cute."
She walked away because Teddy was in the room and because throwing a navigator through a mess table created paperwork. Since then, Shields had used the name sparingly. That was how she knew he understood its value. He did not waste ammunition. He saved it for moments when he wanted to remind her that nothing she loved was safe from being mishandled by strangers.
Y/N was staring through the viewport, coffee cooling untouched in her hand, when he stepped onto the bridge.
"Passengers are down," Shields said.
He had a gift for making neutral statements sound like accusations. If he ever said oxygen nominal, Y/N suspected the oxygen would feel judged.
She did not turn around. Her eyes stayed on the navigation display. "Coords locked?"
"Getting there."
His chair complained as he dropped into it. A sequence of soft chimes followed, clean and efficient, and the coordinates populated on her secondary screen. He had done the work correctly, of course. Shields's flaws were many and aggressive, but incompetence was not one of them.
For one beautiful second, that could have been the end of the interaction.
Then Shields opened his mouth. "Don't rush me, Fry."
Uncle Sean used to shout Fry across the docks with grease on his hands and pride in his voice. Everyone she knew called her that, and it was one of the only nicknames she'd ever had growing up. The way Shields said it made it sound like an insult and stripped away all of her good feelings toward the word.
Y/N kept her hands steady. "Coords are set."
"I can read." He glanced at the console and smirked.
She looked out at the stars.
"Bitch," he muttered.
Her hands stopped moving. Y/N turned her head slowly.
"You've got your numbers," she said. Her voice was level, which was how people who knew her could tell the day had become dangerous. "Lock them and get off my bridge."
Shields leaned back in the co-pilot's chair and folded his arms behind his head, performing boredom with the dedication of a mediocre stage actor. Console light carved hollows beneath his cheekbones. His fingers tapped the armrest.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Always moving. Even at rest, Shields leaked motion. His eyes flicked toward her and away again. He liked making people react. He did not like holding their gaze once they did.
"Not your bridge."
"No. I fly it. That matters more." His mouth twitched. "So unless you want Teddy asking why his nav is pissing on the deck, move."
The tapping stopped. That had landed.
Shields rose slowly, all height and angles, restless energy trapped under skin. One hand trembled before he shoved it into his pocket. The motion was practiced; he had been hiding that tremor a long time.
"Always so hostile?"
"Eat shit, Shields." Y/N tipped her head back and raised her voice. "Marshall!"
His jaw clenched. "Fucking rat," he said with a thin laugh. "You got a famous attitude problem."
She turned fully toward him. Blue cockpit light cut across her face. "You don't know me."
"Enough. Everybody knows enough."
There it was. That little hook. The implication that he had heard things, that the past had been passed around in rooms where she was not present, that her life had become a convenient object for other people's speculation. Her expression cooled.
"Say what you mean."
Shields rubbed the side of his neck, quick and unconscious. "Means NOSA talks, Fry. Your name travels."
"You've got five seconds to decide how bad you want this."
"You think I scare easy?"
"No. I think you're an attention seeker and won't leave me the fuck alone."
His jaw tightened hard enough to show muscle under the skin. His fingers resumed tapping against his thigh.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
"You think highly of yourself."
"No. Just low of you."
For a second, there was only the ship. The H-G's reactor pulse moved beneath them, steady and indifferent. It would not intervene. Machines rarely did. They simply kept working until people broke them.
Shields looked at her directly now. The exhaustion in him was impossible to ignore at this distance: dark circles bruising the skin beneath his eyes, pupils too bright, the faint smell of stale coffee, antiseptic cream, recycled air, and anger old enough to have settled into him permanently.
"Know your problem?" he asked.
"I'm sure you're dying to tell me."
"You walk around like you're better than everyone."
"No," she said. "Just you."
His nostrils flared. There it was, a fracture under the polish. Greg Shields was not weak, and he was not stupid, which would have made him easier to dismiss. He was damaged and furious and too proud to admit either. Y/N did not know what had happened during those grounded years, but whatever it was had left him with a body he resented and a temper he fed like proof he was still in control.
He opened his mouth.
"Greg."
The voice came from the hatch. Y/N glanced over.
Captain Theodore Marshall stood in the doorway with one hand resting against the frame, looking from Shields to Y/N with the weary patience of a man who had walked into too many rooms one sentence before disaster. He did not need to loom. He simply occupied space with quiet authority. Corridor light caught the silver in his beard and the faint scars along his square jaw. His brown eyes settled on Shields and stayed there.
Shields changed immediately. The smirk vanished. His shoulders tightened. One hand moved toward the back of his neck, only to drop again.
"Captain."
Teddy's gaze did not move. "Heard my name."
Y/N leaned against the console and folded her arms. "Good. Saves me yelling."
Shields shot her a look.
"Problem?" Teddy asked.
His voice was deep and calm. It had the kind of weight that made volume unnecessary. Y/N had once heard him talk a dockworker through a coolant leak without raising his tone. By the end, the dockworker had stopped hyperventilating, the leak was isolated, and Teddy had somehow made good job sound like a medal.
Shields swallowed whatever he had been about to say. "No."
Teddy let the answer sit there until it began to sweat. "Good," he said. "Lock your coords and go eat."
Y/N snorted before she could stop herself.
Shields's pale eyes flicked toward her, sharp with resentment, and away. He leaned over the console, completed the final lock sequence, and stood.
"Coords locked," he said.
"Thank you," Teddy said.
Shields left the bridge with his shoulders high and his hands shoved deep into his pockets. The hatch sighed shut behind him, and for a moment Teddy and Y/N listened to the ship.
Teddy turned his head. "You leaking?"
"Inside or out?"
"Out is my job."
"Then no."
"Good." He stepped farther onto the bridge and rested one hand on the back of Shields's vacated chair. "He start?"
"Captain's supposed to ask that in a more professional manner."
"I know Greg."
Y/N looked back at the forward glass. The stars had sharpened again. "He called me a bitch."
Teddy's mouth became a flat line. "I'll handle it."
"Leave it."
"Wasn't a request."
She exhaled through her nose. "He's wound tight. Probably just stressed."
"He's nav. Chair, screen, math. He's got the easiest job here."
"Be nice."
He gave her a look.
"Fine," she said. "Be a captain."
"That I can do." He glanced at the console. "Anything before cryo?"
She brought up the scan packet with two quick touches. "Passive caught something outer cluster. Quick flash. Same coords twice. Another pass showed movement, not enough to name."
Teddy leaned in, his expression shifting from irritated captain to working captain. The difference was subtle but complete.
"Thermal?"
"No."
"Vector?"
"None."
He studied the readout. "Junk?"
"Maybe."
Teddy glanced at her. Y/N hated that word, and he knew it.
"I widened passive," she said. "Dropped the thresholds. Flagged the cluster. It comes back, we hear it."
"Good."
"Shields will bitch."
"That his hobby now?"
Y/N smiled despite herself. Teddy straightened.
"Send the packet. I'll look before I go under."
"Already did."
"Course you did."
There was affection in it, and that made something in her chest ache with an inconvenient tenderness.
Teddy saw too much, but he did not always say what he saw. That was one of the reasons she could stand him. Some people treated perception like ownership, as if noticing your pain entitled them to handle it. Teddy noticed and waited. He opened a door without pushing her through it. The restraint was so rare it felt almost luxurious.
He knew she hated cryo. He knew she hated the helplessness of it, the surrender, the way you gave your body to machines and trusted you would come back on schedule instead of becoming another blue-lit shape behind frosted glass. He knew without being told that her jokes got sharper before long sleep and that she checked systems twice as often as necessary because fear needed somewhere to put its hands.
"Cryo audit?" he asked.
"Twice."
"Bad news?"
"Bay three humidity sensor is faulty. Rest is green."
"Passengers?"
"Stable. Row C family tried to take a plant cutting into cryo."
Teddy closed his eyes. "Again?"
"Different family. Same bad idea."
"Toxic?"
"Fern. Mild skin irritant."
"You took it?"
"Thinking of keeping it."
Teddy made a low sound that might have been a laugh. "Don't rob the sleepers."
"Joke," she said, rolling her eyes. "I've got enough plants."
The exchange settled something in her. Not all of it, and not enough, but enough to make the bridge feel less like a confession booth and more like a place where two people could stand beside the same unease without naming it too loudly.
The comm clicked off the scan review channel. Teddy started toward the hatch, then paused.
"Food in twenty."
"Food?"
He looked offended. "I cooked."
Y/N turned slowly. "You?"
"Try not to sound excited," He pointed at her. "Twenty."
He left.
Y/N sat for another moment, watching the empty scan and the flagged coordinates glowing in a small amber box on the edge of the display. Probably nothing.
Still, she sent the note to Teddy again with an added marker, locked the monitor to alert on recurrence, and stood. Hours at the controls had turned her shoulders stiff and her neck sore. She grabbed her mug, considered the cold synth-coffee inside, and decided she still had some survival instinct left, then left it on the console.
Before leaving, she did what pilots did when they were pretending not to worry: she checked everything again. Not the full formal sequence; that had already been logged, verified, witnessed, and blessed by the proper bureaucratic spirits. This was a private check, the kind never listed in procedure manuals because official documents disliked admitting how much of safe travel depended on obsession. She ran her eyes over power distribution, reactor stability, thermal load, cryo bay environmental draw, navigation lock, autopilot authority transfer, collision avoidance, passive scan sensitivity, and the flagged anomaly.
Nothing had changed. That should have comforted her. Instead, it made the bridge feel like a room holding its breath.
She tapped the scan marker and enlarged the packet. Sparse data, nothing more. A ghost of motion. A suggestion in the machine's peripheral vision. Coordinates that meant very little by themselves and too much because they had appeared twice. She watched the playback at half speed, then quarter speed, as if slowness could reveal intention.
Point cluster. Fade. Correction wash. Empty field.
Again.
Point cluster. Fade. Correction wash. Empty field.
"What are you?" she whispered.
The display did not know. The display only showed what it had seen, and what it had seen was almost nothing.
Y/N closed the packet. On the far right console, the passenger cryo summary scrolled by: one hundred twenty-nine civilians sealed and stable, crew pending, custody transport sealed, marshal sealed, no medical exceptions, no active distress. The numbers were orderly enough to look merciful.
She thought of the child with the fabric moon, the couple touching palms through glass, the teacher and her physical books, the man with his sister's ashes. People trusted ships because they had to. They walked up gangways with their bags and their private griefs, handed their bodies over to systems they did not understand, and expected crew to be worthy of that trust.
Y/N had always felt the weight of it more keenly before cryo. During waking flight, responsibility had movement: alarms, corrections, voices, hands on controls. Under long-haul sleep, responsibility became faith. You set the watch and surrendered to it. She hated that.
She placed one hand flat on the console. "Stay good," she told the H-G.
The old ship hummed under her palm, offering no promises beyond the one it was already keeping.
The bridge hatch opened with a soft hydraulic breath. The corridor beyond glowed amber for cryocycle transition, and the H-G always changed before long-haul sleep. Lighting softened. Environmental systems lowered their circulation noise. Doors slowed by half a second, as if the ship itself were trying not to disturb the passengers it had already tucked into cryo.
Voices got quieter before cryo. Footsteps softened. Even arguments lost some of their teeth. There was something about knowing you were about to surrender consciousness beside strangers for half a year that made people temporarily decent. Not good, necessarily, but decent enough.
As she walked, the ship made its own preparations around her. Cargo locks cycled into long-duration hold with dull magnetic clunks. Fire suppression systems shifted into sealed compartment mode. Access panels blinked from green to blue as nonessential corridors closed themselves to preserve heat and power. The H-G was folding in, becoming smaller and more self-contained, like an animal curling around its vulnerable parts.
Y/N passed the observation nook on deck two and stopped without meaning to. It was a useless little space, hardly more than a window and two fold-down seats, installed decades ago when some designer had believed civilian passengers might want to look at the stars before deciding whether to vomit. Most people ignored it. The glass was scuffed. One of the seats jammed halfway unless pulled at an angle. Someone had scratched initials into the wall, and someone else had carefully scratched them out. Still, the nook had a view.
The stars burned cold beyond the hull, and Y/N stood there with one hand on the wall and let herself look.
There was a kind of courage in admitting beauty, even when beauty did not care about you. Maybe especially then. The universe outside was vast past comprehension, indifferent past cruelty, and still beautiful enough to make her throat tighten. Helion's sky had been crowded with stars, but atmosphere softened them. Out here, they were hard and ancient and mercilessly clear.
Somewhere ahead was New Mecca. Refuel. Inspection. Three days of weather. Pistachio bread if the market stalls still opened early. Maybe a call to Aunt Rose and Sean, delayed but worth it. Maybe a message waiting from Jimin, full of jokes and omissions, because he never said I miss you directly when the distance was bad. He would say something like Hoseok broke the kettle and morale has collapsed, which meant the same thing if you knew how to read it.
Y/N walked on with one hand trailing along the wall. Engine vibration came through the metal under her palm, steady and familiar. Behind the panels, filtered air carried the faint smells of antiseptic, warm dust, machinery, medical gel, and the chemical cold of cryo prep.
The smell of garlic cut through all of it.
Y/N stopped dead in the corridor. Real garlic sizzling in oil, sharp and warm, threaded with roasted vegetables, yeast, tomato, pepper, and something rich underneath it. Her stomach made an immediate and embarrassing decision.
"Teddy," she called toward the canteen doors, "what the hell is that smell?"
His voice drifted back, deeply pleased with itself. "Walk in and learn something."
The canteen doors slid open. Gold light washed over scratched metal tables, steam curled above the galley counters, and actual food crowded the prep space instead of nutrient bricks wearing morale labels. For a second, Y/N simply stood there, as if she had walked into the wrong ship by accident.
The H-G's canteen had never been designed for beauty. It was a narrow, practical room wedged between storage and the secondary access corridor, built by engineers whose idea of comfort seemed to be surfaces that could be wiped clean after a spill or a medical emergency. The tables were bolted down. The benches folded into the wall. The overhead lights had two settings: interrogation and mild headache. Someone years ago had tried to make the place cheerful by sticking a faded mural of a blue ocean along one wall, but the adhesive had bubbled in three places and the ocean now looked diseased.
Tonight, somehow, Teddy had made the room human.
He had lowered the lights and clipped two small utility lamps above the prep counter, their warm glow turning the steam gold. He had put a clean cloth over the crooked table, which did not hide the table's crookedness but suggested optimism. Three real plates sat waiting instead of disposable trays. Three mismatched cups. A little dish of grated hard cheese that must have cost someone a favor. A chipped bowl full of chopped herbs.
"Damn, Ted," she said.
Theodore Marshall stood by the stove with the sleeves of his dark undershirt rolled to his elbows. His forearms were scarred, strong, and dusted lightly with flour. An apron hung crooked across his broad chest. It said KISS THE COOK in faded, peeling letters.
Y/N stared at the apron, then at him, then back at the apron. "Give me a second," she said. "My head's not buying this."
Teddy looked down at himself, deadpan. "Gift."
"Dwayne?"
"Who else?"
"He know you let people see that?"
"Ship's mine."
At the nearest table, Gregory Shields sat slouched over a basket of bread rolls like a man defending territory. He was halfway through one already, pale eyes flicking toward Y/N before sliding away. Under the warmer canteen lights, he looked worse than he had on the bridge. His skin was pale over sharp cheekbones. Bruised shadows sat under his eyes. Silver had started threading through the hair near his temples, though he could not have been much past his mid-thirties. His jumpsuit hung loose on his narrow frame, one sleeve shoved up to his elbow, and his fingers tapped against the tabletop between bites.
Tap, tap, tap.
"Marshall cooks like a station wife," Shields muttered around bread.
Teddy pointed a wooden spoon at him. "That's four."
"Prove it.
"I counted."
Y/N dropped into the chair across from Shields. "Might be five. Fear makes a man hungry."
"Fuck off, Y/L/N."
The insult came automatically, but the heat was missing. More reflex than attack. Y/N noticed Teddy noticing her noticing, and Teddy gave one small shake of his head.
Y/N let it go, which was maturity, and she hated it. Instead, she leaned back and gestured at the galley counter. "Who'd you rob for all this?"
Teddy spread his arms with theatrical pride. "Told NOSA I had a vetted Nexus asset aboard. Your people make clerks move fast."
Y/N groaned. "We eat the same brick food everyone else does."
"Better bricks," Shields said.
Y/N looked at him. "Try again."
"Nexus gets vegetables."
"I've had radishes and potatoes."
"Exactly." Shields lifted his roll like evidence. "You people live soft."
"Shields," Teddy said. Shields froze mid-chew. Teddy's expression stayed calm, but his eyes had hardened. "You want to get a counseling before cryo?"
Shields swallowed. "No, Captain."
"Smart."
For a second, the canteen held still. Then Teddy turned back to Y/N, controlled again. "You eating or talking?"
Y/N raised both hands. "Eating."
"Thought so."
He returned to the stove, and Y/N watched him move around the cramped galley with surprising grace for a man his size. Teddy knew exactly where every edge and handle was. He stirred sauce, checked bread, shifted a pan off heat, and made the space feel less cramped instead of more.
The smell was unfair: garlic in oil, roasted peppers, basil, tomato cooked down until it had gone deep and sweet, thick bread brushed with butter and herbs, vegetables browned at the edges under steam.
"How do you cook like this?" Y/N asked.
"Old family thing."
Shields snorted into his bread. "He says a family recipe. I don't believe him."
Y/N laughed before she could stop herself, and the sound surprised her.
For the first time in weeks, the canteen did not feel temporary. Teddy filled bowls with pasta and sauce, added roasted vegetables, and shoved bread at them with the silent authority of a man who believed feeding people was a duty and also a practical way to make them shut up. Y/N took one bite and closed her eyes.
"Pretty good, Cap."
Teddy grinned.
For a while, eating took precedence over dignity. Y/N had forgotten what texture could do to morale. The pasta had bite. The sauce had depth. The vegetables tasted like they had come from soil instead of a corporate nutrient cartridge programmed by someone who had once read about flavor in a training document. Her body, which had spent weeks accepting fuel as a professional obligation, reacted with embarrassing gratitude.
Teddy watched them with the quiet satisfaction of a man pretending not to watch. He tore bread in half, used it to mop sauce from the edge of his plate, and kept glancing between Y/N and Shields as if taking inventory of a storm system. Shields noticed, because of course he did.
"Stop looking," he said.
Teddy chewed slowly. "Like what?"
"Like I'm about to drop."
"Are you?"
"No."
"Then I'm not worried."
Y/N lifted her fork. "He's got you."
Shields pointed at her with bread. "Don't help him."
Teddy leaned back, some of the hardness easing from his shoulders. "Last night awake."
The sentence quieted them in a way none of his command voice could have. People said it casually because the alternative was thinking about it. Cryosleep was routine, safe, regulated to the point of suffocation. Millions of passengers crossed systems in cold sleep every year and woke with headaches, nausea, and no memory of the months they had lost. But the phrase still had teeth if you let it. Last night awake. Last meal. Last conversation before lowering yourself into a machine that would slow your heart and cool your blood and place your life in the hands of software, metal, and statistics.
Shields stabbed a piece of pasta. "You making this sentimental?"
"Sentiment scare you, Greg?"
Y/N laughed into her cup. Shields glared, but it was unfocused, his attention already slipping toward whatever waited behind his eyes. He rolled his shoulder once, as if trying to settle a pain under the joint. His left hand disappeared under the table. When it came back, it was steady.
Y/N looked at Teddy without meaning to, and knew that he noticed that same thing.
For a moment, all the warmth in the room became something laid over a colder shape. Shields ate like he was trying to outrun a thought, shoulders tight, attention flicking from the corridor to his plate and back again. He drank water in quick, hard swallows, and a faint tremor ran through his hand when he reached for his fork.
Y/N tried not to watch. Trying not to watch made her watch harder.
Teddy leaned back with a beer in one hand. "Twenty-four weeks cold."
"Twenty-four weeks not listening to you people," Shields muttered.
"You say that now," Y/N said. "Wait till cryo spits you out, old man."
Teddy barked a laugh. Shields rolled his eyes, but the corner of his mouth twitched. It vanished almost immediately, like he had caught it doing something unauthorized.
"Two days after wakeup until New Mecca," Teddy said. "If nothing breaks."
Y/N pointed her fork at him. "Don't say that."
"Frenchie, ship goes up, you won't have time to care."
"Passive caught something," Y/N said. "Quick flash. Same cluster twice. Another pass showed movement, not enough to name. Packet's yours."
Shields leaned back, and the tapping stopped. "Likely junk."
Shields made a quiet sound. "That'll scream at dust."
Y/N looked at him. "Would rather that then get hit by something.”
For once, Shields did not insult her. He looked down at his plate instead, jaw working slightly.
"Seen a debris hit?" he asked.
The question came out low, almost unwillingly. Y/N glanced at him. "In person? No. Only in the training sims.”
"So no."
She set down her fork. "That mean something?"
Shields pushed a piece of bread through sauce without eating it. "Sims don’t teach you jack shit.”
Teddy's eyes remained on him. "Greg."
Shields's mouth tightened. For a second, he looked prepared to snap, but then he dropped his gaze to his plate. "Saw one off Meridian."
Y/N did not move. Shields rarely volunteered anything real. When he did, it felt less like a door opening than a crack appearing in ice.
"Small hauler," he said. "Unregistered salvage route. Cut a dead zone to save fuel. Caught a shard off an old defense platform. Bigger than my hand? Maybe not. At speed, it opened crew deck like ration tin."
The canteen seemed to contract around his words. The steam, the warm lights, the smell of garlic, all of it suddenly felt fragile and far away.
"We heard them for eight minutes," Shields said. "Couldn't reach them."
His fingers tapped once against the table.
Tap.
"So yeah," he said. "Likely junk.”
Y/N's dislike of him did not soften exactly. It shifted, which was more irritating. "I flagged it."
"I’ll take another look at the navs before we sleep,” Greg said. “Just in case.”
Teddy looked between them, expression unreadable. For a brief, strange moment, they were not enemies. Not friends either. Just three people inside a metal shell moving very fast through a universe that did not care how sharp their tongues were.
Shields reached for another roll.
Y/N said, "That's five."
"Go to hell."
The moment passed.
Teddy picked up his beer again, but he did not drink. "I'll look before cryo."
The conversation moved on, not because the anomaly stopped mattering, but because there was nothing else to do with it yet. Long-haul crews were good at that. You named the problem, put it where everyone could see it, and kept eating.
New Mecca came up because it always did before New Mecca runs, and Y/N felt the first real warmth of anticipation. Three days planetside waited at the other end of the route while the H-G refueled, underwent inspection, and took on another batch of civilians for the return to Aguerra Prime. Three days of air that had touched weather. Three days of sunlight not filtered through glass.
"What?" Teddy asked.
Y/N smiled into her bowl. "Been a while since I went back home."
"Your uncle still there?"
She shook her head. "No. He and Rose moved to AP after NOSA took me. Said they weren't waiting years between looks at me."
The memory softened her before she could stop it. Sean had complained through the entire move while refusing help because no one else knew how to pack tools correctly. Aunt Rose had ignored him with the calm of a woman who had survived both desert heat and marriage.
"Helion's good this time of year," Y/N said. "Cooler by the coast. Markets stay open late. Tea place near west docks makes pistachio bread at dawn. Dockworkers strip it clean if you're slow."
Teddy smiled. "Sounds decent."
"It is."
Shields rubbed the side of his neck and reached for another piece of bread.
For a while, the conversation became easy in the way shipboard conversations sometimes did right before everyone disappeared into cryo. They talked about docking delays, bad passengers, worse station food, and the moral failure of galley coffee on older transports. Teddy carried most of it. He had a gift for keeping silence from getting too large.
"I once spent fourteen hours beside a woman smuggling six sedated peacocks through customs," he said.
Y/N almost choked. "Peacocks?"
"Said they were support animals."
Shields blinked slowly. "They support anything?"
Teddy stared at him. "What do you think?"
Y/N laughed hard and sudden.
Teddy pointed with his beer. "Couldn't put them in cryo. Regulations. Had a care-assist bot onboard legally married to the damn things."
"No," Y/N said.
"One got loose."
Shields made a sound like pain and amusement had collided. "Where?"
"Bridge. Three in the morning. Straight into my copilot's face."
Even Shields laughed. It was rough and brief, but real. For a few minutes, the room softened. Steam rose from their bowls. Teddy looked pleased. Y/N felt the old ache of belonging stir behind her ribs, and that made her cautious.
That was the danger of a good meal. It tricked the body into believing in safety. Warmth, salt, laughter, the clink of forks against plates, Teddy's terrible apron, Shields briefly less unbearable than usual. These things gathered themselves into an imitation of home so convincing that Y/N could almost forget how temporary it was.
She had learned to distrust almost. Almost was the gap between a pressure seal holding and failing. Almost was the missed reading, the delayed correction, the one strange sound nobody logged because the numbers were still green. Almost was a passenger transport carrying too many strangers and one chained killer through a lane that had looked empty until it did not.
She looked down at the sauce left on her plate and thought, absurdly, of Aunt Rose.
Aunt Rose had believed food was a language more honest than speech. She cooked when she was angry, cooked when she was frightened, cooked when there was not enough money and no good news and the whole colony seemed to be surviving on stubbornness and dust. Her hands were small and quick, her wrists strong. She could make a meal from things Y/N would have mistaken for packing material.
"Hungry people make noise," Rose used to say, sliding bread onto a cooling rack. "Feed them. Then see what's still standing."
Y/N wondered what Rose would make of this room: Teddy with his scarred forearms and careful eyes; Shields with his shaking hands and mouth full of razors; herself, sitting between suspicion and gratitude, too tired to be as armored as she preferred. Rose would have fed them all again. Privately, she would have called Shields a sad little man and told Y/N not to adopt strays with teeth.
Shields shoved his chair back so hard the metal legs screamed against the floor.
"Head," he muttered.
He left without looking at either of them.
The hatch closed. Teddy's face changed, the warmth draining from his eyes and leaving behind the quiet focus Y/N had seen during system checks and near misses.
"You see it?" he asked.
Y/N leaned back. "He's wound up."
"He's more than that."
The corridor beyond the hatch was silent. Y/N lowered her voice. "You think he's on something?"
"Don't know yet."
"No way. Nobody's stupid enough to dose up on a civilian long-haul." Teddy looked at her, and she sighed. "Fine. People are that stupid. But Shields? I don't like him, but I don't read him as suicidal."
"I've seen things after wakeups."
That got her attention. "Like?"
"Sweats. Jumping at nothing. Hands worse than usual. Turns mean fast."
"Greg’s always been a mean fucker,” Y/N replied.
"Not like this."
The concern in his voice carried no cruelty. Teddy did not sound like a captain building a case against an inconvenient crewman. He sounded like a man who had been hoping his own eyes were wrong, and that made it worse. Y/N could have handled anger. Anger was clean. Anger meant Teddy had already decided Shields was a problem and only needed the proper form to make that decision official. But worry was messier. Worry meant he still saw a person under the behavior. Worry meant he had been watching, measuring, giving chances, and hating the math as it assembled itself.
Teddy rubbed both hands over his face. For a moment, the captain slipped and the tired man showed through. Not weak. Never weak. Just worn down by command's quietest burden: the knowledge that being fair and being safe did not always point in the same direction.
"Had a gunner once," he said.
Y/N stilled. Teddy almost never began stories that way.
"Strikeforce?" she asked.
He nodded. His eyes were on the table, but she had the sense he was looking at something much farther away. "Good man. Twenty-seven. Funny as hell. Could run firing solutions half-asleep and half-drunk. Often did."
Y/N waited.
"Got hurt on a boarding action. Back. Nerves. Medical cleared him too fast because command needed bodies and he wanted his chair back. Started taking things. Painkillers first. More after that. Whatever kept his hands steady and his face normal."
Teddy's jaw shifted.
"We all saw pieces. Told ourselves no one saw enough. He worked. Passed checks. Made jokes. Did the job. Until he didn't."
The canteen light hummed above them. Y/N's pasta had gone cold.
"What'd he do?"
"Missed a friend-or-foe confirm during pursuit. Not stupid. Wired. Couldn't wait half a second. Fired on a disabled vessel we were meant to board."
Y/N felt her stomach pull tight. "Dead?"
"Two." Teddy's voice stayed even, which somehow made it heavier. "Not ours. Made the report cleaner. Made living with it worse."
She did not ask what happened to the gunner. Teddy's face answered enough.
"Greg's not him," Teddy said. "But I've got a bad feeling, and it's started bringing evidence."
"For the tremor?"
"Maybe. Maybe pain. Maybe sleep. Maybe nothing and I'm just staring too hard."
"Last one tracks."
Teddy gave her a tired look.
"Sorry."
Y/N looked toward the hatch Shields had disappeared through. The longer he was gone, the more aware she became of the distance between canteen and bathroom, bathroom and med locker, med locker and restricted supplies. She disliked the path her mind took. She disliked more that Teddy's had gotten there first.
"Want me to check him?"
"No."
"I will."
"I know. That's why it's no." Teddy leaned back. "If he's using, cornering him before cryo would just piss him off."
Y/N folded her arms. "So we let him go cold?"
"We don’t really have a choice,” Teddy shrugged. “Not like there’s anything we can do about it from up here. It’ll be up to NOSA.”
"To him."
Teddy looked at her, and she heard what she had said, and what she had meant.
Dangerous to us.
That was the ugly part of command too, maybe. Caring about a crewman as a person while also calculating how much harm he could do as a failure point. People were systems. Systems could break other systems. Compassion did not change physics.
"I'll read his pre-sleep scan myself," Teddy said. "Anything trips, he stays warm until I'm satisfied. If nothing trips, we get through the run. Back at NOSA, I file testing."
Y/N nodded slowly. She did not like it, but not liking a plan did not make a better one appear.
From somewhere down the corridor came the faint sound of running water, a metallic clatter, then silence. Both of them looked at the hatch.
Shields came back a minute later paler than before, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes moved from Teddy to Y/N, quick and suspicious.
"What?"
Y/N picked up her fork. "Teddy was just talking about Dwayne."
Teddy did not miss the cue. "I miss him."
"You miss getting your dick wet," Y/N said, winking at him.
Shields stared at them as if they were both stupid, which, under the circumstances, was probably useful.
"You two need work," he said, and dropped back into his chair.
His hand shook when he reached for his water. Nobody mentioned it.
Shields reached for a set of headphones and glanced over at them. "I'm not listening to your gay sex shit, Ted. Let me know when we're going under."
The rough snarl of whatever rock band he was listening to leaked through the headphones while he scrolled on his data pad.
"He's still doing the job," Y/N said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"Functional doesn't mean safe. He's not supposed to take anything on duty. If he is, passengers ride that risk with us. One bad nav call and this ship turns into wreckage some budget office forgets."
The H-G hummed beneath them. Twenty-four weeks unconscious. Twenty-four weeks with the ship flying itself through dark lanes on the strength of math, machinery, and trust.
Trust mattered out here.
Eventually Teddy leaned back. "Back at NOSA, he gets tested. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. He hates me a week."
Then Teddy clapped his hands once and stood, because apparently emotional whiplash was part of command training. "All right. Enough. Finish up. Cryo soon."
Y/N stared at him. "Already?"
"In forty."
The thought made her stomach tighten. Teddy started stacking dishes.
"Besides, you'll want settled before they finish locking down our guest."
Y/N went still.
Right. The prisoner.
The warmth of the canteen dimmed. Somewhere deeper in the Hunter Gratzner, beyond cargo pallets and passenger pods, a holding chamber contained a murderer.
It was strange what the mind could forget on purpose.
Y/N had known about the prisoner since preflight. Everyone on crew had. The manifest had placed him in clean administrative language beneath security cargo, which was the sort of phrase that made people feel better because it sounded like equipment. Designation: restricted human transport. Custodial authority: Marshal Taemin Lee. Prisoner classification: maximum risk. Medical condition: sedated for duration. Special handling: no early release under any non-catastrophic circumstances.
No early release under any non-catastrophic circumstances.
That was another phrase that had stayed with her. Not because it was reassuring. Because it invited imagination to define catastrophic.
There had been a briefing, short and joyless, conducted by the marshal in the forward bay while cargo loaders moved pallets behind him. Lee was compact and hard-faced, with close-cropped hair going gray at the temples and eyes that looked as if they had misplaced their last good night's sleep sometime in another decade. He spoke with clipped impatience.
"Prisoner stays restrained in the security pod for the whole route," Lee said. "Sedation runs on an independent system. Pod has reserve power and mechanical locks. Crew doesn't open it. Crew doesn't talk to him. Crew doesn't touch restraints, coverings, feeds, or visual blocks. Faults come to me. Unauthorized contact gets reported and prosecuted. Clear?"
Shields had leaned against a cargo strut, arms folded, looking bored enough to qualify as a medical state. Teddy had listened with his captain face, while Y/N watched the black security pod sitting behind the marshal and tried not to think about the body inside it.
“Visual blocks?” she asked.
Lee’s eyes moved to her. “Goggles.”
“Why?”
“Required.”
Teddy gave her a small warning glance, and Y/N let it go, not because she was satisfied, but because she understood jurisdictional walls when she saw them. Later, Teddy told her the prisoner’s name because everyone knew it anyway.
Jungkook Jeon.
Killer. Escape artist. Soldier once, maybe. Animal, depending on who spoke. Some said he could see in the dark. Some said he had killed guards with his hands, with a blade, with a cup, with nothing at all. The number of alleged victims changed from telling to telling, but the only consistent part was that men who liked sounding fearless lowered their voices when they said his name.
Y/N did not like stories like that. They made monsters too clean. People enjoyed imagining evil as something separate, marked, obvious. It let them feel safe in ordinary rooms with ordinary men who smiled and lied and did ordinary harm. Still, when she thought of the pod, her skin tightened. The ship carried a man the law did not trust awake, and that was difficult to ignore forever.
“You hauled criminals before?” she asked.
“A few times.”
“Feels wrong.”
Teddy loaded dishes into the cleaner. “He’s locked, sedated, restrained, and riding with a marshal.”
“Still.”
“Frenchie, you know how many people on this ship could kill if they wanted?”
“Not helping.”
“I’m serious. Miners, settlers, ex-military, mechanics, contractors. You never know who you’re flying.”
“He murdered someone.”
“Allegedly several.”
Y/N stared.
Teddy sighed. “Fine. Not ideal.”
“To say the least,” Y/N huffed.
Teddy dried his hands on a towel. “You know your pod?”
“No. Shields swapped me.”
“Coward.” Teddy pointed vaguely toward the lower bay. “Yours is by holding. Bridge rotation gets proximity for wake.”
Y/N stared at him. “I sleep by the killer?”
“There are partitions.”
“Asshole.”
“Captain. Similar job.”
She stood, groaning under her breath, and headed into the corridor. Behind her, the canteen still smelled like garlic, bread, and tomato. Ahead of her, the ship waited in amber light, ready to put them all under and ask the machinery to keep its promises. Y/N did not like handing trust to anything she could not keep an eye on. Tonight, she had a suspicious scan, an unstable navigator, a sedated murderer onboard, and twenty-four weeks of sleep waiting for her.
So much for probably nothing.
The ship had grown quieter. Most passengers were sealed away now, and monitoring lights blinked along the walls in patient blue rhythms. The farther Y/N walked toward the cryobays, the more the H-G felt like a tomb pretending to be a vehicle. Her boots echoed softly. The engine vibration rolled beneath the floor like a distant pulse.
She passed the passenger rows first. Families. Labor crews. Contract settlers. People chasing money, weather, forgiveness, anonymity. Cryo made them all equal in the ugliest possible way. The wealthy did not look wealthy sealed behind glass. The strong did not look strong. Faces softened. Mouths slackened. Eyelashes glittered with frost. A child in row B clutched a fabric moon against her chest, the toy compressed under the safety webbing. An old woman two pods down wore three rings on one hand, each ring turned inward toward her palm as if she had wanted to hold the memory of someone through the cold.
The passenger bay had been noisy earlier, almost festive in a brittle way. People laughed too loudly at safety instructions and asked questions they already knew the answers to because hearing a crew member respond made the danger feel managed. Will I dream? Probably not. Will I feel cold? Not after induction. What if I wake up early? You will not. What if there is an emergency? The system has protocols. What if the protocols fail? Nobody asked that one directly. They only found ways to circle it.
Y/N had helped with orientation because Teddy believed crew visibility calmed passengers, and because Shields had looked one overheard complaint away from being reported to customer relations. She stood beside the cryo tech interface while families clustered in small, anxious knots, and she explained metabolic suspension in the plainest language she could manage.
“System drops your temperature and slows your body down,” she said. “Monitors stay on the whole time. You wake up thirsty, sore, sick, and stupid for a few minutes. Normal.”
A few people laughed. Not many, but enough.
The child with the fabric moon raised her hand. “Can Moro sleep too?”
Her father started to shush her, embarrassed, but Y/N crouched so she was closer to the child’s level. “What’s its name?”
“Moro.”
“Moro sleeps if he can be very good.”
The girl looked solemnly at the toy, then back at Y/N. “Moro’s a good boy.”
“Good. He can stay.”
The father mouthed thank you over the girl’s head. He looked exhausted, the way parents looked when they had spent months turning fear into logistics because children needed breakfast more than existential honesty. His wife stood beside him with a baby strapped to her chest and a stare that kept returning to the cryopods as if she were memorizing an enemy.
Later, Y/N had seen that same woman press her lips to the baby’s forehead before handing him to the pediatric pod cradle. She did not cry. Her eyes shone, but she did not cry. She waited until the cradle sealed, one hand flat against the glass until frost began to form around her fingers.
There were kinds of courage nobody gave medals for because they happened too quietly.
A miner named Holtz had tried to flirt with Y/N while signing his cryo consent, mostly because he was terrified and flirting was apparently the only tool he owned for making terror smaller.
“You there when we wake?” he asked.
“Plan says yes.”
“Good. Friendly face helps.”
“You’re generous with friendly.”
His friends laughed. Holtz laughed too, relieved, and climbed into his pod with his hands shaking.
The teacher with the physical books had asked whether cargo temperature variation could damage paper. Y/N spent five minutes reassuring her and another ten making sure the book crates were logged away from coolant lines. The woman had touched the cargo receipt like it was a sacred document.
“For the settlement school,” she said.
“New Mecca has digital.”
“Digital dies. Kids still need paper.”
Y/N had liked her immediately.
Now all of them were reduced to green lights. That was what cryo did. It translated lives into status indicators. Stable. Stable. Stable. A whole bay of stories suspended by chemistry and cold, their beginnings and endings paused mid-sentence while the H-G carried them through an indifferent dark.
Y/N slowed beside a pod occupied by a man about her age with a long scar along his jaw and grease still under one fingernail. Mechanic, probably. Or miner. His manifest ID glowed beside his vitals, but she did not read it. Names made passengers heavier. Crew learned that early. You were responsible for everyone, but you could not carry everyone as a person and still function. So they became rows, counts, statuses, green indicators.
Her eyes kept finding details anyway. A braid tucked carefully over one shoulder. A prayer charm taped inside the pod glass. A teenager with chipped black polish on one thumb. A couple sealed in adjacent pods, hands positioned palm-out against the glass so that, when frost blurred the chamber, their fingers seemed to almost touch.
Y/N looked away. The H-G did not know she was sentimental, and she intended to keep it that way.
At row D, one pod’s blanket had bunched near the occupant’s shoulder, not enough to endanger anything, just enough to irritate Y/N’s sense of order. She opened the maintenance access, reached through the service gap, and adjusted it carefully without waking the pod or disturbing the leads. The man inside was elderly, bald except for a white fringe around his ears, his mouth slightly open. A tattoo on his forearm had blurred with age until the words were unreadable.
“There,” she murmured.
No one answered.
She closed the access panel and logged the adjustment because Teddy cared about logs and because undocumented kindness looked suspicious in audits.
Farther down, the family with the confiscated fern slept in a cluster. The mother’s face was turned toward the pediatric cradle. The little girl’s fabric moon had fogged a round patch against the glass. Moro, apparently, remained responsible.
Y/N stood there too long.
She did not want children. Or rather, she had never found a version of her life where wanting them made practical sense. Her work moved too much. Her debts pressed too hard. Her sense of safety had too many missing panels. But sometimes she saw a child asleep in a ship's cryobay, trusting adults and machines with the blind arrogance of the loved, and something in her twisted. Not longing, exactly. More like grief for a road she had never chosen and therefore had no right to mourn.
Aunt Rose would have understood. Aunt Rose understood most things she pretended not to notice.
Y/N moved on before the feeling became too articulate.
Past the passenger rows, the light changed. Blue gave way to amber, then amber to the slow red pulse of the security section. Reinforced partition doors stood open for final crew access, thick enough to make the surrounding walls look flimsy. Warning strips ran along the floor. The marshal's pod sat two rows from the prisoner's chamber, standard issue but surrounded by additional monitoring equipment. Lee was already sealed inside, his hard face made strangely boyish by sleep.
The lower cryobay was colder than the rest of the ship. Not freezing, but controlled. Medical. The kind of cold that had been approved by committees and calibrated by people who believed discomfort was acceptable if it was statistically useful. The air smelled of antiseptic, coolant vapor, and recycled oxygen. Rows of cryopods stretched into the dimness like upright coffins arranged with mechanical precision.
Most were already sealed. Faces blurred behind frost-clouded glass. Some passengers looked peaceful. Others looked erased. Blue indicators pulsed beside each pod, tracking heart rates, neural suppression, metabolic slowdown, blood chemistry, all the fragile human processes being carefully bullied into suspension.
The holding chamber sat near the far end, and Y/N saw the red light first. It bled across the wall in slow pulses, turning frost and metal the color of old blood. The pod itself was larger than the civilian units, recessed into reinforced housing with dark metal bands locked around the glass seal. A warning display glowed above it.
LOCK-OUT PROTOCOL IN EFFECT. ABSOLUTELY NO EARLY RELEASE.
Y/N stopped.
The man inside was mostly obscured by condensation and cryofrost. Sedative vapor filled the chamber heavily enough that only fragments of him showed clearly: a lean body strapped into restraints, wrists and ankles locked in thick cuffs, additional bands crossing his chest and waist. The hardware looked excessive for his frame.
He was younger than she expected, and that irritated her. Not because murderers had to be old, but because some stupid narrative part of her brain had expected him to look monstrous. Bigger. Meaner. A face that matched the red lights and warnings. Instead, he looked human, which was inconvenient.
Black goggles covered his eyes completely, thick dark rims sealed tight against his skin. They were not ordinary eye protection, but something heavier, more restrictive. The strap wrapped around the back of his head, pulling them so close they seemed almost fused to him. Beneath the pulsing red light, the goggles made his face look inhuman anyway, all sharp cheekbones, frost-pale skin, and hidden expression.
Why cover his eyes?
Light sensitivity. Neurological condition. Special sedation protocol. Prisoner restraint measure. Y/N did not know. She was a pilot, botanist, and reluctant doctor, not a corrections specialist. Still, the detail lodged in her mind, along with the sudden irrational certainty that if the goggles came off, the man inside would know she was there.
The thought embarrassed her, which did not make it leave.
He was unconscious. Drugged, chilled, restrained, sealed behind reinforced glass and enough lockouts to satisfy the kind of people who wrote regulations in bloodless offices. There was no reason for the hair at the back of her neck to lift. No reason for her hand to drift toward the tool clipped at her belt, a little emergency cutter that would be useless against the security housing and probably useless against the man inside it too.
No reason except the primitive one, old as caves, old as firelight, old as the first human being who looked into the dark and felt something looking back.
Y/N stepped closer despite herself. Frost webbed the glass in delicate veins. Under it, his skin looked gray-pale. His dark hair caught the red light in uneven pieces. A scar ran along one side of his jaw, half-hidden by vapor. Another marked him near the collarbone, old and white. His mouth was relaxed in sedation, two piercings set into his lower lip on either side. Two studs pierced his eyebrow, one above, one below. Tattoos covered his skin, one arm far more heavily inked than the other, the art disappearing beneath the black shirt that hid the rest of him. Even strapped down, he looked huge and broad.
Y/N found herself thinking he was pretty. Prettier than she thought he would be.
The red light pulsed over his goggles.
Dangerous, it said again. Dangerous dangerous dangerous.
Her assigned pod opened beside the holding chamber with a soft hiss. The interior glowed pale blue. A folded thermal blanket waited inside beside medical leads and connector tabs. Coolant vapor curled near the base like cold breath. Behind her, the prisoner remained motionless under crimson light.
Y/N climbed into her pod without looking back.
The chamber padding adjusted beneath her. Biometric systems woke with quiet chimes. The inside smelled sterile and metallic, the universal scent of cryosleep no matter the ship. She entered her codes.
She had gone under dozens of times. Short jumps, long hauls, emergency suspension during medical transport after a survey accident she still disliked thinking about. Familiarity did not help much. Cryo remained an act of trust so complete it felt indecent. You stripped yourself of agency. You let strangers and systems decide your temperature, your blood chemistry, your breath. You became an object that could dream.
Some people found it peaceful. Jimin did. He always claimed the last minute before sleep felt like floating in warm water. Y/N had accused him of lying because Jimin considered optimism a public service. He only smiled and said, "Maybe your brain likes drama."
She wished, suddenly and sharply, that he were there. Not because he could do anything, but because he would knock twice on the pod glass and make some terrible gentle joke and wait until her breathing slowed before getting into his own chamber. Instead, she had Shields two pods down, Teddy across the row, a marshal sleeping near his chained prisoner, and a ship full of strangers trusting systems older than some of the debts that had put them onboard.
The pod read her pulse and disapproved.
HEART RATE ELEVATED.
The pod increased the pre-sedation oxygen mix.
ZARA HADDAD
FLIGHT CREW VERIFIED.
CRYOCYCLE AUTHORIZATION ACCEPTED.
Across the bay, the hatch opened, and Shields entered first. Even exhausted, he moved like he had too much electricity under his skin. His jumpsuit hung loose. One hand rubbed the back of his neck while the other held a half-finished bottle of water. He barely looked at anyone.
"Night," he muttered.
"Night," Teddy answered from farther down the row.
Y/N nodded. "See you when we thaw."
Shields snorted and climbed into his pod two chambers down. "Don't miss me."
"I won't."
He gave the smallest ghost of a smile. It was there and gone so quickly she almost could have invented it. Then his hand tightened around the edge of his pod.
Pain crossed his face, not dramatic, just a twitch near the mouth and a tightening around the eyes. He waited it out with the practiced fury of someone who hated being witnessed by his own body. When he looked up and caught Y/N watching, the shutters came down.
"What?"
"You double check the nav?” She asked
"Yeah,” He sighed. “I adjusted the coordinates a bit so we’ll sail past it. Seemed like a rogue comment. Taking us through a ghost lane for a bit then we’ll be back on course.”
“You talk to Captain?” She asked, eyebrows coming together.
“Yes,” He snapped. “It’s fine, Y/N.”
Y/N did not know what to do with that, so she did nothing.
The canopy lowered over him with a hydraulic whisper. Pale vapor curled around the seal. Green indicators blinked awake one by one.
CRYOCYCLE INITIATED.
Shields closed his eyes before the sedatives had fully dispersed. His restless fingers finally stilled against the armrests. Tension drained from his face in stages, softening the sharpness until he looked younger, emptier, almost peaceful.
Y/N hated that part. Cryosleep looked too much like death.
Teddy entered after him.
He had changed into a dark thermal undershirt and loose cryocycle pants, practical and unremarkable, though somehow he still looked like he could command a room while half asleep and barefoot. His old chronometer remained strapped to his wrist. His eyes moved to Shields's sealed pod, then to Y/N.
His expression softened. "Want another pod?"
The offer cost him something. Not because moving her would be hard, although it would be inconvenient this late in the cycle, but because both of them knew what it meant for a captain to rearrange cryo assignments around fear. It meant making fear official. It meant giving it a form that paperwork could hold.
Y/N looked toward the red-lit pod. The prisoner lay motionless behind frost and warning text. The marshal slept. Shields's vitals glowed green. Passenger rows hummed with artificial winter.
"No," she said. “I don't like it, but no."
She looked back at him. His canopy was still open, his broad hands resting on either side of the pod. Under the clinical light he looked older than he had in the canteen. More tired. The silver in his beard caught the red pulse every few seconds and disappeared again.
"You ever scared?" she asked.
Teddy's eyebrows lifted slightly, not because the question shocked him, but because she had asked it plainly. "Yes."
"Of what?"
He looked at the ceiling for a moment. "Bad calls.”
He smiled, and the smile faded into something gentler. "Twenty-four weeks, we wake up. Greg complains. You pretend you're fine. I make bad coffee. You get your pistachio bread."
The picture was so ordinary it hurt.
"Yeah," she said.
"Hold that."
He moved toward his pod across from hers as the lights dimmed another degree. The Hunter Gratzner was transitioning into long-haul mode now. Soon the ship would belong to autopilot, sleeping machinery, and whatever watched the dark when humans could not.
Y/N's gaze drifted toward the holding chamber. The prisoner remained still beneath frost and red warning light.
LOCK-OUT PROTOCOL IN EFFECT.
The letters reflected across the polished floor in dull crimson pulses.
Teddy settled into his pod. "Night, Frenchie."
"Night, Teddy."
His canopy lowered with a hiss. Vapor curled around the edges. His eyes closed as the system began its work.
Y/N leaned back and stared through the translucent cover above her while final prompts scrolled beside her shoulder.
HEART RATE STABLE.
SEDATION PREP COMPLETE.
CRYOCYCLE COMMENCING.
The cold came. It seeped upward through the pod slowly, not painful, but invasive. Her fingertips numbed first. Her hands followed. The heaviness moved into her arms while sedatives entered her bloodstream in measured waves. Her thoughts softened at the edges.
Cryo did not take a person all at once. That was another small cruelty. It advanced by territories: fingers, wrists, the hollows inside the elbows. The mouth went dry. The tongue felt too large. Sounds lengthened and deepened, as if the ship were moving away from her instead of the other way around. Her heart, offended by the whole procedure, kicked hard against the chemical hand closing around it.
She tried to do what the training modules advised. Count backward. Visualize a safe place. Release each muscle group in sequence. None of it worked. Counting turned into system checks. Safe places turned complicated. Her body refused to release anything voluntarily.
So she listened.
The ship's heartbeat was still there. Slower now, or seeming slower because she was. The reactor pulse traveled through the pod frame into her back. Fans whispered. Coolant moved. Somewhere, deep in the H-G's logic systems, autopilot accepted the route, the flagged anomaly, the sleep cycle, the responsibility for all these cooled hearts.
Above her, the lights blurred. Beside her, red warning light pulsed through frost.
Dangerous dangerous dangerous.
The thought dissolved almost as soon as it formed.
Fear was hard to hold under sedation. So was anger. So was regret. Everything became distant and soft, like sound through snow. The prisoner remained motionless. Teddy slept across from her. Shields lay silent behind glass. The Hunter Gratzner sailed onward through the black, carrying them all into twenty-four weeks of dark.
The world quietly disappeared.
Jungkook was supposed to be unconscious. That was the whole damn point.
Cryosleep was one of those miracles people trusted because the brochures used clean colors and expensive words. The body went under. The blood slowed. The mind folded itself down into a small, dark place. Months passed without weather, without hunger, without memory. A person closed their eyes in one system and opened them in another, nauseous and cotton-mouthed, but alive.
That was the promise.
The brochures made it sound gentle: reduced metabolic activity, synaptic suppression, muscle preservation, low-temperature cellular stasis. Blue arrows for coolant. Green lines for neural stabilization. Yellow warnings written in the soft, polite language corporations used when they wanted fear to sit down and behave.
None of those brochures said what happened if the mind did not sink all the way.
Jungkook floated in the dark. He could not move. Could not speak. Could not open his eyes, even if the black cryo goggles sealed over them had allowed it. His muscles belonged to the drugs. His breathing belonged to the pod. His pulse moved at the slow, obedient pace the system demanded. But some part of him remained near the surface, and that was unfortunate for everyone involved.
Cold pressed around him through the suspension fluid. He knew, technically, that cold had no weight. A prison doctor had once explained that to him while checking the dosage on a restraint sedative, smiling like education and mercy were cousins.
Cold is not a substance, Mr. Jeon. It is the absence of heat.
Jungkook remembered looking at the man's soft hands and thinking, You ever been left in it long enough, doc?
The fluid moved around him in slow, patient currents from the pod's circulation system. It slid over his wrists, throat, ribs, thighs. It touched the restraints as if curious about them. Above him, the lid of the cryopod was clouded with frost. Beyond that was the holding bay. Beyond that, the Hunter Gratzner. Beyond that, empty space laid out in every direction for longer than most minds were built to understand.
The ship carried civilians, crew, a marshal, and one prisoner.
Numbers helped with distances like these. People loved numbers. They named routes, counted weeks, tracked berths, divided the endless dark into little units that could be filed, insured, and survived. Twenty-four weeks under. Twenty-eight weeks in transit. Two days to approach. One hundred and forty-three passengers. One prisoner. Numbers made the endless feel managed.
Jungkook knew better.
Thoughts reached him slowly in cryo, broken more often than whole. A woman's hand around a pistol. Sand across a landing pad. Burned insulation. A boy laughing in a room with yellow curtains. Blood on white tile. A door closing. A door opening. A name he refused to remember. Cryosleep did not soften memory. It only ruined the order.
Faces surfaced and vanished before he could attach names to them. Some belonged to the dead, which was irritating. The dead were persistent, especially the ones who thought they were owed something.
They were not.
No one was owed anything.
Jungkook let the memories pass. He had learned not to grab at them under sedation. The harder he tried to hold a thought, the faster it broke apart. Better to drift. Better to listen.
The Hunter Gratzner was always making noise.
Metal expanded and contracted beyond the pod walls. Ventilation moved through sealed corridors with a dry, whispering patience. Coolant clicked behind insulation. Electrical relays hummed in cycles. Beneath it all, the engines pulsed through frame, pod, fluid, and bone. A sedated passenger would not have heard any of it.
Jungkook heard almost nothing else.
The ship was old. Not dying, not yet, but old enough that its sounds carried history: repair, stress, fatigue, stubbornness. Machinery repeated itself. The H-G endured.
Around him, the holding bay slept. People were noisy even unconscious. They breathed. Twitched. Muttered when dreams rose too close to the surface. A woman somewhere to his left made small sounds through her sedation, breath catching on old fear. Someone farther away groaned every few hours. The marshal had been quiet for a long time.
One voice surfaced more often than the rest. A man, low and slurred, nearly swallowed by sedation. The words came through steel, frost, and drugs in fragments, but Jungkook recognized the language as Saramic. The kind spoken near the eastern cities of Helion Prime.
The man murmured again.
A pilgrim, Jungkook thought. Bound for New Mecca, probably. Jungkook built him from scraps because there was nothing else to do: dark hair, maybe; brown skin from some inland sun; a scar across one knuckle; a mother who still sent messages he pretended not to need.
That was another thing the brochures left out. Boredom survived sedation.
Not normal boredom. Not the restless, fingernail-chewing kind that came with waiting in a locked room or sitting across from a stupid man with a gun. This was older. Meaner. Awareness without agency. A trapped witness inside his own skull while machines held his body in a careful imitation of winter.
The woman who smelled of machine grease had to be nearby too. He had sensed her before the sedatives thickened completely: old leather gloves, mineral dust in worn clothing, cheap soap. Worker, maybe. Free settler. Someone from the edge of colonized systems, with three good tools, one bad knife, and strong opinions about corporate water rights.
Too many others to map clearly. Human presence reduced to heat, breath, faint movement. A bay full of sleeping bodies, each one sealed in glass, coolant, and faith in maintenance schedules.
Transporting him alongside civilians had been bold. Jungkook suspected Taemin Lee would regret it.
Lee came into memory. Brown eyes that missed almost nothing. Sun-weathered skin pulled tight over high cheekbones. Gray beginning at the temples. Big hands. Slow movements. Lee never rushed unless rushing was necessary. That made him dangerous. Fast men were common. Fast was nerves, fear, bad impulse control. Lee decided first. Then he moved. The space between those two things had gotten a lot of people killed.
Jungkook's mouth twitched faintly inside the pod.
Lee did not sleep well anymore. Not after Blackwater.
The memory rose with smoke.
Blackwater Station. Emergency lights failing in sections. Corridors dropping into darkness, then flashing red hard enough to break movement into pieces. Sirens screaming through damaged speakers. Artificial gravity stuttering, dropping men to the deck and throwing blood into the air. Sparks near a cut security gate. Someone crying in short, wet gasps.
Jungkook remembered heat on his face. He remembered laughter, though not whose. He remembered Lee across a burning docking platform, framed by flame and smoke, staring through it all with an expression Jungkook had not forgotten.
That was before mercenaries started calling him the Brown-Eyed Devil. Before he left the military. Before he began hunting men through the outer systems with warrants in one hand and old grief in the other. Before he and Jungkook crossed paths enough times for coincidence to become a pattern.
Enemies, usually. Allies once or twice, though Jungkook considered that more geometry than morality. If two men were shooting at the same third man, people liked to call it cooperation.
Lee still did not know much about him. That was good. People who knew things wanted explanations. Explanations became leverage. Leverage became cages.
Jungkook had spent enough time in cages. This one, at least, was impressive.
Heavy restraints locked his wrists and ankles into the pod's reinforced frame. Not passenger stabilization cuffs. Correctional grade, black composite bands with magnetic anchors and secondary mechanical locks in case power failed. One restraint crossed his chest. Another pinned his waist. His neck had limited range, though the sedatives made that irrelevant. The goggles sealed over his eyes were fixed with a pressure strap and neurological dampening contacts at the temples.
Overkill, by most standards. Reasonable, by his.
Lee had insisted on the goggles. Jungkook remembered him leaning over the pod before sedation, checking each restraint himself.
"You planning to glare your way out?" Jungkook had asked.
Lee had not smiled. "No."
"Then why the eyewear? I'm touched, but it's not my color."
"You know why."
"I know several possible reasons. I was curious which one keeps you up at night."
Lee tightened the final strap with more force than necessary. "Sleep well."
"Never do."
Lee's eyes held his for a moment before the drugs kicked in.
Now Lee was somewhere in the bay, sealed in his own pod, armed in theory and helpless in practice. That was the useful thing about cryosleep. It made equals of everyone: marshal, murderer, pilot, pilgrim, mechanic, child. All of them frozen. All of them dependent on machinery, math, and the assumption that nothing interesting would happen.
Interesting things always happened. Eventually.
Jungkook drifted. Time lost shape. Minutes or hours passed. The engines pulsed. The pilgrim whispered. The woman with machine grease muttered what might have been a name. The ship carried them on.
The engine pulse was one beat delayed. The next compensated too quickly, as if the ship had stumbled and corrected before anyone noticed.
Jungkook's attention sharpened. Not thought. Thought was slow in cryo. This was older than thought, more like an instinct. They always say that everything but the animal side went down in cryosleep.
The engines settled. For three pulses, everything returned to normal.
Then a tremor moved through the hull. The suspension fluid shifted around him. A thin ribbon slid across his cheek. Somewhere beyond the pod, metal gave a soft complaint and fell quiet.
Jungkook listened. Warning chimes sounded far away. He could not make out the words. Cryosleep kept language away unless it came from dreams or nearby mouths. The Hunter Gratzner was worried.
That was interesting.
His body remained useless. Sedatives held him down. His pulse could not rise much. His muscles could not tense properly. His lungs continued their slow exchange. But beneath that, instinct climbed.
Something was off.
Another tremor rolled through the chamber walls, longer this time. Not violent, just a low shudder through the pod frame and into his bones. The fluid vibrated softly around him. The engine rhythm changed again.
Before, the ship had carried the confidence of a machine doing familiar work. Now there were tiny inconsistencies beneath the pulse: load shifts, micro-corrections, compensations layered over compensations. A ship could hide trouble from passengers. Not from someone with nothing to do but listen.
The bay remained asleep. The pilgrim did not wake. The worker woman did not stir. Lee did not rise from his pod with a weapon in hand and that grim frontier stare. Nobody else knew. Nobody else was close enough to consciousness.
The thought moved through Jungkook slowly, and with it came something close to pleasure.
There were few honest things in the universe. Pain. Hunger. Vacuum. Fire. Fear. Machines, sometimes, if you caught them before people lied on their behalf.
And opportunity.
Opportunity had a sound. Sometimes a lock clicking open. Sometimes a man saying the wrong name. Sometimes engines missing a beat halfway through a ghost lane with twenty-four weeks of darkness between ports.
Ghost lanes.
The route returned to him in pieces. Old transport corridors. Cheap corridors. Dangerous corridors. Once useful, before newer jump gates pushed commerce through safer monitored lanes. Now maintained just enough for budget carriers, desperate settlers, prison transfers no one wanted to fund properly, and corporate accountants who considered risk acceptable when applied to other people.
Long isolated stretches. Poor monitoring. Signal dead zones. Ships disappeared out here often enough that official concern had become a template.
Jungkook would have laughed if his lungs had belonged to him.
Taemin Lee had chosen the wrong route. Or someone had chosen it for him. That was possible too. Bureaucracies made disasters through small arithmetic. A safer route cost more. A prison transfer needed schedule alignment. The Hunter Gratzner had civilian berths available. The prisoner was restrained. The marshal was experienced. The risk profile fell within tolerance.
Another vibration moved through the ship.
Somewhere beyond the holding bay, metal struck metal. The sound traveled through structure rather than air, a muted clang softened by distance. The ship answered with diagnostic tones.
The suspension fluid stirred again. Jungkook's thoughts began arranging themselves with care.
First possibility: debris impact. Ghost route, old junk, high relative velocity. A small impact could damage exterior arrays or attitude thrusters without breaching the hull. The ship would compensate. If the autopilot corrected cleanly, everyone slept through it and woke up to an incident report.
Second possibility: engine imbalance. Old ship, long burn, main drive irregularity. A misfire in one chamber or a magnetic containment fluctuation could create vibration and diagnostic cycling. Bad, but survivable if caught.
Third possibility: navigation correction. Something had forced the ship to adjust course.
That was the one Jungkook liked.
A course correction during protected cryosleep transit meant the ship had detected a hazard, suffered a fault, or received an instruction strong enough to override sealed navigation. Any of those could wake crew. Any of those could trigger emergency protocols.
Emergency protocols opened doors. Fire suppression outranked prisoner comfort. Hull breach outranked sedation schedule. Life support outranked lockout etiquette. Enough problems in the right order could make a secure cage depend on software written by someone who believed edge cases were theoretical.
Jungkook had built a life in edge cases.
A faint hiss entered the pod. The system adjusted coolant flow. Not his pod alone. The whole bay. Environmental correction.
Jungkook's mouth twitched again. This time it almost became a smile.
The ship shuddered. The tremor passed through the Hunter Gratzner, and somewhere in the bay a civilian pod clicked as its stabilizers adjusted. A sleeping passenger made a frightened sound. The pilgrim murmured in Saramic, clearer this time.
"Light preserve us."
Then silence.
Jungkook drifted beneath the sedatives, cold, restrained, blind, while his mind circled the situation. He thought of Lee waking early, jaw tight, one hand reaching for a weapon before memory fully returned. He thought of the crew dragging themselves out of cryo with shaking hands and frozen lungs, confused and sick. He thought of civilians trapped in pods, unaware that the ship carrying them had stumbled in the dark.
He thought of locks. Power systems. The route. A long time between stops. A long time for mistakes to grow. A long time for rescue to be inconvenient. A long time for a ship to become its own sealed world, cut off from law, help, and witnesses.
Lee had wanted him buried in slam. Concrete walls, magnetic locks, recycled air smelling of bleach, metal, old sweat, and institutional fear. Sedatives in the vents. Guards with bored eyes and shock batons. Administrators who believed evil could be managed through scheduling.
Jungkook had no affection for prison. But he understood it.
A cage admitted what it was. This ship pretended to be passage. That made it more interesting.
Another diagnostic tone sounded. Closer.
A system voice spoke beyond the pod, muffled by glass, fluid, and sedation. Jungkook could not make out the words, but he heard the cadence. Calm. Female. Artificial. The voice of a machine explaining danger to people who could not hear it.
Jungkook smiled in the dark. Not enough for a monitor to care. Just a tiny movement at the corner of his mouth, hidden beneath frost, fluid, and the black goggles Lee had strapped over his eyes.
Nobody else was awake enough to understand. Not the pilgrim with his old prayers. Not the worker woman with machine grease in her clothes. Not the civilians sealed in their neat rows. Not even Lee, unless the marshal's instincts ran closer to the surface than Jungkook suspected.
The Hunter Gratzner trembled around them. Something was wrong. Something was beginning.
And Jungkook, locked in the cold with restraints on his limbs and darkness over his eyes, listened to the ship stumble through the endless black and felt the first clean edge of possibility slide into place.
Hi! I was wondering if you’ll ever revisit the hockey player Jk/figure skater fic? It’s such a great read and I love it! No pressure, btw😅
Hi! I am planning on doing more with The Comeback eventually, but just haven't edited the next chapter yet. It's coming soon though. Maybe closer to winter time!
Jean Giraud's (or more known as "Moebius") illustrations are really reminding me of Pb, especially the way he illustrates environment; desert landscapes, space, etc...
Due to strict publishing rights i was not able to find at least ONE pdf comic that was officially translated or scanned 😭😭😭
but i found a page that contains a lot of his works, thought i might link it if you wanted to take a look:
Oh, I can absolutely see what you mean, especially with the desert landscapes and the way he makes these huge, strange environments feel so lonely and lived-in at the same time. It really does fit the atmosphere of PB.
The world is mostly built around the Riddick universe, so that gritty mix of sci-fi, horror, industrial, and harsh landscapes is definitely the biggest influence. But I can also see bits of artists like Moebius, H. R. Giger, Ralph McQuarrie, and Ron Cobb in the kinds of visuals that feel at home in the story.
It’s such a shame his work is so difficult to find translated or scanned, though 😭 Thank you so much for sending me this. I’m definitely going to look through it because the artwork is beautiful, and I already know I’m going to end up falling down a rabbit hole.
Just checking in with a little update about Pitch Black and the Blackout Series as a whole.
I’ve been doing some editing, as I tend to do, and I’m trying to pace certain things a bit better while sprinkling in a little more detail here and there. So, if you check the Masterlist over the next few weeks, things may start looking a bit different.
Dark Fury is going to be moved over to the Extras section, since I feel like it works better as a standalone piece rather than part of that main arc. The “prologue” is also going to be repurposed into its own separate chapter in the Extras section, where we’ll get to see the crew before the crash and learn a little more about them.
I’d recommend rereading Pitch Black once the edits are fully posted, since I’ve already started going back in and adding new details. There may even be a kiss somewhere in there, but I didn’t tell you that. You’ll have to go see for yourself.
I’ve also added more characterization for a few people, more dialogue for everyone, and generally fleshed out that first arc a bit more. The Longest Day was edited pretty recently, so I don’t expect that one to change anytime soon. Dead or Breathing will also be getting some edits, but it’ll take a little while for everything to be finished.
My plan is to post the edits and the extra chapters once everything is done, so I’d say wait on that reread until then unless you want to end up reading the same thing over and over again. I’m not changing too much. I’m mostly just adding to what’s already there, building up the tension, and giving the characters a little more room to breathe.
So, if you were wondering where PB has been since April, that’s what I’ve been working on. I’m still writing new stuff too, but after rereading a lot of the older material, I felt like there could be more. Seeing people say they’d like more extra, shorter content between the larger chapters also got me thinking.
I’ve already written another extra chapter soon about Audrey’s life between living in New Mecca with Joon and ending up locked away in Crematoria. I’m also thinking about writing one for how Namjoon became the “holy man” and how he got to the H-G. There are some smaller filler pieces about other side characters on the drawing board too.
The one I’m probably most excited about is Frenchie’s life before the crash on M6. Obviously, it won’t be from birth all the way to then, because I could probably write an entire series about that alone, but it’ll be short snippets of her life over the years leading up to the H-G.
Thank you all for being patient with me and for still caring about this story. I’m really excited to share the new version with you.
jk’s new tour outfit the one with the sunnies reminds me so much of pb #whenlifeimitatesart. can u tell i just miss this badass fic lolol
If you're talking about him in Brussels... yeah... I can see it for sure. It's definitely up there with one of my favorite looks on JK. Black Swan era was another favorite of mine and his look for the Grammy's when they performed Butter was also up there in my book of BTS fashion moments.
They all look so good right now though. Love the entire aesthetic of this comeback a lot.
To readers, please skip this ask if you haven't finished reading that masterpiece of a story
I just finished The Bride!!! I shed a tear here and there!! So I have questions regarding the last few chapters
1. In the scene where Taehyung was preparing flowers and they mentioned "duchess", were they pertaining to YN? Like there was a last effort for him to do something romantic for her? And how he brought a new bed for her-- was it because he was hoping she'd live in the villa, regardless of what their ending may be?
2. When their little family was at the dining table and Taehyung was explaining to Taylin what he did to YN, he said something along the lines of "I love mommy. Ver much." -- was he speaking in present at that time? Like was he saying he (still) loves her (now)?
3. The final duel - did Taehyung subtly allow her to win? I feel like he just picked the fight for the sake of it but also already decided that she'll let her win
4. BUT ok did / does Taehyung still hold affection for her after all that has happened-- like he just really overracted over the news of her getting married to someone else after leaving him (giving yandere obsessive lolz)
I'm not disregarding that what Taehyung did to her was right, but I would like to understand the depth of his affection. Everyone, including YN are morally gray characters, they all have their fair share of demons, let's be for real 😂 Brandi being the reincarnation of Satan himself, kidding!
I'd probably be thinking about this story for the next few days 😂
Apologies for these nonsense questions
Hi Anon! No, these aren’t nonsense questions at all. This is literally the kind of stuff the ending is supposed to make you overthink lol.
Yes, Tae still loved Y/N. He never stopped loving her. But Tae’s version of love isn’t normal or healthy. He loves hard, but he also needs control. He wants the person he loves to stay close and be his, and when they don’t, he kinda loses it. We see that with him in Chapters 7 and 8 too, when he finds out Araceli’s cheating on him.
The Duchess and the flowers were him talking about his daughter. The bed thing was him trying to make Y/N walk into this little life he’d built up in his head. Taylin, the villa, the bedroom, all of it. He wanted her to see it and think, oh, this could still be ours.
Which is cruel, obviously. He’s taunting her, but he’s also showing her what she could have if she stopped going after revenge and stayed with him and Taylin.
When he tells Taylin he loves Mommy, he means it. He still loves her, even after everything.
With the duel, he didn’t let her win. He wanted her to win, but he didn’t throw the fight. Once he talked to her and realized there was still too much hurt and anger there, he knew she wasn’t coming back to him. He wanted to see her again before one of them died, and he didn’t want the others killing her before he got that chance.
But he also wanted to live. He wanted Taylin. He wanted Y/N. He wanted the family he kept pretending they could still be. So no, he wasn’t just gonna stand there and let her kill him.
He fought because he wanted to stay alive. He rooted for her because he loved her.
I do have a one-shot planned from his POV during those three months she was gone. I just haven’t written it yet.
𓄿 Chapter Two: In Sickness and in Health
Pairing: Jimin x Reader
Other tags: Werewolf!Jimin, Witch!Reader, Shifter!Reader, Shifter!Jimin, A/B/O Dynamics, Alpha!Jimin, Witch!Yoongi, Witch!Seokjin, Werewolf!Taehyung, Alpha!Taehyung, Werewolf!Namjoon, Alpha!Namjoon, Werewolf!Hoseok, Alpha!Hoseok, Werewolf!Jungkook, Omega!Jungkook
Genre: Fantasy!AU, Werewolf!AU, Witch!AU, friends to lovers, extreme slow burn, mutual pining, angst, fluff, eventual smut, 18+ only
Word Count: 23.8k+
Synopsis: Across the four realms of Lustra lies the enchanted Bangtan Forest, homeland of the southern Foxglove pack and a place whispered about as the “land of magic.” It is also the domain of the Bridd, a line of witches bound by an ancient curse and entrusted as the forest’s sacred guardians. Y/N, the newest Bridd, inherited her role far too young. Now grown, she is honored by the wolves as the most powerful witch they have ever known. Yet beneath the reverence and power lives a woman who must choose between the weight of her destiny and the longings of her heart.
Warnings: blood, witchcraft, shapeshifters, childhood memories, yearning, pining, emotional constipation, magic, talking animals, spirit guides, PTSD, negative self talk, gossiping, meddling woodland friends, unrequited love (or is it?), dreaming of him, long haired Jimin, that will be a reoccurring warning, mating system, politics, injured character, sick character, nightmares, whimsy, bickering, Shiloh is so iconic, Paganism, let me know if i missed anything...
A/N: Thanks for reading!
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Y/N was sitting at her dining table when the morning found her. The sun came first through the high black branches, then over the frosted meadow, then along the sill; only after that did they venture into the cottage, setting pale gold on the floorboards, on the backs of chairs, on the worn stones of the hearth, and finally upon the enormous round table where Y/N had taken her tea.
It was a peculiar table, and the sort of table no tidy-minded person would ever have chosen if he had begun with measurements, color schemes, or any of those sensible things by which houses are so often made dull. It was too large for the cottage, much too round to be useful in a corner, and stained a deep, stubborn teal that had resisted soap, sanding, charms, powders, moon-water, muttered threats, and one rather shameful experiment involving vinegar, a silver spoon, and a great deal of misplaced confidence. The color remained exactly as it had always been, clinging to the wood with the firm cheerfulness of an old joke that refused to stop being funny.
The surface bore all the marks of a life thoroughly lived. There were pale rings left by teacups, dark scars from knives, dents where jars had been dropped in haste, and three blackened places where candles had behaved badly during storms. Its legs, absurdly grand for so battered a thing, were carved with curling leaves and little beasts whose faces had worn down over the years until they appeared to be looking out at the world in sleepy astonishment.
It matched nothing—not the chairs, not the rug, not the cupboards, not the old blue pitcher by the stove, not the brass bell without a tongue, and certainly not the footstool embroidered with foxes by someone who had clearly never seen a fox but had loved the idea of them very much.
But Aldara had loved the table, and that was enough.
Because Aldara had loved it, Y/N kept it as faithfully as if it had been made from the wood of some tree that grew in the courts of heaven. She cleaned it, defended it, and spoke rather sharply to anyone who suggested, even kindly, that perhaps it was time for something smaller, plainer, newer, or less teal. There were many things in the cottage like that—things which had outlived usefulness, fashion, convenience, and, in some cases, good sense, but had not outlived meaning. The cottage did not look arranged so much as gathered. Every shelf, chair, jar, cracked cup, and faded curtain seemed to have come there carrying a story under one arm and no intention whatever of leaving.
The chairs around the table were no better behaved than the table itself. One had armrests carved into the heads of wolves, a gift from Hoseok after a winter hunt that had begun with boasting and ended with three people stuck in a tree until sunrise. Another had once been painted with stars and moons, though time had softened them into cloudy smudges, and one leg was shorter than the others, so that it rocked if anyone sat down too quickly or breathed with too much confidence. A third chair was blackened along one side from an alchemical mishap that Y/N still insisted had not been her fault, though nobody who had been present believed her, and nobody who had not been present believed her either. On damp evenings, if one pressed close to the charred edge, it still smelled faintly of sage, smoke, and embarrassment.
None of the chairs matched. None of them seemed to wish to. Y/N had always thought this one of their better qualities.
The windows were shut against the morning, for late January had no manners and would come straight into a person’s bones if invited too freely. Still, a narrow pane near the stove had been cracked open to let out the old hearth-smoke, and through that little opening the cold slipped in. It smelled of snow, wet bark, woodsmoke, and the hard iron sleep of frozen earth. The curtains moved only a little, lifting and falling as if the cottage itself were breathing carefully, not wanting to wake too much of the winter outside.
Beyond the glass, the meadow lay under its thin white covering. It was not one of those deep, swallowing snows that buried fences and made paths into guesses, but it had softened the world all the same. White gathered in the hollows of the field and along the low stone wall. The grasses stood through it in brittle golden tufts, bent and rimed with frost. The dead heads of foxglove rattled faintly near the fence when the wind moved through them, while the bluebells slept under the hard ground and would sleep for weeks yet. Poppies and daisies were only promises kept deep in the soil. Even the trees seemed less like trees than dark thoughts sketched in charcoal and silver, their bare branches holding small jewels of ice where the night fog had frozen.
Imbolc was only a week away.
Perhaps, Y/N thought, she ought to write to Jin today and ask him to bring extra firewood. He would laugh, of course. She could hear him already, bright as a bell and twice as troublesome.
You live in a forest, Y/N. It is rather famous for having wood.
And he would say it with that impossible sideways grin of his, the one that made rebuke feel like an invitation and foolishness feel like a holiday. He would arrive late, carrying half the forest under one arm and pretending the whole thing had been her idea, and then he would make dreadful toasts while Yoongi pretended not to enjoy them.
But perhaps this year she would surprise him. Perhaps this year she would really do it. She would host her own Imbolc fire. Nothing grand. Nothing with banners or musicians or any ceremony that required people to stand solemnly while pretending their feet were not freezing. Just a proper fire beneath the clean winter dark, a kettle of spiced cider, honey cakes if she remembered them, and enough light to honor the turning of the season.
The thought pleased her. It pleased her so much that she said it aloud, because spoken intentions had weight, and Y/N had always believed that words, once released into the air, began looking for ways to become true.
“This year,” she said into her tea, “I shall host something for Imbolc.”
The cottage listened politely.
Then, because Y/N knew herself very well and had lived with herself long enough not to be fooled by grand declarations made before breakfast, she added, “And I shall not forget.”
The cottage accepted this too, with the same quiet tact.
A moment later, she made a little face at herself and took another sip. Honeysuckle tea spread warm and sweet over her tongue. She had meant to host a gathering the year before, and the year before that, and once she had gone so far as to write down a list. The list had then vanished under a stack of pressed flowers and been rediscovered in autumn by a beetle who appeared to find it inspiring.
“No,” she said firmly, as though speaking to the future version of herself who would almost certainly be elbow-deep in poultice or frog bones when Imbolc arrived. “Not this time.”
Her favorite chair—if one could call a chair favorite without offending all the others—had been angled beside the window for so many years that the floor beneath it had faded in its shape. From there, she could see the meadow rolling away from the cottage in a white, winter hush. Frost clung to every blade of standing grass, making the field glitter as though the night had spilled a box of tiny stars and forgotten to gather them again. Near the fence, last summer’s stems stood brown and hollow, and beneath the snow the sleeping beds held their secrets.
The sight stirred something in her that was not quite happiness and not quite sorrow. She saw herself suddenly, not as she was now, but as she had been: barefoot in summer, wind-burned and wild-haired, running through that same meadow with both arms flung wide, as if she meant to catch the whole sky against her chest. The grass had been taller then, and she had been shorter. Clover had thickened the air with sweetness. Bees had moved sleepily from bloom to bloom. Her laughter had flown all the way to the tree line, where birds startled up from the branches in a flurry of indignant wings.
Yoongi had been there in those days, grumbling even as a child. He had possessed the solemn disapproval of a very small old man and the tender heart of a saint who did not wish anyone to know about it. He complained about mud while stepping directly into it to pull her out. He scolded her for climbing too high, then climbed higher himself to prove the branch was unsafe. He hid sweets in his sleeves and pretended to be baffled when they ended up in her pockets.
Then had come Jin, bright and careless and charming enough to be forgiven for nearly anything, smelling always faintly of citrus peel, sun-warmed wool, and mischief. And Wendy, with hair that carried the salt of the sea no matter how far inland she wandered, leaving damp marks on their books and turning every dull afternoon into an expedition.
By the time they were half-grown, the four of them had become inseparable in the way only children can be, before the world teaches people to divide themselves into duties, homes, griefs, and silences. They had belonged to one another without ceremony. No oath had bound them. No spell had stitched them together. It had been something simpler and stronger than either: the easy gravity of shared youth. They had believed then that the world was wide because it meant to make room for them.
Y/N lowered her cup.
Of course, they had grown. Everyone did, though it was a great inconvenience and almost always happened before one was finished with being young. Life had drawn them away by degrees, gently at first and then with a firmer hand. Yoongi had his kitchen in the deep woods, where every loaf of bread seemed to come out tasting faintly of loyalty. Jin followed sunlight wherever it led, which meant he arrived late, departed early, and always left some warmth behind him. Wendy belonged to the ocean as surely as shells belonged to the tide.
And Y/N belonged here—to the cottage, to the meadow, to the forest, to the animals, to the rituals, to the old bargains and the small healings, to the invisible chains of responsibility she had learned to wear lightly, so that others might mistake them for ribbons.
They would never again be exactly what they had been. She had accepted that long ago, but acceptance, she had discovered, did not always keep a thing from hurting.
From across the room came the soft scrape of talons on wood, and Y/N smiled before she turned.
Shiloh stood on her perch beside the kitchen window, pale feathers puffed around her like a shawl. The owl’s eyes were narrowed with the weary dignity possessed only by creatures who slept in daylight and disapproved of everyone else’s schedule.
“I’m going to sleep for a while,” Shiloh announced, her voice thick with drowsiness. “Wake me if you need me.”
“You should sleep outside,” Y/N said, in the tone of someone who knew she would not be obeyed but felt morally improved by saying the thing anyway. “I’ll be using the kitchen soon, and I might wake you.”
Shiloh ruffled herself with enormous offense. “I beg your pardon.”
Owls did not beg for anything, and familiars even less so. Before Y/N could answer, Shiloh spread her wings and swept through the open window in a pale blur, vanishing into the morning with all the wounded grandeur of a queen exiled by fools.
“You are dramatic even for an owl,” Y/N called after her.
There was no answer, unless the sharp rustle of wings in the trees could be counted as one.
The cottage settled into a quieter quiet after Shiloh left. It was not empty. Y/N’s home was never empty. It held all the little sounds that made solitude bearable: a kettle ticking as it cooled, herbs shifting in their bundles above the hearth, a floorboard sighing under the memory of someone’s step, and the faint scratch of a mouse in the wall whom Y/N had been meaning to evict for three weeks but had not done because he seemed polite.
Beyond the windows, the forest breathed in its winter sleep. Branch touched branch. Ice loosened by slow degrees. Roots spoke to roots beneath the frozen ground in a language that trees remembered and people mostly forgot.
Y/N’s hearing was not so keen as Shiloh’s, nor as sharp as that of the wolves who moved through Bangtan like white shadows, but it had always been better than ordinary. She could tell the difference between a rabbit under the hedge and the spirit fox that sometimes lingered near her land. She knew the dry skitter of frozen leaves, the soft fall of snow slipping from a branch, and the careful tread of deer on crusted ground. When she was younger, she had been rather proud of it. Too proud, perhaps.
At twelve, on one hot afternoon thick with flies and golden light, she had declared before Jin that she could hear wings half a mile away and the footfall of a wolf long before it reached the clearing. He had laughed and called her a showoff.
He had not meant it cruelly. Jin rarely meant things cruelly then. His laughter had been bright and passing, like a coin tossed into water. But she remembered the small burn of embarrassment, the sudden knowledge that a person could reveal too much of herself simply by being pleased with what she was. She had smiled, because children learn very early to smile when they are stung in places no one can see, and after that, she had not boasted anymore.
Now, many years later, the memory only made her laugh softly into her cup.
“Showoff,” she whispered, tasting the word as if it belonged to another life.
The sunlight shifted. It traveled along the table, deepening the teal stain and catching in the shallow scars of the wood until the whole thing seemed lit from beneath like a lantern. Outside, winter held fast, but beneath it, spring had begun its first secret work. Buds tightened on the branches. Clouds drifted like wool torn thin. A brave and foolish bee, drunk on the mere idea of flowers, bumped itself against the window frame and wandered away again.
For the first time in weeks, Y/N did nothing.
This was rarer than it ought to have been. There were always poultices to mix, charms to mend, creatures to soothe, spirits to bargain with, letters to answer, knives to sharpen, candles to dress, and jars to label before she forgot what was in them and had to determine by smell whether something was medicine or supper. But that morning, no task had yet found her. No ritual tugged at her sleeve. No urgency curled like smoke at the edge of her mind.
She simply sat.
Her tea cooled. The meadow glittered. The cottage breathed.
By the time the second cup had gone lukewarm and the third had nearly done the same, she saw something move at the edge of the field.
At first, she took it for light. That was easily done in winter. Sunlight had a habit of putting on shapes in the forest. It flashed on ice and looked like eyes. It caught on frosted bark and pretended to be silver thread. It lay across old stones until they seemed to shift under it. Y/N narrowed her eyes and set her cup down carefully.
The pale shape stood half in the trees and half out of them, thin as a breath against the dark trunks.
Then it moved again.
Not with the easy, floating grace of mist. Not with the sway of grass.
It limped.
Y/N’s hand went at once to the windowsill.
The shape staggered from the shadow of the trees into the open meadow. Sunlight slid across its pelt and turned it briefly to silver. It was a wolf—a large one, pale-furred, long-legged, and moving with the tight, careful steps of an animal who had learned that the ground might hurt him if touched in the wrong way.
Then came the sound.
It was very small for so great a creature, a thin, broken whimper, quickly swallowed as though pride had leapt up and clamped jaws around it. But Y/N heard it, and it hooked into her chest with cruel little claws.
She leaned out the cracked window. “Are you hurt?”
Her voice had changed without her willing it to. The idle softness had gone from it. What remained was the calm, low certainty she used with frightened birds, wounded deer, children with cut knees, and once with an outraged river spirit who had caught his elbow in a fish trap.
The wolf froze. His ears lifted. The crying stopped.
Y/N did not move too quickly. One did not startle a hurt creature, especially one whose teeth were longer than one’s fingers.
“If you are hurt,” she said more gently, “I can help you. I have supplies. Enough to patch you quickly.”
The meadow seemed to hold its breath. A pale winter butterfly wandered between them, unconcerned with injury, dignity, or the delicate negotiations between witch and wolf. It drifted over a dead stem, reconsidered the entire matter, and went elsewhere.
The wolf’s eyes caught the sun. Amber. Sharp. Familiar.
Something stirred uneasily in her memory. Not certainty. Not yet. Only the tug of a thread. The pale wolf from the other night, perhaps—the one who had returned her lantern and vanished before she could decide whether to thank him, scold him, or ask why he had been carrying it in the first place.
White wolves were not strange in Bangtan. Jimin was fair-furred. So was old Ahn, whose pelt shone beneath moonlight like frost. But the thought of Jimin rose before she could stop it, stubborn and unwelcome, and Y/N grimaced faintly at herself.
The wolf limped nearer, slowly and deliberately, with far more pride than was sensible for someone leaving blood in the snow. When he reached the wall beneath her window, she could see the injury plainly. Blood streaked his hind leg, vivid against the white fur. More darkened his side, though he held himself as if nothing at all were wrong and the whole matter were a minor inconvenience caused by the weather.
“Oh,” Y/N breathed, and the sound held more sorrow than she meant it to.
The wolf looked away, as if offended by pity.
“Come around to the door,” she said. “You may need to shift to get inside.”
At that, he stiffened.
The change was subtle but unmistakable. His head lifted. His shoulders tightened. Something proud and hot flickered through him like a coal stirred under ash. Wolves could shift, yes, but they did not always do it gladly. Not when wounded. Not before someone outside their own. Not when the shifting itself might expose more than skin.
“All right,” Y/N said at once. “You do not have to. I can bring you in another way.”
His gaze returned to her.
“It feels odd the first time,” she admitted, because honesty was kinder than reassurance when magic was involved. “But it is safe. I promise.”
The wolf tilted his head. His tail gave the smallest uncertain twitch, which might have meant interest, suspicion, or that he had lost too much blood to argue properly. Then, after a long pause, it wagged once.
Y/N smiled. “Good. Hold still for me.”
She closed her eyes, and the world changed when she did. Not outwardly, not to anyone watching from the meadow, but behind her lids, the cottage bloomed in clear detail. She saw the red and white rug before the hearth, worn soft by years of feet and paws. She saw the mismatched chairs around the teal table, the sewing chair with its cushion gone thin in the middle, and the row of knives above the fireplace stones, each blade polished and named. She saw the kitchen shelves crowded with jars of herbs, roots, bones, salt, feathers, oils, seeds, and things that would have looked alarming to anyone who did not know how useful a dried beetle could be.
She saw the altar beneath the windows, the candles guttering lavender and gold, the little dish of river stones, the sprig of rosemary tied with red thread. She saw sunlight lying on the floorboards like spilled honey, and only when the shape of home was whole in her mind did she begin to murmur.
The words came easily. They always had. They belonged to a language older than Lustra and older than the courts that pretended to rule it. Older, perhaps, than the first witch who learned that air could open if spoken to properly. The chant slipped from her tongue soft and lilting, not commanding the world so much as persuading it to remember that doors were only agreements.
With two fingers, she traced an outline in the air.
The space before the wolf shimmered. Light gathered there, pale and thin at first, then thickening like a curtain woven from moonlit water. The edges trembled. The center grew transparent. Y/N parted it with a gentle push.
The wolf stared.
For one unguarded moment, all the dignity went out of him. His tail wagged faster, and fascination brightened his eyes until he looked, despite the blood and the size of him, almost young. He sniffed the glowing threshold, then stepped through with more courage than caution.
An instant later, he stood beside her hearth.
He was enormous.
Y/N blinked up at him. The wolf blinked down at her.
He took up half the room.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I may need to shrink you a little.”
His ears twitched.
“I know. I know,” she said. “Terribly rude of me.”
The wolf sat down with great care, as if to prove that he was cooperative, civilized, and only accidentally the size of a small pony.
“Very gracious of you,” Y/N said.
She lifted one hand. Blue light pulsed softly through the room, cool and bright as winter dusk. It ran over his fur, passed through the air, brushed the walls, and faded. When it was gone, the wolf remained large, but no longer impossible. He was still magnificent, still broad-chested and powerful, but now he looked less like a creature who might knock over the ceiling beams by sighing.
“There,” Y/N said. “Manageable.”
The wolf gave her a look that suggested he did not care to be called manageable.
“Lie down,” she instructed.
To her mild surprise, he obeyed at once. He lowered himself onto the floor before the hearth with a slow, tired exhale and rested his head on his paws.
The sight softened something in her.
Whatever unease she usually felt near wolves—whatever old caution lived in her bones and woke at the scent of them—was swallowed by the plain fact of his pain. There was blood on her floor now, dark little marks against the wood. There was a torn place in his side. There were wounds where no wound ought to be.
She knelt beside him and parted the fur around his hind leg. The blood was tacky beneath her fingers. The skin below was hot. Bite marks punctured deep through the muscle, and claw marks raked cruelly along the flank. These were not the scrapes of a hunt gone poorly. Not brambles. Not a fall. Not even the ordinary brutality of a scuffle. This had been done with purpose.
Her stomach tightened.
“You really are something,” she murmured, partly to him and partly to herself. “Sneaking out, getting into fights, bleeding in my meadow. What would your mother say?”
The wolf made a muffled sound into his paws. It was not quite a growl. Not quite a sigh. It sounded, impossibly, like a grumble of amusement.
Y/N looked up.
His eyes met hers: amber, watchful, intelligent, and warmer than she expected. There was a person looking out through them. Not merely a wolf with clever instincts, but someone aware and guarded and curious beneath all that pale fur. Again, the thought of Jimin flickered through her mind, and again she pushed it away, though not quite as firmly as before.
“Stay,” she said, though he had made no attempt to rise.
She crossed to the shelf beside the stove and took down a small tin. When she opened it, the cottage filled with the clean, green smell of comfrey, sage, and goldenroot. It was a humble salve by the standards of elaborate healers and proud witches who preferred their medicines to glow dramatically in crystal bowls, but Y/N trusted it more than many spells. It had soothed burns, sealed cuts, calmed bruises, eased bites, and once restored feeling to Yoongi’s thumb after an incident with a cursed pastry fork.
It had earned its place.
“Well then, little wolf,” she said, returning to his side, “let us get acquainted.”
He looked at her.
“I shall begin,” she continued, dipping her fingers into the cool cream. “And next time it will be your turn.”
The wolf’s eyes narrowed faintly, as if to ask whether there would indeed be a next time.
Y/N pretended not to notice.
She smoothed the salve carefully along the torn skin. He did not flinch. His breath changed, growing deeper, but he held himself still with astonishing discipline. The fur beneath her hand was thick and soft, warmer than it looked, and the heat of him came up through her fingers like the heat of banked coals. She worked slowly, parting the fur, cleaning the wound, pressing the salve where it needed to go.
“People call me Bridd,” she said after a while.
The wolf listened. The room listened too, in the way rooms do when secrets are spoken in them.
“But if you are going to spend time here,” she went on, “you may call me Y/N. Bridd sounds far too formal for friends.”
The wolf blinked once, slow and solemn.
It felt like an answer.
“My aunt gave me that name when I came to Lustra,” Y/N said. “No one ever really discovered how I arrived. Not properly. Aldara used to say the Gods guided me.” Her mouth softened around the memory. “She said when she saw me, she simply knew, as if she had been waiting for me all her life.”
The wolf remained still, but his gaze had changed. It was not pity. Y/N would have resented pity. It was something quieter. Attention, perhaps. Or recognition.
The salve in the tin emptied more quickly than she had hoped. She sighed, rose, and went to fetch another. Then another after that, because the wounds were longer than they had first appeared and wolves, apparently, contained an unreasonable amount of surface. When she turned back with both tins in hand, she found him staring at her with such a human expression—one brow lifted, his mouth slightly open, his eyes full of patient judgment—that she laughed.
“You look as though you are about to lecture me,” she said. “And I would remind you that I am not the one who lost a fight.”
His tail thumped once against the floor.
“I wish I knew your name,” she said, kneeling again. “Or even whether I ought to call you he or she. Calling you wolf feels horribly impolite, and little wolf is beginning to sound like an insult when you take up half my hearth.”
The sound that came from him then startled her so badly she nearly dropped the tin.
It was low and warm, rising from his chest in a rumble that shook through the floorboards.
Laughter.
Y/N froze. “You can laugh?”
The wolf’s amber eyes gleamed.
“Oh,” she said, sitting back slightly. “Well. That changes things.”
He blinked at her, visibly pleased with himself.
“All right,” she said, gathering her composure with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. “Let us be practical. Shake your head for no. Nod for yes.”
The wolf lifted his head.
“Are you a woman?”
He shook his head.
“Fluid?” Y/N guessed. “Some wolves are.”
Another shake.
“So,” she said, smiling in spite of herself, “you are a man.”
The wolf dipped his head in a neat, deliberate nod. It was just shy of smug.
“Good,” Y/N said. “That is a start.”
She gestured for him to roll over.
His ears went back.
“Do not look at me like that,” she said. “I need to see the other side.”
The wolf let out a long, suffering breath, as though no creature in the history of the forest had ever been so greatly inconvenienced, and flopped onto his side with dramatic resignation.
Y/N stared.
“This side is worse.”
He avoided her gaze.
“You could have told me.”
The wolf rolled his eyes.
He actually rolled them.
“Oh, don’t you dare,” Y/N said, though a laugh escaped her. “You wolves and your pride. You would rather bleed through my rug than admit you need help.”
He snorted, offended.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “You are very noble and terribly mistreated. Hold still.”
The wounds along his ribs were deeper. Some had clotted poorly beneath the fur, and when she cleaned them, fresh blood welled dark and quick. Y/N’s humor faded. She leaned closer, her brows drawing together.
Bite marks. Claw marks. Cruel angles.
The attack had not been clean or honorable. Whoever had done this had not merely wished to win. They had wished to ruin.
A small anger kindled in her—not loud, for Y/N’s anger rarely was. It burned low and blue, the way certain flames burn hottest when they do not leap.
“You poor thing,” she whispered.
The wolf’s ear flicked, but he did not look away this time.
She rinsed a cloth in the basin beside her. The water clouded pink, then red, rippling with each movement of her hand. Firelight caught the surface and broke itself into trembling pieces. She cleaned one wound and then another, slow enough not to frighten him, firm enough to do good. The salve gleamed pale on her fingers, its sharp green scent mingling with iron, smoke, lavender candle-wax, and the wild musk of wolf.
He flinched once when she pressed near a deep tear below his ribs. Only once. The muscles under her hand tightened, then gradually released.
“I know,” she murmured. “I know. Nearly done.”
She worked along his side, down toward his flank, over bruises that darkened beneath the fur. When she pressed gently near his hind joint, his leg jerked. Y/N startled, then laughed, soft and bright.
“Oh. So that tickles, does it?”
His ear flicked.
“Good,” she said. “Your reflexes are working.”
The wolf made a low sound that might have been complaint.
“I am choosing to take that as gratitude.”
He huffed.
Outside, the forest continued about its morning. The thrush sang again. Leaves whispered against one another in the wind. Somewhere far off, water moved under ice and over stones. But inside the cottage, time seemed to draw close around the two of them, like a shawl pulled over chilled shoulders. There was only the fire, the basin, the smell of herbs, the warmth of the animal beside her, and the steady work of her hands.
When at last the bleeding stopped and the swelling began to ease beneath the salve’s subtle shimmer, Y/N sat back on her heels.
“There,” she said.
The word was small. Too small, perhaps, for the long quiet that had passed between them. But it was what she had.
She wiped her hands on a cloth and examined him with the stern eye of someone who expected healing to behave itself. The wounds were not gone, but they were clean. The worst of the bleeding had ceased. The salve had settled into the torn places, drawing the heat down and leaving a faint silver sheen along the edges.
“You are good to go,” she said, patting his side lightly.
The wolf did not move.
At first she thought he had not understood. Then she saw that he understood perfectly. His ears had flattened a little, and the muscles along his shoulders had gone tense in a conflicted way. He knew he ought to leave. Of course he did. Packs pulled on wolves like tides pulled on the sea. Someone would notice. Someone might already be looking.
The fire crackled softly, sending amber light up the walls and across the low beams of the ceiling. It gleamed along the knives above the hearth, shone in the teal scars of the table, and turned the wolf’s white fur to gold. Outside, the meadow rested under frost and old snow, bare and beautiful in the hard morning light.
For a little while, there was no Bridd and no stranger-wolf, no pack, no name withheld, no old fear, no hidden wound deeper than the ones she had dressed. There was only Y/N in her odd cottage, with herbs on her hands and sunlight on her floor, and a wounded creature resting his head in her lap because, against all the hard sense of the world, he had decided to trust her.
They remained that way until the fire had eaten another inch of wood and the sunlight had moved from the table to the floor, laying itself across the boards in long, pale stripes.
Y/N did not know how much time had passed. It seemed to her that time had gone soft around them, as warm and drowsy as the wolf’s breath against her knees. Her hand moved absently over his head, smoothing the fur between his ears, and every so often he made that low, contented sound again, quiet enough that she felt it more than heard it.
But at last his ears twitched.
Not from comfort this time.
He lifted his head, slow and reluctant, and looked toward the window.
Y/N’s hand stilled.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”
The wolf did not move at once. He only looked back at her, amber eyes warm in the firelight, and for one foolish moment she almost told him to stay.
There was room.
There was always room, somehow, in the cottage. The mismatched chairs made room for one another. The shelves made room for one more jar, one more book, one more strange little relic with nowhere else to go. Surely there could be room for a wounded wolf by the hearth.
But wolves belonged to their own, even when they wandered. Someone, somewhere, must have been missing him.
Y/N gave his head one last careful stroke.
“Come on then, little wolf. Before I become selfish.”
He rose with some stiffness, though the salve had already done him good. His limp remained, but it no longer dragged so cruelly through his body. He followed her to the windowed side of the room, where morning still poured pale and cold through the cottage. Y/N lifted her hand and whispered the old words again.
The doorway opened like a curtain of pale water.
Beyond it waited the meadow, silvered with frost and old snow.
The wolf paused at the threshold. Then he turned and pressed his cold nose once against her wrist.
It was such a small thanks that it hurt more than any grander thing could have.
“You’re welcome,” Y/N whispered.
Then he passed through the light and stood once more in the meadow. For a breath, he looked back at her, white fur bright against the winter field, amber eyes holding hers with an almost human gravity. Then he turned toward the trees and slipped away, moving slower than he had come, but steadier.
Y/N watched until the forest took him.
Only when the last pale flicker of him vanished between the trunks did she let the doorway close.
The cottage felt strangely large afterward.
She stood there a moment with salve on her sleeves, blood drying faintly at her wrists, and the warmth of him still lingering in her lap as if he had left part of himself behind. Then the kettle gave a small, practical click from the stove, and the spell of stillness broke.
“Well,” she said to the room, because there was no one else to say it to, “that was unexpected.”
The room, being used to unexpected things, did not argue.
Y/N washed her hands in warm water scented with rosemary, watching the pink threads of blood loosen from her skin and curl away. Then she tied her hair back, rolled up her sleeves, and went to the long worktable beneath the hanging herbs.
There was medicine to make.
Comfrey first, dried from summer’s stores, then goldenroot, then a pinch of powdered pearlcap mushroom for swelling. She moved gently but with purpose, crushing leaves in the mortar until the cottage filled with green, living fragrance—a small borrowed memory of the warmth still buried beneath January’s frost.
Outside, the morning went on shining cold and bright. Inside, Y/N worked with a small, secret smile tugging at her mouth.
Every now and then, despite herself, she glanced toward the window.
The meadow remained empty.
Still, she set an extra tin of salve aside.
Just in case.
Imbolc came to the Bangtan Forest on a cold and wandering breeze.
It was the sort of breeze that had not yet made up its mind whether it belonged to winter or spring, and so it behaved a little like both. It came out of the north with cold fingers and a sharp nose, but it had a hopeful heart. It moved over the meadow around Y/N’s cottage, bending the stiff brown grasses one way and then another, as if searching beneath them for the first green blade brave enough to rise.
By midafternoon, the meadow shone beneath a thin, wintry light. It was not the rich gold of summer, which made everything look fat and sleepy and pleased with itself, nor even the gentle brightness of true spring, when the world seemed newly washed and still smelling of rain. This light was paler, strained through frost, a silvery kind of sunlight that made every stone and stem look thoughtful. Ice crystals clung to the tips of the grasses and flashed whenever the breeze troubled them, first like tiny knives and then, when the sun softened, like fallen stars. The sky was a pale, high blue, the color of breath on glass, and at the edge of the meadow the forest stood with its branches bare and listening.
The trees always seemed to listen on Imbolc.
That was the feeling of the holiday in Lustra. It was not yet warmth, but the promise of warmth. Not yet blooming, but the held breath before blooming began. It was the hour in the year when winter loosened one finger from the throat of the earth, and somewhere deep below frozen mud, black roots, and the brown lace of dead leaves, life turned over in its sleep.
The cottage knew it too.
A thin stream of incense drifted from Y/N’s open window, curling into the cold afternoon in blue-gray ribbons. Yarrow, hawthorn, and a pinch of cinnamon, because cinnamon had always seemed to Y/N like a small edible flame, and therefore suitable for any holy day that involved coaxing warmth back into the world. The smoke twisted once around the window latch, seemed to hesitate, then slipped out into the air and vanished, as if it had gone to whisper instructions to the clouds.
She had lit the incense before sunrise. It was part of the old custom, though Y/N had long suspected that Aldara had invented at least half the old customs she taught and merely worn a grave expression until everyone believed her. This had been one of Aldara’s great talents. She could say, “It is the old way,” while holding a broom backward, and three grown witches would at once begin sweeping in the same direction.
Still, Y/N kept the customs. One did not stop doing a thing simply because it might once have begun as someone’s mischief. Many sacred things, she thought, had probably started that way.
So she had risen in the blue dark, shivering in her nightdress while the floorboards bit cold through the soles of her feet, and burned herbs at the window to coax the day along. She had whispered thanks to the sleeping fields, poured milk into a little clay bowl for the spirits beneath the elder hedge, and swept the threshold three times: once for winter leaving, once for spring arriving, and once because Shiloh had said there was still dirt by the door.
Outside, the bonfire pit waited in the meadow. Its ring of stones sat half sunk in frost, and old snow still lingered in the shaded places between them. Y/N had cleared the pit that morning with damp boots, cold fingers, and a determination that had lasted almost as long as her patience. Frozen leaves, dead stems, gray ash, half-melted slush, and one offended beetle had all been removed. The beetle, who had apparently considered the pit a respectable winter residence, objected by turning in circles and then departing under a leaf with the air of someone betrayed by civilization.
By nightfall, if the weather was kind and if Jin did not take charge in some dreadful decorative way, those stones would hold a fire tall enough to crack open the year and let the first rumor of spring come pouring through.
Inside the cottage, however, winter had already been defeated.
The little house had bloomed into the cheerful disorder that only holy days and beloved guests can excuse. The teal table had been dragged to the center of the room, where it stood looking enormous, stubborn, and important. Its scratched surface had been scrubbed until the old stains shone beneath the candlelight like a lake under moonwater. Cushions of every shape and questionable origin had been scattered over the floor. There were round cushions, square cushions, embroidered cushions, faded cushions, one cushion with a stitched hare on it, and one Y/N was fairly sure had once belonged to Hoseok and had been left behind during a rainstorm three winters ago.
Every shelf had been dusted. Every candle had been refreshed. The altar beneath the window had been scrubbed until the wood gleamed softly, and a new braid of sweetgrass had been tied at the base of the little goddess statue. The sweetgrass filled the room with a fresh green scent that stood bravely against the cold still hidden in the cottage walls. Small bowls of milk and honey sat among sprigs of rosemary, dried violets, and polished stones. White ribbons had been tied to the window latch. A little dish of salt waited near the door. The whole cottage seemed dressed not grandly, but lovingly, which is usually better.
Shiloh watched over all of this from the rafter beam.
The owl had recovered fully from what Y/N privately thought of as the Great Puppy Incident, though Shiloh herself preferred to call it an assault, a tragedy, and proof that young animals should be licensed. Her feathers had grown sleek again. Her dignity had returned to its usual alarming size. She had resumed her proper place as tyrant of the household.
“That cushion needs angling,” Shiloh said.
Y/N, kneeling beside the hearth with soot on her nose, moved the cushion half an inch.
Ignoring Shiloh only made Shiloh more dramatic, but Y/N had long ago decided that drama was part of the bird’s digestion and must be allowed to pass naturally.
The kitchen had been awake since eight o’clock, which was earlier than any decent kitchen ought to be asked to wake in February. Yet Imbolc demanded food, and food demanded labor, and labor demanded that Y/N mutter under her breath while tracking frost across the floorboards for the fourth time that morning. Pots simmered. Butter hissed around herbs in a little iron pan. Steam rose against the windows and blurred the meadow beyond into a dream of silver, brown, and pale gold.
The table had filled by degrees with dishes, jars, bowls, bundles, and little plates of things that looked like offerings but were, for the most part, supper. Now, with the worst of the cooking finished, Y/N stood at the sink with her sleeves shoved past her elbows, rinsing the last of the bowls. Steam curled around her face and turned her cheeks pink. Her cold nose had gone shiny at the tip. Wisps of hair had escaped their pins and clung damply to her temples. Her apron, which had been clean at sunrise, now bore flour, soot, herb dust, one streak of honey, and a green smear she could not identify and had decided not to think about.
A wilted violet petal, which had somehow attached itself to her sleeve in the morning and refused to be removed by shaking, brushing, or insult, chose that moment to give up its long struggle and drop into the dishwater.
Plop.
Y/N stared at it. “Really? Now?”
From the rafters came Shiloh’s voice, smooth with satisfaction. “Darling, if I plucked every stray flower you dragged into this house, there would be nothing left for your table, your altar, your pockets, or your hair.”
Y/N muttered something uncomplimentary about owls and turned back to the dishes.
The cottage smelled like the holiday itself. There was the sharp green bite of foraged winter leaves, the warm butteriness of eggs, the deep brown comfort of mushrooms, the sweetness of rose and rice, the smoke of the hearth, and beneath it all the colder smell of the world outside waiting to thaw. Every counter had been claimed. On one side stood a great bowl of winter greens: dandelion, violet leaf, garlic mustard, chickweed, and the arugula and butter lettuce Jin had brought days before with a flourish, as though he had personally persuaded them to grow.
Beside it waited a golden frittata made with Thelma’s eggs, still warm enough to fog the plate beneath it. A platter of ramps and dame’s rocket cooled near the window, sharp and clean as the first water running under ice. Oyster mushrooms, fiddleheads, and herbs gathered in earthy little heaps, some dried from the summer before and some brought by Yoongi only yesterday, wrapped in paper and tied with twine because Yoongi made even vegetables look properly behaved.
Dessert waited apart, as dessert often does, with the quiet confidence of something certain it would be loved. There was a chèvre cheesecake pale as melting snow, its top glossed with honey and sugared thyme, and beside it a rose rice pudding for Wendy, its petals floating on the surface like little pink boats.
But Y/N’s eyes kept straying toward the pantry.
She did not want them to. There were many other things to look at: the polished plates, the newly arranged candles, the sweetgrass braid, the little goddess statue, the meadow beyond the window where the light had begun to lean toward evening. But again and again her gaze slipped to the pantry door.
Behind it, on the middle shelf, sat the hen.
It was already cleaned, already spelled, already preserved under one of Jin’s tidy little charms. A perfectly respectable hen. A plump hen. A hen that, by every ordinary measure, was no longer anyone’s problem but the cook’s.
And yet Y/N did not want to roast it.
She had stood in front of it for nearly ten minutes that morning, arms folded, looking at it with the grim suspicion one might reserve for an enemy who had arrived in disguise. Jin’s voice had repeated in her memory, cheerful and sensible and entirely unhelpful.
It is already done, Y/N. You are honoring it by cooking it. Imbolc needs meat.
Perhaps Imbolc did need meat. Perhaps the old gods liked a table with something hearty at its center. Perhaps Jin was right. He often was, which made him unbearable. But every time Y/N looked at the hen, something in her tightened. It was not disgust exactly. Nor fear. It was simply the feeling that she and the hen had reached an understanding, and the understanding was that they would not be dealing with one another today.
Roasting it herself was out of the question. That felt like challenging the holiday to burst into flames.
At last she had shut the pantry door and whispered, “Nope. Not dealing with that.”
Cordelia always brought fish anyway. Sleek winter trout, usually, silver as frost and smelling of the deep cold places under running water. The wolves would swarm it. Jin would praise it extravagantly. Hoseok, if he came, would complain about bones while eating more than anyone. Taehyung would get a bone stuck in his teeth and pretend he had not. Tradition already had meat enough.
The hen could wait.
Perhaps she would quietly give it to Cordelia later and pretend that had been the plan all along.
Y/N rinsed the last clay bowl, set it in the drying rack, and watched water slide in thin, shimmering trails down her arms. When she flicked her hands dry, droplets scattered into the winter sunlight and flashed like sparks.
“There,” she sighed. “That is the last of it.”
Shiloh hopped down from the rafter with the ceremony of a queen descending into a court she found disappointing but necessary.
For a moment, the cottage settled. Even Shiloh’s feathers flattened into something less theatrical. The fire ticked softly in the hearth. The incense curled upward in a slow blue thread. Outside, the meadow paused in the light, as if holding its breath for evening.
Y/N smoothed her palms over her apron and felt warmth lingering in the fabric. For the first time that day, she allowed herself to stand still and look at what she had made.
The cottage was ready.
Not perfect, of course. Nothing in Y/N’s cottage had ever been perfect and would probably have resented the accusation. But it was warm. It was bright. It smelled of food, herbs, smoke, and hope. It held enough cushions for sore knees, enough chairs for proud backs, enough candles for spirits, and enough food for friends who always claimed they would not eat much and then proved themselves liars.
Imbolc braided people together whether they intended it or not. Y/N often forgot, in the quiet months, where she ended and her strange patchwork of companions began. But on days like this, with the table set and the house waiting, she remembered.
The door opened without a knock.
Yoongi slipped inside the way snow falls: quietly, unassumingly, and somehow already belonging to the place where it lands. He wore soft layers the colors of dusk, river stones, and winter bark. His dark hair was tied loosely at the nape of his neck, though a few strands had escaped and lay across his cheekbones like raven feathers. In his hands he carried a woven basket, and from beneath its linen cover rose a thin curl of steam.
“You brought food,” Y/N said, wiping her hands on her apron as she crossed the room.
Yoongi looked around the cottage once, taking in the table, the cushions, the candles, the absurd number of bowls, and perhaps also the faint desperation in Y/N’s expression.
“We’re the only ones here who don’t eat meat,” he said. “I was being practical.”
“You know I made six dishes already.”
Yoongi set the basket on the teal table with a soft thump. “Arriving empty-handed felt rude.”
His voice was dry as winter wood. His expression, as always, seemed determined not to reveal anything as unruly as affection. But one corner of his mouth moved just enough to betray him.
Y/N leaned over the basket and sniffed dramatically. “Is it cabbage?”
Yoongi gave her a look so flat she nearly laughed.
“No.”
She drooped. “Tragic.”
Then he lifted the linen.
Warmth rose out in a fragrant cloud: roasted carrot, red pepper, garlic, earth, sweetness, and the deep, rich heat of gochujang. It smelled like something that had simmered all morning in a patient pot while snow thought better of falling outside.
“Gochujang and roasted carrot stew,” Yoongi said.
Y/N inhaled as if he had opened a door into paradise. “Oh. That is better.”
The ghost of a smile returned.
He nudged the basket toward her. “Don’t eat it all before everyone else arrives.”
“No promises.”
“Y/N.”
His tone sharpened in the familiar way, like a twig snapping under a boot. It was not a loud rebuke. Yoongi’s scolding was almost always quiet, which somehow made it worse.
She grinned. “Fine. Half.”
“Y/N.”
“It’s Imbolc. Rules don’t apply on Imbolc.”
“They do if you want me to keep sharing.”
She groaned with theatrical suffering, then held out her smallest finger. Yoongi hooked his through it without hesitation. Their fingers touched only briefly, but the touch was warm and ordinary and honest in a way that made Y/N’s heart do something foolish behind her ribs.
“Half,” she conceded.
“Reasonable,” he said.
Then he kicked off his boots near the door, leaving faint specks of thawed mud behind him, and wandered farther into the cottage as though he had always known exactly where to stand.
The door flew open again.
It did not simply open. It announced defeat. It struck the wall with such vigor that a hanging bundle of thyme trembled in alarm, and Jin swept into the cottage like a comet that had become convinced the whole sky existed for its entrance.
His cloak was an outrageous sweep of shimmering gold. It billowed behind him though there was not nearly enough wind indoors to justify it, which meant either he had enchanted it or the cloak had learned vanity from its owner. Even the weak February light seemed to follow him in, brightening at his shoulders and catching in his hair.
“Y/N!” he cried, striding forward with the confidence of a man certain that his arrival had improved the weather. “Tell me you missed me.”
“Moderately,” Y/N said, straightening a stack of plates without looking up.
Jin gasped.
It was not an ordinary gasp. It was the gasp of a prince betrayed, a poet wounded, and a swan informed it was merely a goose.
“You wound me.”
“You’ll live.”
“Will I?” He pressed a hand to his chest and staggered. “Will I truly?”
Before she could move out of range, he swept her into an extravagant embrace and lifted her clean off the floor.
“Jin!” she hissed, laughing despite herself. “Put me down.”
He set her down with a flourish, as though presenting her to an invisible audience.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“For what?”
“For blessing your dreary little cottage with my extraordinary presence.”
“Jin,” she said, rubbing her temple, “it is Imbolc. Please try to behave.”
“I am behaving.” He looked offended by the suggestion otherwise. “Look.”
He swung a small wooden container from the basket on his shoulder and opened it with a flourish worthy of a stage magician producing doves.
“I brought scones.”
Inside sat a neat row of pastries, each one perfectly shaped, their tops brushed with butter and sprinkled with herb sugar. The crystals caught the winter sunlight and glittered like frost that had decided to become delicious. A warm savory scent rose from them: bread, basil, spinach, parsley, and something bright and green that did not belong in February but had somehow been persuaded to attend.
“They have basil, spinach, and parsley,” Jin said reverently, as if naming royal heirs.
Y/N leaned in. “They smell wonderful.”
He preened. Truly preened. His spine straightened. His chin lifted. One hand smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from his cloak. If he had possessed tail feathers, they would have opened.
From above, Shiloh made a dry, pointed sound.
“Absolutely a peacock.”
Jin’s head snapped upward. “I heard that.”
“You were meant to,” Shiloh replied.
He pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Even the birds disrespect me.”
“Especially the birds,” Y/N said, patting his arm.
He sighed as though his burdens were ancient and undeserved. But his mouth softened at the corners, and Y/N knew him well enough to see that he was glad to be there. His happiness showed not in quiet, like Yoongi’s, but in light. He seemed to bring it with him, trailing warmth, noise, and ridiculousness in his wake. He moved around the cottage comfortably, adjusting things she had already arranged, setting his scones beside Yoongi’s stew and nudging the container two inches to the left until it sat perfectly aligned.
A shaft of afternoon sunlight caught in his hair and made him look briefly less like a person and more like a rumor about summer.
“All right,” he declared, surveying the table. “Where is the rest of it? I came ready to be dazzled.”
“You say that every year.”
“And every year,” he said solemnly, “I am.”
She tried to hide her smile and failed.
Jin’s eyes slid toward Yoongi, who had taken it upon himself to alphabetize her spice jars, though no one had asked him and no one but Yoongi had ever believed spices needed governance.
“And Yoongi,” Jin said, “for someone who avoids people, you certainly enjoy feeding them.”
Yoongi did not turn around. He moved a jar of marjoram to the left of mint.
“I like feeding her,” he said.
The cottage went very still around Y/N.
Heat rose up her neck so quickly she wondered whether she had leaned too close to the hearth.
Jin blinked. Then he pointed at Yoongi with the solemn delight of a man witnessing history.
Yoongi shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
Jin looked between them with the expression of someone preparing to become unbearable. Y/N could practically see the speech forming behind his eyes, but something about the gentle quiet of the room, or perhaps the look Yoongi gave him without turning his head, softened the worst of it.
Jin settled for patting Y/N on the shoulder. “Someone get Y/N a chair. She’s about to faint.”
“Certainly. Your face is simply celebrating Imbolc.”
Y/N snatched a bowl and pretended to be very busy with it.
Jin, mercifully, wandered toward the porch and paused to encourage the flowers near the threshold. There were daisies there, absurdly early daisies, peering up through the cold as if they had misunderstood the calendar. Jin bent over them and whispered praise in a voice usually reserved for frightened children and dramatic horses.
Y/N reorganized a stack of bowls that did not need reorganizing and waited for her heartbeat to stop behaving like a trapped sparrow.
It did not.
Then a cool breeze drifted in from the west, tinged with brine and distance. It smelled faintly of sea foam riding beneath the first thaw, and Y/N knew at once what it meant.
Ocean witches.
The grasses beyond the gate rippled in a long shiver, brown at the tips but green at the roots, confused by the mild spell warming the day. Through them came three figures, walking with the steady grace of people who had learned from tides rather than roads.
Cordelia led. She was tall and grounded, dependable in the way a lighthouse is dependable: not soft, exactly, but built to remain when weather lost its temper. Her ginger braids were threaded with shells and opals that clicked faintly as she walked. Winter light skimmed across the pale coral woven through her hair, and the hem of her cloak moved about her ankles as though it had not quite forgotten waves.
Darya came behind her, quick-eyed and quick-moving, with dark hair glinting like stormwater beneath a pale sun. The breeze curled around her ankles as though waiting for instruction. She had the look of a person who noticed everything, trusted very little, and enjoyed herself most when both those things proved useful.
Between them walked a girl Y/N had never seen before.
She could not have been more than eleven. She carried a satchel nearly half her own size, which bulged with the mysterious confidence of bags owned by children. Her eyes were wide. Her steps were light and eager, almost skipping, though she tried very hard not to. Curiosity came off her like heat from a hearth.
Before Cordelia could reach the gate, the girl broke into a run.
“Bridd?” she called breathlessly.
Y/N stepped forward, already smiling. “You must be Belinay.”
The girl nodded so hard her braids bounced. She stopped a few feet away and looked up at Y/N with such reverent astonishment that Y/N had the sudden and uncomfortable sensation of having been mistaken for a monument.
“I wanted to see if you were real,” Belinay said. “Mama says the Bridd is as old as the forest.”
Behind Y/N, Yoongi’s voice drifted dryly from the cottage. “She’s been here longer than Northorn has been a colony.”
Y/N elbowed him sharply without looking back.
“Ow,” Yoongi said, though without surprise.
“I am not that old,” Y/N told the girl.
Belinay’s mouth fell open, as though this information had raised more questions than it answered.
Cordelia reached them then and took Y/N’s hands in both of hers. Her palms were cool and steady, smelling faintly of salt, rope, and winter wind.
“Thank you for having us, Snatcher,” she said warmly. “She’s been begging to meet you for months.”
“I haven’t!” Belinay squeaked. “Only weeks.”
Darya snorted. “You built a shrine.”
Belinay turned scarlet. “It was not a shrine.”
Y/N laughed, and the sound went up into the cold air like a little bell.
“Shrine or no shrine, I am very glad you came.”
Belinay beamed so brightly that she looked as if she had smuggled in a piece of the sun.
After that the cottage filled quickly, the way summer rain fills a dry ditch: softly at first, then all at once. Voices entered. Boots came off. Cloaks were hung. Cold hands reached toward the fire. The air thickened with laughter, movement, and the particular kind of chaos that turns a house into a home.
The mismatched chairs were claimed at once. Jin dropped into the star-painted chair with the triumph of a monarch claiming a throne he believed had been waiting for him since the dawn of time.
“This one,” he said, leaning back, “is appropriate for someone of my radiance.”
“You mean your ego,” Y/N said.
“Same thing.”
Darya examined the remaining chairs as if they were suspects in a crime. At last she chose the scorched one near the wall, the chair marked by a crescent burn from a charm that had misfired years before. She traced the blackened edge with one finger and nodded, as though the wood had confessed and she approved of its honesty.
Yoongi unpacked his basket with the quiet precision of a winter ritual. Jars lined themselves into neat rows beneath his hands. The stew pot settled into the center of the table as though it had always been meant to be there and every other dish had simply been waiting to arrange itself around it.
Cordelia moved through the cottage with a slow, tide-like curiosity. Her fingertips brushed the shelves, the jars of dried herbs, the feather charms, the polished stones, the old trinkets, the carved spoons, and the little oddities Y/N had gathered over the years because no one else wanted them and she could not bear to let them feel unwanted.
“You keep entire worlds in here,” Cordelia murmured.
Y/N glanced around, suddenly shy. “I suppose I do.”
Belinay walked through the cottage as if she had stepped into a story and feared that touching anything might wake it. She stared at charms, talismans, jars, candles, and bones with her breath held. Twice she reached out one finger and then snatched it back, looking horrified by her own boldness.
It became painful to watch.
“You may touch things,” Y/N said gently.
Belinay froze. “Really?”
“As long as you don’t drink anything that glows.”
“I won’t drink anything at all,” Belinay vowed.
Across the room, Jin tapped his chin. “I might drink something glowing.”
“Shut up, Jin,” Yoongi said, without looking up from a row of jars.
Y/N hid a smile behind her hand.
Their familiar rhythms settled into the cottage like warmth returning to chilled bones. She had not realized how quiet the winter had been until now, with laughter loosening the silence from the rafters. Someone opened a window a little wider, and a mild February breeze slipped in, carrying damp earth and cold grass. It wove through the smells of bread, mint, stew, incense, and sweet herbs until the whole cottage seemed to breathe like a living thing.
Cordelia set a small wooden crate beside the stew.
“We brought fish,” she said. “But Mel is carrying it up.”
“That sounds like Mel,” Y/N said.
Mel was always last. His timing was tidal, which meant it was dependable only in the broadest possible sense. He was never gone for good, never exactly on time, and never entirely predictable.
“Hopefully with actual fish,” Darya said. “And not another jar of sea foam.”
Jin gasped. “He’d better hurry. Imbolc waits for no one.”
“Mel waits for everyone,” Yoongi said.
Cordelia sighed. “He’s close.”
Y/N looked around the cottage and felt something inside her ease. It had been too quiet here for too long. After Aldara’s passing, silence had settled into the walls like dust. There had been days when Y/N could hear every tick of the cooling stove, every scrape of branch against window, every small absence. But now the house had filled. The chairs creaked. The fire crackled. Shiloh insulted people from above. Belinay whispered questions. Jin praised himself. Yoongi pretended not to smile. Darya argued with a spoon. Cordelia moved gently among all of it.
The cottage had a pulse again.
Hosting, once Y/N surrendered to it, came as naturally as breathing. Her apron sat crooked. Her hair had escaped almost entirely from its knot. She wielded a wooden spoon like some benevolent kitchen deity who had misplaced her crown but not her authority. Somehow, through motion and instinct and the mercy of the gods, it all worked.
She ladled Yoongi’s roasted carrot stew into clay bowls. She tucked fresh herbs onto the frittata. She slid the platter of wild greens within reach of even the laziest hands. She cut the cheesecake into careful slices and threatened Jin with a fork when he tried to steal a corner too early.
From her scorched chair, Darya lifted a forkful of salad. “What’s in this?”
“That depends,” Y/N said. “If your tongue goes numb, that’s garlic mustard. If it tastes like flowers, those are violets.”
Darya chewed thoughtfully. “I like the buzzing.”
“That is not a word I want associated with my salad.”
Jin, eating one of his own scones with the solemn concentration of a judge at a contest, nodded once.
“You’ve outdone yourself, Y/N,” he said. “I did not know ramps could shine.”
Yoongi snorted. “What are you now? A food critic?”
Y/N placed a bowl in front of Belinay, who stared down at the colorful greens and petals as though she had been handed an enchanted relic. Cordelia took her bowl last and gave Y/N a quiet, grateful look.
“We’ll help clean later,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”
Y/N waved her off, though the idea of extra hands washing dishes made her want to sink into the nearest pile of cushions and never rise again.
Then the front door burst open on a gust of salty wind.
“Bel! Darya! I come bearing gifts!”
Melvin stumbled inside like a ship docking badly. He carried an enormous fish across both arms, its silver body gleaming beneath the cottage light. A strand of seaweed clung to his sleeve. His boots were muddy. His hair looked as though the wind had tried to steal it and lost.
“Caught it myself,” he announced. “Mostly. A seal helped. That is irrelevant.”
Cordelia groaned. “Melvin. You tracked sand into the house.”
“Sand,” Mel said proudly, marching toward the kitchen, “is the seasoning of the sea.”
Y/N hurried after him, half laughing and half horrified. “Just don’t blow anything up.”
“Explosions are for Yule,” Mel said breezily, already rolling up his sleeves. “This is Imbolc. It would be out of season.”
The fish landed on her counter with a heavy, reverent thud, rattling a row of jars and sending a puff of dried herb dust into the air. Mel stood over it as solemnly as a priest before an altar. Before Y/N could object, he had taken command of her kitchen.
This was what Mel did. Some people asked permission. Mel entered, declared himself useful, and somehow became so before anyone could stop him. He seized knives, spoons, herbs, bowls of spices, oil, salt, and one little jar Y/N was nearly certain he had no business touching. The pan went onto the stove. Oil hissed the instant it touched iron, snapping and spitting like applause. The fish followed with a slap of skin against heat, and at once the cottage filled with the smell of brine, crisping flesh, herbs, and sea-magic.
It smelled like Imbolc turning its face toward spring. Like cold water running free under ice. Like February forgetting itself for one glorious hour.
Y/N leaned in the doorway, arms folded.
“Should I help?” she asked, though her voice already regretted it.
“No,” Mel said grandly. “But you may admire me if moved.”
“Please clean everything afterward. Thoroughly. I don’t like animals leaving anything behind on my dishes. If I taste even a hint of something leftover, I’ll hex you into next year.”
Mel froze with the solemnity of a knight receiving sacred law.
“You have my word, Bridd.”
The pan answered with a loud sizzle. Mel tossed in rosemary, and the leaves snapped like tiny sparks. Then he splashed in a pale green liquid from a bottle so strange-looking that Y/N straightened at once.
“What is that?”
“Ocean wine,” Mel said.
“That is not a thing.”
From the table, Cordelia called, “Of course it is.”
Y/N looked at her.
Cordelia was completely serious.
“We lower bottles into the sea and let them ferment underwater,” she explained. “Look at the barnacles.”
Y/N stared at the bottle. It was crusted with barnacles, salt, and a clump of seaweed that seemed deeply committed to remaining attached.
“So,” Y/N said slowly, “it is normal wine soaked in salt water, mold, and ocean debris.”
Darya nodded. “For at least a year.”
Yoongi, still arranging a few of her spice jars into some private system of justice, asked, “Does it taste different?”
“Not at all,” Cordelia said. “But it looks pretty.”
For a heartbeat, no one spoke. Then laughter rolled through the cottage.
It rose and spread, warm and bright, catching one person and then another. Jin began reenacting an old battle with a goose, complete with flapping arms and deeply offensive honking. Darya tormented Yoongi about his need to organize everything within reach. Belinay tugged on Cordelia’s sleeve and asked whether she could grow up to be both a witch and a fisher. Yoongi pretended not to listen, which meant he was listening to every word.
Y/N stood in the kitchen doorway and let herself watch.
Her home was loud. Her home was full. Her home smelled of herbs and smoke and fish and bread and the faint wild promise of thaw. For months after Aldara died, the cottage had seemed to hold its breath. Tonight, it breathed again.
Mel lifted the fish from the pan at last and set it on a platter with dramatic reverence.
“Feast,” he declared.
The reaction was immediate. Cheers burst through the cottage like sparks catching dry tinder. Belinay squealed. Jin applauded with the lavish elegance of a nobleman attending an opera. Yoongi gave one decisive nod, which from him was practically a standing ovation. Darya simply armed herself with a fork and prepared for battle.
They crowded around the teal table in a happy scatter of elbows, bowls, chairs, cushions, and passing hands. Plates scraped. Bread traveled in the wrong direction and caused a minor crisis. Someone spilled wine. Someone else knocked over a bowl of violets, and Belinay somehow managed to paint a streak of gochujang across her nose without noticing. Y/N’s frittata disappeared almost as soon as it was cut. Yoongi’s stew was scraped clean with alarming speed. Mel’s fish drew murmurs so reverent that Jin accused everyone of worshiping dinner, then immediately took another bite and joined them.
Outside, the sun dipped low over the meadow. The brittle winter grasses turned bronze. The first smoke from the bonfire pit began to drift upward, thin and blue against the dimming sky. The air was still cool enough to belong to February, but beneath it ran something softer. Something waiting. Something alive.
Imbolc pressed close around the cottage, not grandly, not with trumpets or signs, but with the quiet blessing of a year beginning to turn.
Y/N sat among her friends, her strange beloved patchwork of people, and listened to them laugh over her table.
It was not perfect. The floor was dirty. The kitchen was a disaster. Jin was still talking about the goose. Shiloh had stolen a corner of scone and was pretending she had not. The hen remained uncooked in the pantry, and Y/N would have to decide what to do with it eventually.
But not yet.
For now, the fire was warm. The table was full. The cottage was alive.
And it was a good day.
A very good day.
Dawn had sent only one thin messenger before it: a pale seam of gold trembling low in the east, where the black edge of the world was beginning, very unwillingly, to loosen. All Bangtan Forest lay under that deep winter hush which belongs only to evergreen woods after snow. The pines and firs stood tall and dark against the paling sky, their boughs bent beneath white burdens, while the spruce needles glittered with frost as if some patient hand had threaded them with splinters of glass. The earth below was neither green nor brown nor even properly earth at all, but a hidden thing, tucked beneath old drifts and crusted silver-blue wherever the night wind had hardened the snow.
Mist lingered low between the trees. It was not the kind mist of spring, rising from warm ground and making the world seem secret and forgiving, but a colder, thinner thing: winter’s breath caught among roots and hollows, curling along fallen logs like pale smoke. Spiderwebs abandoned in the elbows of bark and bramble had gone stiff with rime. Somewhere out of sight the river whispered under a skin of ice, its voice small and muffled, like a song sung through clenched teeth. In the darkest places, where morning had not yet dared to enter, faint rings of blue-green mushrooms shone beneath the fallen timber, their ghostly light made stranger by the snow around them.
It was the hour Y/N loved best.
She loved the forest before it woke. Bangtan seemed most itself then, before the pack stirred in Foxglove, before cottage chimneys began to smoke in earnest, before squirrels resumed their noisy arguments and the thin winter birds lifted their brave, sharp songs into the cold. The world seemed balanced between sleeping and waking, as though one soft word might tip it either way. Trees remembered old things then. Snow listened. Even the air appeared to hold still.
Her wings should have cut through that blue-gray silence as easily as ink drawn across parchment.
On any other morning, flying would have been as natural to her as breathing. She would have felt the wind gather beneath her, a living hand under each wing, and she would have risen over the snow-laden pines with frost catching at her feathers, and some secret joy brightening in her breast. The cold could be cruel, certainly, but from above it was also beautiful. The world became simple from that height: white fields, dark woods, silver water, smoke unwinding from chimneys, everything lying under winter’s spell.
But this morning the air did not hold her.
This morning something had gone wrong.
She knew it before she could name it.
It had begun behind her eyes, a deep, throbbing ache that beat steadily against the inside of her skull. It was not ordinary pain. Ordinary pain had borders. This seemed to have none. It pressed outward as if her very thoughts had turned to stone and were now too heavy for her head to carry. After that came weariness: not the honest tiredness that followed work well done, not the pleasant heaviness after a long walk and a warm meal, but something strange and stealing, seeping into her bones like meltwater through cracked stone.
Her wings beat unevenly.
They trembled at the end of each stroke, and the air, instead of lifting her, resisted her.
Y/N blinked hard.
The forest blurred.
Below her, the treetops tilted, swung wide, and then righted themselves again. A blade of new sunlight struck ice on the branches and shattered into a hundred cruel sparks. Pain flashed through her head so fiercely that, for one terrible instant, she forgot the very shape of flying.
Her left wing dipped.
She caught herself, but only just.
Get home.
The words did not leave her beak. In this shape, speech lived mostly in thought, and even thought had gone thin and frayed, like cloth worn nearly through. She forced her wings to spread, caught a cold current, and rode it with the desperate care of someone clinging to a rope above a ravine.
Too soon, she thought.
The shift was coming.
It should not have been. She knew the rhythms of her own magic as a sailor knows the tide. Shape-changing was not always painless, but it had its laws. There were warnings, intervals, the inward gathering of the body before it remembered another form. There should have been time to land. Time to draw breath and make herself ready.
Her feathers prickled along her skin. Her bones ached with a deep and unnatural heat. Warmth crawled up through her veins in sudden pulses, and then came cold so sharp and swift that her whole body shuddered. The magic holding her owl-shape together sparked and split. It no longer moved through her as a clean, living thread, but snagged and tore like yarn dragged through a broken needle.
The forest pitched beneath her. Pines became dark spears. Snow became glare. The pale dawn widened, narrowed, widened again, as if the whole world were struggling for breath.
Then, between the trees, she saw the cottage.
At first it seemed only another pale shape among the drifts, a trick of snow and longing. Then the roof appeared beneath its thick cap of white, and the crooked chimney rose against the brightening sky, breathing one frail ribbon of smoke into the cold. The meadow opened before it, smooth and untouched except where the wind had carved shallow blue shadows. The garden lay buried beyond the little gate, only the woody tops of rosemary and thyme showing through the snow in stiff, frozen sprigs.
Relief came to her, though weakly, like a candle nearly burned to nothing.
Almost there.
She angled downward.
The descent should have been graceful. Y/N had landed in storms, between branches, upon narrow stones, and once, long ago, on the shoulder of a startled giant who had been too courteous to mention the inconvenience. But now the clearing rushed toward her too quickly. The snow glittered and shifted below her, every point of ice too bright, too sharp. The cottage roof seemed to lurch. The garden wall slid strangely sideways. The world had become unreliable.
Her claws struck earth and skidded over frozen grass hidden under powder. She stumbled, wings flung wide, and half-collapsed among the buried garden beds, scattering loose snow from the rosemary stems. Pain pulsed through her head in great black waves. Her vision narrowed, the edges of it darkening, while gold streaks flickered before her like sparks from a dying fire.
She had seconds.
Perhaps fewer.
Y/N dragged herself toward the cottage door.
Feathers came loose behind her. They did not fall prettily. They shed in a ragged trail across the snow, dark and damp and wrong against all that white. Each step sent a tremor up her legs. The garden path had never been long before, but now it stretched before her like a road into another country. The door, which she had opened a thousand times without thought, stood at the end of it like the gate of a besieged castle.
Her talons scraped the threshold.
Then the shift seized her.
There was no grace in it. It struck like lightning through water.
Her body convulsed. Wings folded inward too fast, and bones twisted with a terrible, intimate certainty, remembering the wrong shape before finding the right one. Feathers dissolved into skin. Heat roared along her veins. Her spine arched. Her claws became hands, shaking and pale against the floorboards. The cottage air filled with the faint smell of singed magic, wild feathers, cold rain, and snow.
She fell forward through the doorway.
Her knees struck the wooden floor with a crack that made her gasp. One hand caught the doorframe, the other curled helplessly against the boards. For a moment, her sight broke into pieces: black, gold, pinewood, snowlight, shadow. Then the pain loosened all at once, leaving her hollowed, human, and shaking.
When it was over, Y/N lay naked just inside the cottage door, drenched in cold sweat.
The air touched her skin like winter water. Her breath came in ragged pulls, each one scraping her throat raw. She tried to rise, because some stubborn part of her believed that standing upright would prove she was well, but her legs betrayed her. They buckled beneath her, useless as wet cloth.
“Not good,” she muttered.
Her voice was thin and rough, scarcely more than a breath.
“Not…”
Her hand slipped. She caught herself again, cheek nearly pressed to the floorboards. The pine beneath her smelled faintly of smoke, lavender, and old spilled tea. Ordinarily that smell would have comforted her. Now even comfort seemed to be standing on the far side of a river she could not cross.
She tried to crawl.
It was absurdly difficult. Her limbs felt separate from her, heavy and disobedient, as though someone had tied stones to them while she slept. Her magic, usually bright and living beneath her skin, had dimmed to ragged threads. Each movement seemed to drag those threads across broken glass.
“Y/N?”
The voice came from above.
A flutter of wings followed, then a clumsy thud as Shiloh landed on the back of a chair with none of her usual dignity. The little owl’s amber eyes were wide and bright with alarm.
“What happened?”
Y/N squinted up at her. The room swayed. Shiloh, the chair, the table, and the window all drifted apart from one another and then came together again.
“Shifted,” Y/N croaked. “Too early.”
Shiloh hopped down from the chair, her feathers puffing with distress. “Too early? What do you mean, too early?”
Y/N tried to laugh, but it came out as a dry, miserable rasp.
“Felt… strange.”
“Strange how?”
There was sharpness in the question, but no cruelty. Fear threaded every word. Y/N could hear it even through the feverish fog pressing at her skull. Shiloh could be grand, theatrical, and impossible when it suited her, but she did not turn truly sharp unless something had frightened her badly.
Y/N pressed a shaking hand to her forehead. Her skin burned beneath her fingers.
“Headache,” she managed. “Heavy. Air felt wrong. Couldn’t breathe right.”
Shiloh’s face changed. The irritation did not leave exactly, but it folded itself around something far more tender.
“I told you not to go far,” she said, and her voice was lower now. “There was sleet yesterday, and the frost came in hard before dawn. You know what that does to you.”
“Didn’t want,” Y/N whispered, “to fall out of the sky.”
Shiloh opened her beak, then closed it again.
For once, no scolding came.
The little owl only looked at her, and in that look were all the winter illnesses they had survived together: every fever that had taken too long to break, every cough that had settled in Y/N’s chest like an unwanted guest, every chill that had slipped into her bones and refused to leave. Shiloh knew better than anyone that Y/N did not get sick the way others did. A damp sleeve, a drafty window, one foolish night flight through sleet—any little thing that would have inconvenienced another witch could put Y/N in bed for days.
Y/N had a great deal of magic. That was the part people saw first. They saw the shifting, the old words, the healing hands, the green fire in her charms, the way wild creatures came to her door as if the trees themselves had whispered that she was safe. They saw the Bridd, and forgot there was a body beneath the title.
A body that chilled too quickly.
A body that burned too fast with fever.
A body that had always seemed a little too frail for the fierce spirit housed inside it.
At last Shiloh said, more softly, “You’re impossible.”
Y/N’s mouth twitched. “Only just noticing?”
“Don’t joke.” Shiloh hopped closer, trying very hard to sound stern and only half succeeding. “Not when you’re shaking like that.”
“I’ll be fine.”
The lie was so thin that even the cottage seemed embarrassed by it.
Y/N clawed herself forward another few inches. The bedroom was not far. It had never seemed far before. It was only across the cottage, through the little doorway beyond the hearth. Now it appeared as distant as another kingdom.
“Don’t you dare pass out here,” Shiloh warned, hopping after her. “You’ll freeze before I can get a blanket over you.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Y/N muttered.
“That is not comforting.”
Shiloh fluttered ahead into the bedroom, then back again, unable to decide whether she ought to lead, push, scold, or scream for help. Y/N reached the bed by sheer stubbornness and nothing more. She caught the rumpled blankets in both hands, dragged herself upward, and collapsed into the sheets.
The linen was cool, chamomile-scented, and soft as mercy.
She turned her face into the pillow and shivered.
“Gods,” Shiloh breathed, landing at the foot of the bed. Her voice had gone quiet. “You really do look terrible.”
“Thank you,” Y/N whispered.
“Should I get someone? Yoongi? Jin?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. She shook her head, and the room tipped so violently that she regretted it at once.
“No. They’ll worry.”
“They should worry.” Shiloh’s talons gripped the blanket. “That is rather the point of friends.”
“It’s just fatigue.”
“Fatigue doesn’t make your lips go pale.”
“It’ll pass.”
Shiloh stared at her. Y/N could feel the stare without opening her eyes.
“It will,” Y/N insisted, though the words were already blurring at the edges. “Just need to rest.”
Shiloh did not answer.
That silence was worse than any scolding.
The room tilted gently around Y/N. The walls softened. The faint embers in the hearth beyond the bedroom doorway cast a weak orange glow, flickering over the cottage walls like tired fireflies. Shiloh remained at the foot of the bed, feathers fluffed, talons curled into the blanket, caught between obedience and fear.
Y/N wanted to reassure her. She meant to say something sensible, something kind, something that would make the owl stop looking as if the world had cracked open beneath her feet.
But the words sank before she could catch them.
Her breathing thinned.
The light dissolved.
Sleep took her not like a blanket, but like water closing overhead.
Outside, morning finally arrived.
The first true sunlight crept over the snow and laid fragile gold across the bedroom floor. The forest did not burst into song. It woke thinly and reluctantly, as winter forests do. A few brave birds called from the pines. Ice ticked along the eaves. Snow slid softly from one evergreen branch to another. Somewhere beneath the white crust of the meadow, the buried grasses waited for a spring still many weeks away.
The world went on.
Inside, the Bridd lay still, her magic dimmed to a dull ember, waiting for some careful hand to coax it back to flame.
Shiloh did not wait long.
She had known fear before. Familiars always did. They lived tied to another soul, and love made every danger enormous. It made drafts seem like knives, coughs sound like omens, and foolish decisions feel like betrayals. But this was not a small danger casting a large shadow. The air in the cottage had changed. It had grown dense and strange, heavy in the way the world becomes just before a storm breaks. Y/N’s scent was sharp and fever-bright. Her pulse, when Shiloh pressed close enough to hear it, sounded too faint, too far away, too unlike itself.
Wrongness moved through the room in a way no sensible creature could ignore.
Shiloh watched her for another breath, then another, talons curled tight into the blanket at the foot of the bed. Y/N lay too still beneath the covers, her skin pale under the fever burning in her cheeks, her breaths shallow and uneven. It did not matter that she had said she only needed rest. It did not matter that she had forbidden Shiloh from fetching anyone. Y/N was terribly brave when she ought to be sensible, and terribly stubborn when she ought to be afraid, and Shiloh had long ago learned that loving her meant knowing when not to obey her.
“No,” the little owl murmured at last. “I am not letting you sleep this off.”
With a hard snap of her wings, she launched herself through the open window.
Cold morning air rushed to meet her. The meadow below lay buried in snow, smooth and pale except where the wind had carved blue hollows around the roots of trees. The sun had barely lifted over the treetops, but already its light stretched long across the clearing, turning frost to glass and icicles to thin knives of fire. Shiloh climbed higher, beating her wings hard through the bitter air.
From above, the world spread wide beneath her. There lay the dark sweep of Bangtan Forest, old and watchful, its evergreens bowing beneath their white burdens. There curled the river, half-hidden under ice and bright only where running water still broke through. Farther off, the rooftops of Bangtan village huddled beneath snow. Beyond them rose the soft shimmer of the solar coven’s hill, where Jin lived among warmth, bees, flowers under glass, and far too much self-satisfaction.
It was not a long flight.
That did not make Shiloh like it.
She hated leaving Y/N alone. She hated the weight of the decision, the memory of that shallow breathing behind her, the knowledge that Y/N’s body could fall badly ill from things other people shrugged off. Worst of all, she hated that she was flying to Jin while frightened enough to need him.
Of all the witches in the forest, she thought bitterly, it would have to be the one who will never let me forget this.
Jin’s cottage appeared with the first full spill of sunlight, and even in midwinter, even beneath snow, it could belong to no one else. Golden wards shimmered around it in a soft halo, humming with warmth and light. They had melted the snow from the path and roof, leaving the cottage tucked inside a strange little pocket of false spring. The garden itself was mostly asleep, but not wholly. Glass cloches, charm-warmed frames, and low domes of golden light covered the beds, and beneath them early blossoms nodded drowsily, coaxed open by solar magic rather than season. Vines that were bare and brown outside the wards curled green along the window nearest his workroom.
Then she saw the bees.
Not the wild abundance of summer, thank the gods, but enough to make her sigh with deep personal fatigue. A few dozen drifted lazily through the warmth beneath the eaves, slow and drowsy, their hum softer than it would be in warmer months. Jin’s wards had tempted them from sleep. They moved like living flecks of sunlight, utterly unconcerned by the fact that February still owned the rest of the forest.
Shiloh’s feathers puffed.
The bees ignored her, which was both polite and suspicious. The last time she had visited, one had landed on her beak and refused to leave until Jin bribed it with honey, which Shiloh still considered a betrayal from both parties.
She landed on the doorknob, breathless, and hammered her talons against the wood.
“Jin!” she shouted. “Wake up. It’s urgent.”
Nothing.
She knocked harder.
“Seokjin! Open the door before I do something we shall both regret.”
A faint rustling came from inside. Then a groan followed, long and lazy and so offended by morning that Shiloh might have laughed if fear had not lodged so tightly in her chest.
“It is dawn,” Jin’s voice complained from somewhere within. “The day has not even properly begun. Go home.”
“Y/N is sick.”
Silence.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Then something crashed.
The door flew open.
Jin stood there in a half-tied robe, his hair loose around his shoulders in a tangle of sleep-warmed gold. Even bleary-eyed and barefoot, he had the indecency to look radiant. Sunlight clung to him through the doorway as if it had waited all night for the privilege.
He blinked at her.
“Shiloh?”
“She’s sick,” Shiloh said again, and this time the words came quieter. “Very sick. She collapsed after shifting. She can’t stand, and her breathing is wrong.”
All sleep vanished from his face.
There were some people who only seemed frivolous because joy sat close to the surface of them. Beneath Jin’s ridiculousness there was a steady thing, and it showed itself at once. His eyes sharpened. His shoulders squared. The sleepy, golden foolishness fell away from him like a cloak dropped on the floor.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough. She’s already beginning to sweat.”
Her voice hitched on the last word despite all her efforts, and she hated it. Hated him hearing it. Not because he would mock her. He would not. They had known each other too long for that. He had been a golden, loud, impossible boy once, tripping over his own feet in the solar gardens, and she had been the owl who scolded him from the fence post while secretly making sure he did not fall into the lily pond. She disliked him often. She loved him, in her irritated way, nearly as often.
And because he knew that, he did not tease her now.
Jin swore softly and ran a hand through his hair.
“All right. Give me a moment.”
He disappeared into the cottage.
At once, the house seemed to wake with him. Candles sparked to life. Shelves glimmered gold. Jars chimed and hummed as his magic stirred among them. Shiloh hopped anxiously on the threshold, listening to the clatter of vials, the snap of satchel buckles, and the low murmur of sunlight being drawn into ready hands.
Then came a sound she dreaded.
A deep, throaty woof.
From around the corner barreled Mannix. Jin’s beloved St. Bernard came bounding toward Shiloh in a glorious avalanche of fur, drool, affection, and terrible intentions. His tail wagged with such force that it seemed capable of rearranging the furniture.
Shiloh lifted off the doorknob with a startled flap.
“Mannix, no. Not today.”
Mannix barked once, delighted that she had addressed him personally.
“Sit!” Jin called from inside. “Mannix, sit.”
The dog skidded to a halt so abruptly his paws slid on the floor. He sat, tail thumping, gazing at Shiloh with adoring confusion.
“He’s too big,” Shiloh muttered, more out of habit than genuine complaint. “You know he is too big.”
“He only wants to say hello,” Jin said, striding back with a healer’s satchel over his shoulder. His robe was now tied, though still crooked.
“Can’t believe you let Wendy talk you into getting that beast,” Shiloh huffed.
Jin scratched Mannix behind one ear. “Guard the house. I’ll be back soon.”
Mannix gave a solemn, slobbery huff and settled by the doorway as if he had just been entrusted with the fate of kingdoms.
Shiloh fluttered onto Jin’s shoulder, gripping his robe with her talons. Beneath the fabric and skin, she could feel the hum of solar magic gathering itself, warm and steady and alive. It pulsed in him like a heartbeat made of sunlight.
“You’re flying us there?”
“It’s faster.”
“Try not to singe me.”
“Try not to dig holes in my shoulder.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she snapped.
His mouth softened.
Then he stepped into the morning, lifted one hand, and spoke a word in the old tongue.
The air thickened with gold.
Light wrapped around them, bright but gentle, weightless as breath. The garden, the drowsy bees, the cottage, and the snow-bright hill all blurred into streaks of color. Wind rushed past in a warm roar. For a moment, Shiloh could see nothing but radiance.
Then the world snapped back into shape.
They landed in Y/N’s meadow, soft-footed in the snow. Powder scattered around Jin’s boots in bright crystals. The air smelled of frozen mint, woodsmoke, pine resin, and the cold iron scent of deep winter. Ahead of them stood Y/N’s cottage, crouched between the trees beneath its snow-heavy roof, a thin curl of smoke rising from the chimney like a breath held too long and finally released.
“Inside,” Shiloh said.
Jin was moving before Shiloh had finished speaking.
There are some moments in life when all the little vanities and habits of a person fall away from him as leaves fall from a tree in a sudden frost, and what remains is the true shape of the thing beneath. Jin, who could be vain over the tilt of his hair, ridiculous over the cut of a sleeve, and insufferably pleased when sunlight touched his face at just the right angle, lost all of that in the space between one breath and the next. His expression sharpened. His shoulders squared. The laughter that usually lived so near his mouth disappeared, not because he had become cold, but because something steadier and older had risen in its place.
He went through Y/N’s cottage door without ceremony, bringing with him the faint scent of winter air, solar herbs, and the clean golden warmth that always seemed to cling to him, even on the grayest mornings. Shiloh followed in a flurry of anxious feathers, darting ahead and then circling back again, as though she could hurry him by sheer force of panic.
“In here,” she said, though Jin already knew. “She’s in here. She tried to pretend it was nothing, of course. She always does. As if pretending not to be dying has ever cured anyone.”
“She isn’t dying,” Jin said, but he said it in the careful voice of a healer who has not yet looked closely enough to promise anything.
Y/N’s bedroom was dim and close, warm near the hearth and cold near the window where the winter light pressed pale fingers against the glass. The curtains had not been drawn properly. One corner of them hung loose, allowing a narrow blade of morning to fall across the floorboards and touch the leg of the bed. Beyond the window, the forest stood white and blue and silent beneath its burden of snow. Inside, everything smelled of fever: hot skin, damp hair, herbs, old smoke, and the faint bitter edge of magic strained too thin.
Y/N lay half-hidden under the blankets, small in a way that felt wrong.
She was not, ordinarily, a person anyone thought of as small. There was too much wildness in her for that. Too much old power in her hands. Too much knowing in her gaze. Even when she was quiet, even when she sat with her knees tucked beneath her and a cup of tea cooling forgotten beside her, there was always the sense that she belonged partly to the forest and partly to something older than the forest. People looked at her and saw the Bridd. They saw the witch who mended wing-bones and spoke to stubborn roots, who could take feathers upon herself and ride the dawn winds over Bangtan as if she had been born from them.
But fever had a way of making even the mighty look young.
Her dark hair clung damply to her forehead and temples. Her skin was too pale in the dim room, save where fever had painted two hard spots of color high in her cheeks. Her lips had lost their warmth. Her breathing came shallow and uneven, each breath catching faintly in her chest before the next could find its way out. One hand lay above the blanket, fingers loosely curled, the nails faintly bluish from the cold she had carried home with her.
Concern flickered over Jin’s face. It was there and gone quickly, like the shadow of a bird crossing snow. His hands, however, remained calm.
That, more than anything, steadied Shiloh.
He knelt beside the bed and touched the back of his hand to Y/N’s forehead. The heat there made his mouth tighten.
“Fever,” he murmured. “High, but manageable.”
Shiloh clung to the bedpost. Her talons tapped an anxious little rhythm into the wood before she realized she was doing it and forced herself to stop. “How high is high?”
“High enough that I’m glad you came.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have until I examine her properly.” His voice was gentle, but firm enough to keep her from snapping at him again. “How long has she been like this?”
“Since sunrise. Maybe before.” Shiloh’s feathers ruffled and then settled again in quick, worried waves. “She came home from flying and collapsed inside the door. She said she felt strange.”
Jin opened his satchel. He did it with the swift competence of someone who had packed such bags in the dark, in storms, in kitchens crowded with weeping relatives, in barns, beside wells, and once or twice under circumstances no sensible person would have called safe. Little glass bottles clinked against one another. Dried herbs rustled in folded paper. A spoon, a roll of soft cloth, a stoppered vial of golden oil, and a small copper cup appeared on the bedside table one after another.
“Strange how?” he asked.
“Headache. Trouble breathing. Heavy, she said.” Shiloh paused, trying to remember every word, as though one misplaced syllable might be the thing that mattered. “She said the air felt wrong.”
Jin glanced toward the window, then back to Y/N. “She flew through sleet?”
“Last night, yes. And frost before dawn.” Shiloh’s voice tightened, thin with guilt and irritation tangled together. “I told her not to go far.”
“You did right coming for me.”
It was a simple thing to say. It should not have mattered as much as it did. Yet Shiloh’s feathers settled a little, and the hard knot in her chest loosened by the smallest measure. She had expected questions, perhaps reproach, perhaps one of Jin’s soft sighs that meant he thought everyone in the room was being foolish except him. She had not expected approval.
“I should have come sooner,” she muttered.
“You came when you knew she needed more than rest.”
“She needed more than rest the moment she crawled through the door looking like a plucked ghost.”
“Then you came soon enough.”
Shiloh looked away, but not before Jin saw the fear in her eyes.
He took out a small tin and opened it with his thumb. At once, the room filled with the soft scent of lemon balm and starflower, bright and tender against the feverish air. Beneath it was something else, something warmer and sunlit, like summer honey kept in a cupboard through winter.
Jin leaned closer and listened to Y/N’s breathing. Then he touched two fingers to the pulse below her jaw. His face did not change much, but Shiloh, who had known him since childhood and distrusted most of his expressions on principle, saw enough.
“What?” she demanded.
“It looks like a cold.”
“A cold?” Shiloh repeated, offended by the smallness of the word. “She nearly fell out of the sky.”
“A cold can be a very serious thing in the wrong body.”
“So it isn’t just fatigue.”
“No.” He looked at her then, and his voice was not frightening because he did not dress the truth up in false comfort. “It will likely take a few days to a week before she is properly herself again, but she should be fine.”
“Should be?”
“Will be, if she rests and takes what I give her.”
“You say that as though she has ever willingly done either.”
Jin gave the faintest smile, not enough to be cheerful, only enough to be familiar. “That is why you and I are here.”
He set to work mixing the tonic. He measured partly by sight, partly by scent, and partly by that old healer’s instinct which looks mysterious to everyone watching and perfectly ordinary to the person doing it. Into the copper cup went a pinch of pale dried petals, two drops of golden oil, a spoonful of dark syrup, and a thread of light drawn from his own fingertip. The light did not blaze. It sank into the mixture like dawn entering milk, turning it warm and faintly luminous.
The cottage seemed to hold its breath while he stirred.
“She’s always been like this,” Shiloh said suddenly.
Jin did not look up, but his hands slowed a fraction.
“People forget,” the little owl went on, the words gathering force as if she had carried them too long. “They see her working, and fixing things, and putting on that brave face of hers, and they think she must be well because she is useful. But she hasn’t been properly well since that wolf boy’s ceremony, and already she’s preparing for the Luna’s birthday at the end of March. Orders, charms, garlands, blessings, gods know what else. She’ll run herself into the ground because everyone asks and she hates saying no.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Jin said quietly.
“No,” Shiloh admitted after a moment. “You usually don’t.”
Then he slid one arm behind Y/N’s shoulders and lifted her gently. She stirred, barely. Her head lolled against him, her lashes trembling without opening, as if even that small journey from pillow to arm required more strength than she could spare.
“There now,” Jin murmured. “Just a little. You don’t have to wake.”
Y/N made a faint sound, too weak to be protest and too miserable to be speech.
“I know,” he said softly, as though she had spoken plainly. “I know. But you must swallow this.”
He tipped the tonic carefully to her lips.
For one dreadful heartbeat, nothing happened.
Shiloh’s claws dug into the bedpost.
Then Y/N swallowed by instinct. Once. Twice. A third time, weaker than the others, but enough.
Jin lowered her back against the pillow, and the tight line of his mouth eased by a little. He wiped a stray drop of tonic from the corner of her mouth with the edge of his sleeve and brushed damp hair away from her forehead.
“Aldara was similar, or so my mother always said,” he murmured. “A simple fever could keep her in bed for days.”
At the sound of that name, the room changed.
Not greatly. No candle flickered. No wind stirred. But memory is its own sort of ghost, and when Aldara entered a room, even by name alone, one felt the old floorboards remember her feet.
“Their magic lives close to the skin,” Jin continued. “That makes them powerful, but it wears the body thin. It is like keeping a bright lamp in a paper house.”
“I’m aware,” Shiloh sighed. “It is not unusual in her line. Aldara’s own familiar, Ragnarok, was always fretting after her before his trials. Of course, I got an even sicker girl. Just my luck. At this rate, I shall return as a cow in my next life and spend the whole of it standing in a field, chewing grass, swatting flies, and minding no one’s business but my own.”
His smile softened and faded as he turned back to Y/N. He laid two fingers near her temple, and a small glow gathered there: gold, quiet, and warm. It sank beneath her skin slowly, as sunlight sinks through thin curtains.
“Y/N’s immune system is weaker than Aldara’s was,” he said. “Winter has always been harder on her.”
Shiloh’s talons flexed around the bedpost. Outside, snow slid from the cottage roof with a soft, heavy sigh. The sound made both of them glance toward the window, though nothing else moved. The morning beyond the glass was brightening by degrees, pale and pitiless, beautiful in the way very cold things often are.
“All of us worry about her,” Jin said at last. “But we have to trust that the gods have some sort of plan.”
Shiloh looked at him for a long moment.
There had always been irritation between them, but it was the sort of irritation that had been polished smooth by years. Jin had been too bright as a child, too loud as a boy, and too pleased with his own reflection at every age. Shiloh had pecked him once for calling her adorable, twice for placing ribbons near her nest, and once, memorably, for singing outside Aldara’s window before breakfast. He had never fully forgiven her for that last one, though he had deserved it.
Still, he had brought medicine when Aldara died. He had sat outside Y/N’s cottage for hours during the first terrible fever after the funeral, not demanding to be let in, not making a performance of his concern, simply keeping the lamps warm and the snow melted from the path. He had never treated Y/N’s frailty as weakness. He had never mistaken her suffering for inconvenience.
That counted for something.
Shiloh released the bedpost and hopped onto the nightstand, where she began to pace in small, tight turns. Her claws clicked against the wood. Click, click, click. A tiny sound, but in that quiet room it seemed enormous.
“She can’t die,” Shiloh said.
Jin’s brow softened. “Because of your trial?”
She stopped at once and looked at him sharply.
“I’m not saying it as an accusation,” he said. “I know being human again is your great hope.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t care.” Her feathers lifted, making her seem larger than she was. “Her happiness and well-being are my priority. Keeping her safe may help my judgment, yes, but that is not why I do it. I know I am not always the easiest familiar. I know I am sharp, and proud, and occasionally unkind when frightened.”
Shiloh swallowed, and when she spoke again, the bite had gone out of her voice.
“I try very hard to keep my Bridd all right,” she said. “I love her very much.”
The words hung there, small and fierce.
Then, as though a door inside her had opened too far and could not be closed quickly enough, more words came after them.
“If she dies before judgment is cast, I’ll be stuck between worlds again.”
It began sharply, all beak and claw, as if she meant to make the confession unpleasant before anyone else could. But something broke in the middle of it. She turned her head away, feathers bristling, trying to hide the shake in her voice by making herself look larger.
“She is home,” Shiloh said, softer now. “My home. We have been together longer than you can imagine. In this life and in others before it.”
She looked toward Y/N.
There was something ancient in the little owl’s face then, something no mortal bird had any right to possess. For a moment, Jin could almost see the shadow of all she had once been and all she had lost: not merely a familiar, not merely a scolding owl with sharp opinions and sharper talons, but a soul stretched thin across judgments, lives, punishments, hopes, and love that refused to die properly.
“She is not allowed to simply…”
Her voice cracked.
“…die.”
Jin looked at her for a long moment. The jesting answer he might once have offered did not come. His expression gentled, and for once, the brightness of him did not irritate her. It warmed the room without asking to be admired.
“She won’t die, Shiloh,” he said. “I promise. This is serious, but it is treatable.”
“It doesn’t feel treatable.” Her wings flicked, restless and agitated. “It feels like the world has gone wrong.”
He lowered his gaze briefly to Y/N and checked her pulse again. “Her breathing is a little steadier.”
Shiloh paced to the edge of the nightstand and back again. Then she stopped, as though a thought had struck her with physical force.
“Bring Yoongi.”
Jin blinked. “Yoongi doesn’t heal anymore.”
“I know that.”
“Then why—”
“Because she loves him more than anyone else.” Shiloh looked toward Y/N, and all her sharpness softened into plain fear. “If he is here, she will rest easier. You and I both know it.”
Jin’s jaw shifted slightly.
It was a very small movement. Most people would have missed it. Shiloh did not.
Jin sighed. “Would you like me to fetch Cordelia while I am at it?”
“If she is near enough, I suppose. Sea magic might help balance the fever.” Shiloh considered this with visible reluctance, then made a sour little noise. “Can’t you get Wendy instead? Cordelia is a great deal at the best of times, and I am in no mood for her mouth.”
“Wendy is in Clarcton,” Jin said. “Her sister’s doing that whole suitor parade, remember? Half the coven went with them. They won’t be back for days.”
“Then just Yoongi.”
Jin exhaled slowly and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You are impossible.”
“Only when I’m right.”
The cottage stood quiet around them. Y/N breathed shallowly on the bed. Sunlight crept farther across the floor, thin and winter-pale, touching the woven rug, the leg of the nightstand, the scattered hem of the blanket. Shiloh, puffed and frightened and holding herself together by will alone, stared at the solar witch she had known since he was a vain golden child with scraped knees and too much confidence.
At last, Jin’s shoulders loosened.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll fetch him.”
“And don’t be rude to him.”
Jin gave her a tired look. “Shiloh.”
“No, I mean it.” Sternness returned to her at once, partly because she had won and partly because fear needed somewhere to go. “This whole business between you two is immature. You ought not let a girl get between you, especially when we both know he has no interest in her.”
Jin busied himself with closing the tin of herbs. “That is hardly the point.”
“It is entirely the point. If there were ever a girl that boy would marry, it would be the one in that bed, and even then I suspect she would have to propose with a sword pressed to his throat.”
“Shiloh.”
“And you truly think he and that pretty blond boy from Syrena were only friends?”
Jin said nothing.
It was not, for once, because he had no answer. It was because he had several, and none of them would improve the morning. So he chose instead to tighten the buckle on his satchel and let Shiloh’s words pass over him like sleet against a window.
If Yoongi had an interest in men, Jin thought, he would have said so himself.
And yet the thought did not settle cleanly.
For years, Jin had been very careful not to look too closely at certain things. That was one of the many talents pride gave a person. Pride could turn a memory aside before it stung. Pride could make loneliness seem dignified. Pride could convince a man that he was injured when he was only embarrassed, abandoned when he had merely walked away first.
The truth was that Jin knew his old jealousy over Wendy’s crush on Yoongi had been foolish. Worse than foolish, perhaps. Small. He had known it even while nursing it. He had let it sit in him like a thorn and had then blamed everyone else for the pain. He had pushed Yoongi away over a girl Yoongi had never wanted and Wendy had long since stopped mooning over.
It was ridiculous.
It was lonely.
Yoongi had been his only true male friend, and Jin had adored him in those quiet, ordinary ways men sometimes do not know how to confess without wrapping the confession in a joke. He missed their lunches. He missed Yoongi’s bluntness, which was sometimes rude and often exactly what Jin needed. He missed sitting across from someone who did not require him to shine every moment of the day.
With Wendy gone, and Y/N always burdened with orders and work, and his own pride proving poor company, the solar cottage had lately felt much larger than it was.
Shiloh was right about one thing.
It was long past time to let it go.
Jin’s mouth twitched despite himself. “I’ll tell him it’s urgent.”
“Tell him…” Shiloh’s voice faltered.
The sternness fell from her all at once, and beneath it was only a frightened soul in feathers.
“Tell him it’s Y/N.”
Jin’s face softened again. “That will be enough.”
He turned back to the bed before leaving. For a moment, he simply looked at Y/N. Not as a healer looks at a patient, nor as a friend looks at someone beloved, but as a person looks at a light he has always expected to be burning and has suddenly realized could go out.
Then he brushed his fingers once more over her forehead.
A faint golden warmth sank beneath her skin. Her breathing steadied, barely, but enough that the room itself seemed to unclench. Shiloh felt it. So did Jin. Even the cottage seemed to settle around her, the old beams creaking softly as if relieved.
Shiloh watched him cross to the door, wings half-open, ready to chase him if he hesitated.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
He gave one nod.
Light gathered around him, warm and bright, humming with intention. It did not burst or flare. It folded itself about him like a cloak woven from morning. For an instant his outline blurred, gold at the edges, as though the sun had decided to take human shape and then thought better of it.
Then the light folded inward.
Jin was gone.
The cottage became terribly quiet.
There is a quiet that comforts and a quiet that watches. This was the second sort. It settled over the room and under the doorways and among the rafters. It lay in the hearth where embers glowed low beneath a skin of ash. It gathered around the little bottles Jin had left on the bedside table. It seemed to listen to every breath Y/N took and count the space before the next.
Outside, the forest continued as though nothing had happened. Snow slid from the pines. A single winter bird called from somewhere beyond the window. Sunlight brightened the frozen meadow by degrees, pale and pitiless. The river muttered under ice. The world, which had no manners at all, went on being beautiful while Shiloh’s own small world lay feverish and still beneath the blankets.
She heard almost none of it.
She hopped from the nightstand to the pillow, careful not to jostle Y/N. Then she bowed her head close enough to feel each fragile breath stir the feathers of her breast.
Y/N did not wake. Her lashes lay dark against her cheeks. The fever still burned in her, though the hard edge of it had softened under Jin’s tonic. Her hand twitched once above the blanket, fingers curling faintly as if reaching through some dream.
Shiloh pressed closer.
“I know you can’t hear me,” she whispered. Then, after a pause, “Or perhaps you can, and you’re only pretending not to so I won’t scold you. That would be very like you.”
The room gave no answer. Shiloh’s eyes stung, which she found deeply inconvenient.
“You’re going to wake up,” she continued. “You’re going to wake up, and you’re going to be insufferable about this. You’ll say you are fine, and I’ll call you a liar, and then you’ll ask for tea.”
Her voice thinned.
“And I’ll make it for you.”
She tucked one foot beneath herself, then the other, settling beside Y/N’s pillow like a sentry carved from feathers and fear. Every now and then, she glanced toward the door, willing Jin to return with Yoongi, willing the forest to deliver him quickly, willing the gods, who were so often maddeningly quiet, to make themselves useful for once.
Y/N breathed in.
Y/N breathed out.
Shiloh lowered her head until her beak nearly touched Y/N’s hair.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” she whispered. “Not like this.”
The hours crawled.
Or perhaps they were not hours at all. Fear keeps its own clock, and every tick of it is cruel. It can stretch a minute until it is long enough to walk across, and then snap an hour short so that one finds oneself startled by the light changing in the window. Shiloh, who knew the ordinary measurements of mornings very well—the first stir of the fire, the second settling of frost, the third call of the winter birds—lost all sense of them now.
She stood vigil on the bedpost with her claws curled around the wood and her feathers dulled to a muted gray-brown, as if worry had taken the shine out of her. The cottage, usually so full of little homely sounds, seemed unnervingly still. There should have been the tick and hum of charms in the cupboards, the soft creak of old beams warming themselves, the whisper of herbs drying in their bundles above the hearth, and perhaps the small, pleasing complaint of the kettle as it settled on its hook. But now there was only the faint pop of the dying fire, the needle-thin ticking of ice at the window, and Y/N’s breathing.
Too shallow.
Too quiet.
Too unlike her.
Jin’s magic lingered in the room, tinting the shadows faintly gold. It lay across the blanket in soft threads and glowed dimly at Y/N’s temples, and any sensible creature would have taken comfort in it. Jin was not careless with healing, whatever else Shiloh might accuse him of being. His magic was warm, clean, and capable. It had steadied Y/N’s breath. It had drawn some of the hard, cruel heat down from her face. It had made the room feel less like a place where death might enter unnoticed.
But Shiloh did not trust quiet.
Quiet had deceived her before.
Twice she fluttered down from the bedpost and pressed the soft edge of one wing against Y/N’s cheek. The first time, she did it with the stern little air of someone inspecting a foolish child who had only scraped her knee.
“You’re fine,” she murmured. “You’ve always been fine.”
That, of course, was not true. Y/N had been ill many times. Y/N had frightened her many times. But there are lies the heart tells not because it believes them, but because it needs to hear a friendly voice in the dark.
The second time Shiloh touched her, Y/N’s skin still burned, and her breath shivered faintly against the owl’s feathers.
“You’re fine,” Shiloh tried again.
Her voice cracked before she reached the end of it.
She hated that. She hated fear most when it made her small. Fear ought to sharpen a creature. It ought to give one claws and teeth and a good loud voice. Instead, it had made a trembling thing of her. A little gray-brown bird on a bedpost, watching the person she loved lie pale and feverish beneath blankets.
She did not know how much time had passed when she finally heard voices outside.
At first she thought she had imagined them. The cottage had been so full of listening that any sound seemed possible, even invented ones. But then there came the muffled crunch of boots in snow, the low murmur of someone speaking in the meadow, and a colder gust of air pressing around the doorframe as shadows moved beyond the frosted window.
Shiloh’s head snapped up.
She flew to the sill and peered through the glass, blinking against the pale winter glare. The snow outside was bright enough now to hurt the eyes, blue in the hollows and gold where the morning had touched it. Figures stood near the path, dark against the white meadow. One of them moved with Jin’s unmistakable grace, which would have been irritating under almost any other circumstance.
The other—
“Finally,” Shiloh breathed, and the word came out half relief, half accusation.
Yoongi stepped inside first.
He looked as though he had been dragged from the far side of a long night and had not yet forgiven morning for existing. His dark hair was tied loosely back, though several strands had escaped and fallen near his face. Shadows sat beneath his eyes. A faint roughness clung to him, not untidiness exactly, but the mark of someone who had been awake too long over work that would not hurry itself for anyone. His cloak was dusted with snow at the shoulders, and one of his sleeves had been rolled and forgotten, exposing the pale line of his wrist.
But his presence changed the room at once.
It did not brighten it as Jin’s did. It did not fill the corners with warmth, or set the glass jars glowing, or make the shadows look as though they were considering repentance.
It grounded it.
The cottage seemed to settle more firmly upon its foundations simply because Yoongi had entered. The air grew quieter, but no longer in the dreadful way. It was the quiet of a stone placed at the bottom of a rushing stream. Solid. Certain. Unmoved.
He was not alone.
Behind him came Cordelia, wrapped in a heavy cloak over seafoam-colored robes that moved softly around her legs as she walked. Her long silvered hair fell over her shoulders like water under moonlight, and a faint scent of salt, rain, and crushed shells seemed to enter with her. Her presence carried the calm of deep tides: not weak, not slow, not sleepy, but steady with an old power that did not need to announce itself. There was something in her that made one think of cliffs enduring storms, of moonlit bays, of the great sleeping creatures that move far below the surface of the sea.
“Cori,” Shiloh said, startled despite herself. “You came too?”
“I was with him already,” Cordelia said.
Her voice had the rhythm of the coast in it, gentle and sure, with the faint lilt of waves drawing back over stones. She removed her gloves as she crossed the room, her eyes already moving to Y/N. “He was bartering for kelpwort and sea-mist powder when Jin arrived. I thought it wise to come along.”
“Bartering,” Shiloh repeated, aghast. “Now?”
Yoongi set his satchel on the table and began pulling out vials with the unhurried exactness of a man who had no intention of being rushed by panic, owls, or fever. “We started last night. Time slipped.”
The owl clicked her beak sharply. “While Y/N was dying?”
“She’s not dying,” Jin called from the doorway, brushing snow from his sleeve. “I told you that ten times.”
“Tell me again,” Shiloh said.
It came out quieter than she meant it to.
“Please.”
Jin’s expression changed at the word. It was not often that Shiloh gave anyone a please. She handed out insults like crumbs to sparrows, criticism like festival sweets, and commands as if she had been born wearing a crown. But please was rare from her. Please meant something had gone past pride and into the soft, unguarded country beneath it.
Jin shut the door behind them, crossed the room, and answered without even the shadow of teasing.
“She’s not dying.”
The words did not fix everything. Words seldom do. But they placed a stone beneath Shiloh’s feet, and for a moment she could stand.
Yoongi crossed to the bed. Cordelia followed, her sea-glass eyes softening when she saw Y/N beneath the blankets.
“Oh,” Cordelia murmured.
It was a small sound, and a sad one.
“She looks so much like her aunt.”
She rested a gentle hand on Y/N’s shoulder, not to examine her yet, but to greet her, as if some sleeping part of Y/N might know who had come.
Yoongi crouched beside the bed. He did not touch Y/N at first. His fingers hovered above her temple, still as winter branches, while his eyes narrowed in concentration. For a few breaths he listened, not only with his ears, but with whatever quiet sense kitchen witches have for the hidden workings of a body: heat, pulse, breath, hunger, salt, weakness, the little inward fires that keep flesh from surrendering.
Then he placed two fingers at the pulse below her jaw, waited, and exhaled.
“Strong,” he said.
Shiloh leaned forward so quickly she nearly lost her grip on the bedpost. “Strong?”
“Her pulse.” Yoongi’s voice was low, even, and plain. “Skin’s hot, but not dangerously so.”
He pressed his palm lightly against Y/N’s chest and closed his eyes.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the air stirred.
A ripple of cool silvery energy moved through the room, thin and bright as moonlight caught in water. It did not gleam like Jin’s magic. It did not warm. It soothed. It spread through the blankets, over Y/N’s shoulders, along the line of her throat, and down into the places where her breathing had hitched and struggled. The fever did not vanish, but it seemed to lose its teeth. Y/N drew in a breath, then another, and the second came more easily than the first.
It was a small change.
It was unmistakable.
“Well?” Shiloh asked. “What is it?”
Yoongi opened his eyes.
“What Jin said. Fever. Exhaustion. Cold exposure from flying through bad weather all night.” His gaze moved briefly to the scattered feathers still near the doorway, then back to Y/N. “The shift probably made it worse.”
Shiloh lowered her head.
“So I was right to worry.”
Yoongi looked at her then, really looked, and his voice gentled.
“Yes. You were right.”
Jin leaned lightly against the doorway. “No one said you weren’t.”
She ignored them all after that and brushed a damp strand of hair from Y/N’s forehead. Her touch was light, but not timid. Cordelia had the hands of someone who had tended many fevers, bound many wounds, and carried many secrets without dropping them.
“Aldara was just the same,” she said.
Memory softened her voice, and the name settled into the room like a familiar ghost finding an old chair. “Before she took on the Bridd mantle, she and I would swim in the shallows whenever the weather allowed. If she didn’t dry her hair properly afterward, she would be feverish before nightfall. I scolded her constantly.”
Shiloh let out a small, unsteady breath.
“That sounds like her.”
“She always said, ‘The sea wants to keep me longer.’” Cordelia smiled, but there was ache in it. “Stubborn as stone. Fierce as anything I had ever known. And very sure that consequences were meant for other people.”
“That also sounds like her,” Jin said.
“It sounds like all of them,” Yoongi murmured, checking Y/N’s pulse again. “Same constitution, then. Magic close to the bone. It burns hot and fast, and afterward the body pays for it. Mist, cold, exhaustion, a difficult shift—any of it could have pushed her into fever. All of it together certainly would.”
“And Y/N’s immune system is worse,” Jin added. “So we treat it seriously.”
Shiloh glanced toward him.
There was gratitude in the look, though she would sooner have swallowed a pinecone than named it aloud.
“She was restless,” Shiloh whispered. “She said she felt strange. I should have stopped her.”
Yoongi’s eyes flicked to the owl. “How?”
Shiloh said nothing.
“Truly,” he said. “How would you have stopped her?”
“I could have—”
“Scolded her?”
“That is often effective.”
“With Y/N?”
Shiloh’s feathers sank.
Yoongi’s voice gentled further. “Even if you had tried, she wouldn’t have listened.”
It was the truth, and therefore more terrible than comfort.
Cordelia tucked the blankets more securely around Y/N. She did it with an ease that turned the act into a kind of spell: blanket to shoulder, edge beneath chin, warmth held in, cold kept out. She laid one hand briefly over Y/N’s sternum and another near her brow. A faint misty glow gathered between her palms, sea-pale and quiet, and the fever in Y/N’s face softened another degree.
“She’ll recover,” Cordelia said. “Give her two days of steady warmth and proper rest. No work, no flying, no shifting unless absolutely necessary. I’ll leave a tonic to break the fever by morning.”
“You’re sure?” Shiloh asked.
Cordelia looked at her with a patient smile. “She is Aldara’s blood. Her stubbornness is thicker than iron and twice as enduring. She’ll be all right.”
Jin snorted softly. “Truest thing said all morning.”
Shiloh fluffed herself into a tired little ball. “You’re all calmer than I am.”
“Because panicking won’t help her,” Yoongi said.
His tone was even, unhurried, and infuriatingly solid. He wiped his hands on a cloth, then began arranging his vials on the bedside table in an order that made sense to him and probably no one else. “Rest will. Warmth will. Medicine will. Someone watching her breathing will. She’ll wake when her body is ready.”
Shiloh knew that tone.
It ended arguments. Not by force. Yoongi almost never needed force. It ended them by being immovable in a way that made arguing feel like throwing pebbles at fog.
Still, she flew to the headboard and looked down at Y/N’s pale face.
“You’re certain?” she whispered again.
Yoongi met her gaze.
“Yes. I’m certain.”
“Then stay,” she blurted. “Until she wakes.”
Yoongi stilled.
“Please,” Shiloh added.
That word hung strangely between them.
Jin looked away, politely enough. Cordelia lowered her eyes to the tonic she was preparing, though the corner of her mouth softened. Yoongi remained crouched beside the bed, his hand resting lightly on the edge of the blanket.
Shiloh used many words freely: fool, idiot, menace, sunflower, vain peacock, walking chandelier. Please was not one of them.
Yoongi hesitated.
His eyes flicked toward Cordelia.
“She’ll rest easier with you here,” Cordelia said. “You’ve always been her closest friend. And frankly, you have become more of a hermit than Thelma this past year.”
Jin lifted his brows. “More than Thelma? That’s a grave diagnosis.”
Yoongi ignored him and looked back at Y/N.
She lay still and fever-warmed, breathing in small, fragile pulls of air. One hand had slipped from beneath the blanket, palm half-open as though she had been reaching for something in sleep and forgotten what it was. Yoongi’s gaze rested on that hand for a moment longer than it needed to.
Something passed over his face, quiet and unreadable, like the moment before a tide turns.
“All right,” he said.
Shiloh’s shoulders sank with relief.
Jin leaned one shoulder against the doorway and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll send word to Wendy, though she’s still trapped in Clarcton.”
Cordelia’s mouth twitched. “I received a letter yesterday. Nessa has apparently terrified three suitors already and turned a fourth into a tree.”
Jin groaned. “That sounds about right.”
“A shrub, technically,” Cordelia added. “But a very unhappy one.”
“That family should not be allowed near courtship rituals.”
“She is growing fond of a human boy, though,” Cordelia said. “Says he finds her ditsy.”
Yoongi pulled a chair to Y/N’s bedside and sat down. The chair gave a small wooden complaint beneath him.
“Ditsy is certainly one word for it.”
He tried not to think too long about Nessa.
The ache that accompanied her name nudged at him, quiet and unwelcome. It was not a sharp pain. Those were easier, in some ways. Sharp pain announced itself honestly. This was the duller sort, the kind that had lived too long inside him to be a wound and not long enough to become memory.
Only Y/N knew the whole of it.
Only Y/N knew about the old relationship, the years hidden beneath ordinary conversation, the glances swallowed before others could see them, the meetings made to look accidental, the care taken with letters, names, and silences. Only Y/N knew how some love did not end so much as sink below the surface, where no one else could see it but where it still moved with the tide.
Ten years was a long time to keep a secret.
But he and Nessa had both feared the same thing: that truth, once spoken, would wound Wendy. Wendy, who had loved easily and brightly when they were young. Wendy, who had once looked at Yoongi as though he were a locked door she might someday find the key to. Wendy, who deserved tenderness even in disappointment.
So the secret had remained buried.
Silent as silt at the bottom of the sea.
Now Y/N lay before him, feverish and still, the keeper of that secret and so many others. She had carried it without judgment, as she carried most things: not lightly, exactly, but faithfully. She had never pressed him to speak before he was ready. She had never made his fear seem cowardly. She had only sat beside him on certain evenings, when the cottage windows were dark and the kettle had gone quiet, and let silence be a place where he could breathe.
Yoongi’s hand tightened once on the arm of the chair.
Then he let it loosen.
The cottage settled into a softer quiet.
It was no longer the dreadful silence of a house waiting for bad news. It was the quieter peace that comes after worry has done all the useful things it can and must now sit down by the bed. Cordelia hummed under her breath as she stirred herbs into Y/N’s water, a tune that sounded older than words and smelled faintly, somehow, of salt and rain. Jin stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his head bowed, sunlight still faint along his fingers. For once he did not try to fill the room with speech. His silence was awkward at first, then kind.
Shiloh finally tucked her head beneath one wing, though she did not sleep. Her vigil merely changed shape. It became stillness instead of motion, listening instead of pacing, a small feathered trust placed unwillingly in the hands of others.
Yoongi remained beside the bed.
Every so often he checked Y/N’s pulse. Once he adjusted the blanket. Once he lifted the cup Cordelia had prepared and coaxed a little water past Y/N’s lips when she stirred enough to swallow. He spoke to her each time, low and steady, not with the grand soothing phrases people use when they are frightened by their own helplessness, but as though she were merely very tired and would be annoyed later if everyone made too much of it.
“That’s it,” he murmured once. “Just a little.”
Y/N’s brow tightened faintly.
“I know,” he said. “You can be angry with me when you wake up.”
Shiloh opened one eye from beneath her wing. “She will be.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Cordelia’s mouth curved.
Jin glanced at Yoongi then, and something small and old passed between them. Not forgiveness. Not yet. Forgiveness, when it is real, does not usually come prancing in with trumpets and garlands. It arrives more like a thaw: first one drop from an icicle, then another, then the surprising sound of running water where everything had been frozen the day before.
But it was a beginning.
Outside, the forest brightened with the slow, pale unfolding of a winter morning. Sunlight slid between the snow-heavy evergreens in cold ribbons, catching on frost and ice until the world shone white and gold. The mist lifted by degrees, revealing buried paths, dark trunks, and the long stillness of a forest not yet ready for spring. Somewhere high in the pines, a bird called once and then thought better of it. The river muttered under its ice. Snow fell in soft clumps from burdened branches, leaving little puffs of white powder in the air.
Winter still held Bangtan in both hands.
But inside the cottage, winter had been pushed back from the bed.
There was warmth at the hearth. There was medicine on the table. There were herbs steeping, blankets tucked, hands ready, and three kinds of magic keeping quiet watch around a sleeping girl whose body had been asked to carry too much.
Y/N slept on.
Her fever eased by degrees.
Her breath steadied.
And though the cold pressed its pale hands against the windows and peered in with all the patience of February, it could not come any farther.
𓄿 Chapter Two: In Sickness and in Health
Pairing: Jimin x Reader
Other tags: Werewolf!Jimin, Witch!Reader, Shifter!Reader, Shifter!Jimin, A/B/O Dynamics, Alpha!Jimin, Witch!Yoongi, Witch!Seokjin, Werewolf!Taehyung, Alpha!Taehyung, Werewolf!Namjoon, Alpha!Namjoon, Werewolf!Hoseok, Alpha!Hoseok, Werewolf!Jungkook, Omega!Jungkook
Genre: Fantasy!AU, Werewolf!AU, Witch!AU, friends to lovers, extreme slow burn, mutual pining, angst, fluff, eventual smut, 18+ only
Word Count: 23.8k+
Synopsis: Across the four realms of Lustra lies the enchanted Bangtan Forest, homeland of the southern Foxglove pack and a place whispered about as the “land of magic.” It is also the domain of the Bridd, a line of witches bound by an ancient curse and entrusted as the forest’s sacred guardians. Y/N, the newest Bridd, inherited her role far too young. Now grown, she is honored by the wolves as the most powerful witch they have ever known. Yet beneath the reverence and power lives a woman who must choose between the weight of her destiny and the longings of her heart.
Warnings: blood, witchcraft, shapeshifters, childhood memories, yearning, pining, emotional constipation, magic, talking animals, spirit guides, PTSD, negative self talk, gossiping, meddling woodland friends, unrequited love (or is it?), dreaming of him, long haired Jimin, that will be a reoccurring warning, mating system, politics, injured character, sick character, nightmares, whimsy, bickering, Shiloh is so iconic, Paganism, let me know if i missed anything...
A/N: Thanks for reading!
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Y/N was sitting at her dining table when the morning found her. The sun came first through the high black branches, then over the frosted meadow, then along the sill; only after that did they venture into the cottage, setting pale gold on the floorboards, on the backs of chairs, on the worn stones of the hearth, and finally upon the enormous round table where Y/N had taken her tea.
It was a peculiar table, and the sort of table no tidy-minded person would ever have chosen if he had begun with measurements, color schemes, or any of those sensible things by which houses are so often made dull. It was too large for the cottage, much too round to be useful in a corner, and stained a deep, stubborn teal that had resisted soap, sanding, charms, powders, moon-water, muttered threats, and one rather shameful experiment involving vinegar, a silver spoon, and a great deal of misplaced confidence. The color remained exactly as it had always been, clinging to the wood with the firm cheerfulness of an old joke that refused to stop being funny.
The surface bore all the marks of a life thoroughly lived. There were pale rings left by teacups, dark scars from knives, dents where jars had been dropped in haste, and three blackened places where candles had behaved badly during storms. Its legs, absurdly grand for so battered a thing, were carved with curling leaves and little beasts whose faces had worn down over the years until they appeared to be looking out at the world in sleepy astonishment.
It matched nothing—not the chairs, not the rug, not the cupboards, not the old blue pitcher by the stove, not the brass bell without a tongue, and certainly not the footstool embroidered with foxes by someone who had clearly never seen a fox but had loved the idea of them very much.
But Aldara had loved the table, and that was enough.
Because Aldara had loved it, Y/N kept it as faithfully as if it had been made from the wood of some tree that grew in the courts of heaven. She cleaned it, defended it, and spoke rather sharply to anyone who suggested, even kindly, that perhaps it was time for something smaller, plainer, newer, or less teal. There were many things in the cottage like that—things which had outlived usefulness, fashion, convenience, and, in some cases, good sense, but had not outlived meaning. The cottage did not look arranged so much as gathered. Every shelf, chair, jar, cracked cup, and faded curtain seemed to have come there carrying a story under one arm and no intention whatever of leaving.
The chairs around the table were no better behaved than the table itself. One had armrests carved into the heads of wolves, a gift from Hoseok after a winter hunt that had begun with boasting and ended with three people stuck in a tree until sunrise. Another had once been painted with stars and moons, though time had softened them into cloudy smudges, and one leg was shorter than the others, so that it rocked if anyone sat down too quickly or breathed with too much confidence. A third chair was blackened along one side from an alchemical mishap that Y/N still insisted had not been her fault, though nobody who had been present believed her, and nobody who had not been present believed her either. On damp evenings, if one pressed close to the charred edge, it still smelled faintly of sage, smoke, and embarrassment.
None of the chairs matched. None of them seemed to wish to. Y/N had always thought this one of their better qualities.
The windows were shut against the morning, for late January had no manners and would come straight into a person’s bones if invited too freely. Still, a narrow pane near the stove had been cracked open to let out the old hearth-smoke, and through that little opening the cold slipped in. It smelled of snow, wet bark, woodsmoke, and the hard iron sleep of frozen earth. The curtains moved only a little, lifting and falling as if the cottage itself were breathing carefully, not wanting to wake too much of the winter outside.
Beyond the glass, the meadow lay under its thin white covering. It was not one of those deep, swallowing snows that buried fences and made paths into guesses, but it had softened the world all the same. White gathered in the hollows of the field and along the low stone wall. The grasses stood through it in brittle golden tufts, bent and rimed with frost. The dead heads of foxglove rattled faintly near the fence when the wind moved through them, while the bluebells slept under the hard ground and would sleep for weeks yet. Poppies and daisies were only promises kept deep in the soil. Even the trees seemed less like trees than dark thoughts sketched in charcoal and silver, their bare branches holding small jewels of ice where the night fog had frozen.
Imbolc was only a week away.
Perhaps, Y/N thought, she ought to write to Jin today and ask him to bring extra firewood. He would laugh, of course. She could hear him already, bright as a bell and twice as troublesome.
You live in a forest, Y/N. It is rather famous for having wood.
And he would say it with that impossible sideways grin of his, the one that made rebuke feel like an invitation and foolishness feel like a holiday. He would arrive late, carrying half the forest under one arm and pretending the whole thing had been her idea, and then he would make dreadful toasts while Yoongi pretended not to enjoy them.
But perhaps this year she would surprise him. Perhaps this year she would really do it. She would host her own Imbolc fire. Nothing grand. Nothing with banners or musicians or any ceremony that required people to stand solemnly while pretending their feet were not freezing. Just a proper fire beneath the clean winter dark, a kettle of spiced cider, honey cakes if she remembered them, and enough light to honor the turning of the season.
The thought pleased her. It pleased her so much that she said it aloud, because spoken intentions had weight, and Y/N had always believed that words, once released into the air, began looking for ways to become true.
“This year,” she said into her tea, “I shall host something for Imbolc.”
The cottage listened politely.
Then, because Y/N knew herself very well and had lived with herself long enough not to be fooled by grand declarations made before breakfast, she added, “And I shall not forget.”
The cottage accepted this too, with the same quiet tact.
A moment later, she made a little face at herself and took another sip. Honeysuckle tea spread warm and sweet over her tongue. She had meant to host a gathering the year before, and the year before that, and once she had gone so far as to write down a list. The list had then vanished under a stack of pressed flowers and been rediscovered in autumn by a beetle who appeared to find it inspiring.
“No,” she said firmly, as though speaking to the future version of herself who would almost certainly be elbow-deep in poultice or frog bones when Imbolc arrived. “Not this time.”
Her favorite chair—if one could call a chair favorite without offending all the others—had been angled beside the window for so many years that the floor beneath it had faded in its shape. From there, she could see the meadow rolling away from the cottage in a white, winter hush. Frost clung to every blade of standing grass, making the field glitter as though the night had spilled a box of tiny stars and forgotten to gather them again. Near the fence, last summer’s stems stood brown and hollow, and beneath the snow the sleeping beds held their secrets.
The sight stirred something in her that was not quite happiness and not quite sorrow. She saw herself suddenly, not as she was now, but as she had been: barefoot in summer, wind-burned and wild-haired, running through that same meadow with both arms flung wide, as if she meant to catch the whole sky against her chest. The grass had been taller then, and she had been shorter. Clover had thickened the air with sweetness. Bees had moved sleepily from bloom to bloom. Her laughter had flown all the way to the tree line, where birds startled up from the branches in a flurry of indignant wings.
Yoongi had been there in those days, grumbling even as a child. He had possessed the solemn disapproval of a very small old man and the tender heart of a saint who did not wish anyone to know about it. He complained about mud while stepping directly into it to pull her out. He scolded her for climbing too high, then climbed higher himself to prove the branch was unsafe. He hid sweets in his sleeves and pretended to be baffled when they ended up in her pockets.
Then had come Jin, bright and careless and charming enough to be forgiven for nearly anything, smelling always faintly of citrus peel, sun-warmed wool, and mischief. And Wendy, with hair that carried the salt of the sea no matter how far inland she wandered, leaving damp marks on their books and turning every dull afternoon into an expedition.
By the time they were half-grown, the four of them had become inseparable in the way only children can be, before the world teaches people to divide themselves into duties, homes, griefs, and silences. They had belonged to one another without ceremony. No oath had bound them. No spell had stitched them together. It had been something simpler and stronger than either: the easy gravity of shared youth. They had believed then that the world was wide because it meant to make room for them.
Y/N lowered her cup.
Of course, they had grown. Everyone did, though it was a great inconvenience and almost always happened before one was finished with being young. Life had drawn them away by degrees, gently at first and then with a firmer hand. Yoongi had his kitchen in the deep woods, where every loaf of bread seemed to come out tasting faintly of loyalty. Jin followed sunlight wherever it led, which meant he arrived late, departed early, and always left some warmth behind him. Wendy belonged to the ocean as surely as shells belonged to the tide.
And Y/N belonged here—to the cottage, to the meadow, to the forest, to the animals, to the rituals, to the old bargains and the small healings, to the invisible chains of responsibility she had learned to wear lightly, so that others might mistake them for ribbons.
They would never again be exactly what they had been. She had accepted that long ago, but acceptance, she had discovered, did not always keep a thing from hurting.
From across the room came the soft scrape of talons on wood, and Y/N smiled before she turned.
Shiloh stood on her perch beside the kitchen window, pale feathers puffed around her like a shawl. The owl’s eyes were narrowed with the weary dignity possessed only by creatures who slept in daylight and disapproved of everyone else’s schedule.
“I’m going to sleep for a while,” Shiloh announced, her voice thick with drowsiness. “Wake me if you need me.”
“You should sleep outside,” Y/N said, in the tone of someone who knew she would not be obeyed but felt morally improved by saying the thing anyway. “I’ll be using the kitchen soon, and I might wake you.”
Shiloh ruffled herself with enormous offense. “I beg your pardon.”
Owls did not beg for anything, and familiars even less so. Before Y/N could answer, Shiloh spread her wings and swept through the open window in a pale blur, vanishing into the morning with all the wounded grandeur of a queen exiled by fools.
“You are dramatic even for an owl,” Y/N called after her.
There was no answer, unless the sharp rustle of wings in the trees could be counted as one.
The cottage settled into a quieter quiet after Shiloh left. It was not empty. Y/N’s home was never empty. It held all the little sounds that made solitude bearable: a kettle ticking as it cooled, herbs shifting in their bundles above the hearth, a floorboard sighing under the memory of someone’s step, and the faint scratch of a mouse in the wall whom Y/N had been meaning to evict for three weeks but had not done because he seemed polite.
Beyond the windows, the forest breathed in its winter sleep. Branch touched branch. Ice loosened by slow degrees. Roots spoke to roots beneath the frozen ground in a language that trees remembered and people mostly forgot.
Y/N’s hearing was not so keen as Shiloh’s, nor as sharp as that of the wolves who moved through Bangtan like white shadows, but it had always been better than ordinary. She could tell the difference between a rabbit under the hedge and the spirit fox that sometimes lingered near her land. She knew the dry skitter of frozen leaves, the soft fall of snow slipping from a branch, and the careful tread of deer on crusted ground. When she was younger, she had been rather proud of it. Too proud, perhaps.
At twelve, on one hot afternoon thick with flies and golden light, she had declared before Jin that she could hear wings half a mile away and the footfall of a wolf long before it reached the clearing. He had laughed and called her a showoff.
He had not meant it cruelly. Jin rarely meant things cruelly then. His laughter had been bright and passing, like a coin tossed into water. But she remembered the small burn of embarrassment, the sudden knowledge that a person could reveal too much of herself simply by being pleased with what she was. She had smiled, because children learn very early to smile when they are stung in places no one can see, and after that, she had not boasted anymore.
Now, many years later, the memory only made her laugh softly into her cup.
“Showoff,” she whispered, tasting the word as if it belonged to another life.
The sunlight shifted. It traveled along the table, deepening the teal stain and catching in the shallow scars of the wood until the whole thing seemed lit from beneath like a lantern. Outside, winter held fast, but beneath it, spring had begun its first secret work. Buds tightened on the branches. Clouds drifted like wool torn thin. A brave and foolish bee, drunk on the mere idea of flowers, bumped itself against the window frame and wandered away again.
For the first time in weeks, Y/N did nothing.
This was rarer than it ought to have been. There were always poultices to mix, charms to mend, creatures to soothe, spirits to bargain with, letters to answer, knives to sharpen, candles to dress, and jars to label before she forgot what was in them and had to determine by smell whether something was medicine or supper. But that morning, no task had yet found her. No ritual tugged at her sleeve. No urgency curled like smoke at the edge of her mind.
She simply sat.
Her tea cooled. The meadow glittered. The cottage breathed.
By the time the second cup had gone lukewarm and the third had nearly done the same, she saw something move at the edge of the field.
At first, she took it for light. That was easily done in winter. Sunlight had a habit of putting on shapes in the forest. It flashed on ice and looked like eyes. It caught on frosted bark and pretended to be silver thread. It lay across old stones until they seemed to shift under it. Y/N narrowed her eyes and set her cup down carefully.
The pale shape stood half in the trees and half out of them, thin as a breath against the dark trunks.
Then it moved again.
Not with the easy, floating grace of mist. Not with the sway of grass.
It limped.
Y/N’s hand went at once to the windowsill.
The shape staggered from the shadow of the trees into the open meadow. Sunlight slid across its pelt and turned it briefly to silver. It was a wolf—a large one, pale-furred, long-legged, and moving with the tight, careful steps of an animal who had learned that the ground might hurt him if touched in the wrong way.
Then came the sound.
It was very small for so great a creature, a thin, broken whimper, quickly swallowed as though pride had leapt up and clamped jaws around it. But Y/N heard it, and it hooked into her chest with cruel little claws.
She leaned out the cracked window. “Are you hurt?”
Her voice had changed without her willing it to. The idle softness had gone from it. What remained was the calm, low certainty she used with frightened birds, wounded deer, children with cut knees, and once with an outraged river spirit who had caught his elbow in a fish trap.
The wolf froze. His ears lifted. The crying stopped.
Y/N did not move too quickly. One did not startle a hurt creature, especially one whose teeth were longer than one’s fingers.
“If you are hurt,” she said more gently, “I can help you. I have supplies. Enough to patch you quickly.”
The meadow seemed to hold its breath. A pale winter butterfly wandered between them, unconcerned with injury, dignity, or the delicate negotiations between witch and wolf. It drifted over a dead stem, reconsidered the entire matter, and went elsewhere.
The wolf’s eyes caught the sun. Amber. Sharp. Familiar.
Something stirred uneasily in her memory. Not certainty. Not yet. Only the tug of a thread. The pale wolf from the other night, perhaps—the one who had returned her lantern and vanished before she could decide whether to thank him, scold him, or ask why he had been carrying it in the first place.
White wolves were not strange in Bangtan. Jimin was fair-furred. So was old Ahn, whose pelt shone beneath moonlight like frost. But the thought of Jimin rose before she could stop it, stubborn and unwelcome, and Y/N grimaced faintly at herself.
The wolf limped nearer, slowly and deliberately, with far more pride than was sensible for someone leaving blood in the snow. When he reached the wall beneath her window, she could see the injury plainly. Blood streaked his hind leg, vivid against the white fur. More darkened his side, though he held himself as if nothing at all were wrong and the whole matter were a minor inconvenience caused by the weather.
“Oh,” Y/N breathed, and the sound held more sorrow than she meant it to.
The wolf looked away, as if offended by pity.
“Come around to the door,” she said. “You may need to shift to get inside.”
At that, he stiffened.
The change was subtle but unmistakable. His head lifted. His shoulders tightened. Something proud and hot flickered through him like a coal stirred under ash. Wolves could shift, yes, but they did not always do it gladly. Not when wounded. Not before someone outside their own. Not when the shifting itself might expose more than skin.
“All right,” Y/N said at once. “You do not have to. I can bring you in another way.”
His gaze returned to her.
“It feels odd the first time,” she admitted, because honesty was kinder than reassurance when magic was involved. “But it is safe. I promise.”
The wolf tilted his head. His tail gave the smallest uncertain twitch, which might have meant interest, suspicion, or that he had lost too much blood to argue properly. Then, after a long pause, it wagged once.
Y/N smiled. “Good. Hold still for me.”
She closed her eyes, and the world changed when she did. Not outwardly, not to anyone watching from the meadow, but behind her lids, the cottage bloomed in clear detail. She saw the red and white rug before the hearth, worn soft by years of feet and paws. She saw the mismatched chairs around the teal table, the sewing chair with its cushion gone thin in the middle, and the row of knives above the fireplace stones, each blade polished and named. She saw the kitchen shelves crowded with jars of herbs, roots, bones, salt, feathers, oils, seeds, and things that would have looked alarming to anyone who did not know how useful a dried beetle could be.
She saw the altar beneath the windows, the candles guttering lavender and gold, the little dish of river stones, the sprig of rosemary tied with red thread. She saw sunlight lying on the floorboards like spilled honey, and only when the shape of home was whole in her mind did she begin to murmur.
The words came easily. They always had. They belonged to a language older than Lustra and older than the courts that pretended to rule it. Older, perhaps, than the first witch who learned that air could open if spoken to properly. The chant slipped from her tongue soft and lilting, not commanding the world so much as persuading it to remember that doors were only agreements.
With two fingers, she traced an outline in the air.
The space before the wolf shimmered. Light gathered there, pale and thin at first, then thickening like a curtain woven from moonlit water. The edges trembled. The center grew transparent. Y/N parted it with a gentle push.
The wolf stared.
For one unguarded moment, all the dignity went out of him. His tail wagged faster, and fascination brightened his eyes until he looked, despite the blood and the size of him, almost young. He sniffed the glowing threshold, then stepped through with more courage than caution.
An instant later, he stood beside her hearth.
He was enormous.
Y/N blinked up at him. The wolf blinked down at her.
He took up half the room.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I may need to shrink you a little.”
His ears twitched.
“I know. I know,” she said. “Terribly rude of me.”
The wolf sat down with great care, as if to prove that he was cooperative, civilized, and only accidentally the size of a small pony.
“Very gracious of you,” Y/N said.
She lifted one hand. Blue light pulsed softly through the room, cool and bright as winter dusk. It ran over his fur, passed through the air, brushed the walls, and faded. When it was gone, the wolf remained large, but no longer impossible. He was still magnificent, still broad-chested and powerful, but now he looked less like a creature who might knock over the ceiling beams by sighing.
“There,” Y/N said. “Manageable.”
The wolf gave her a look that suggested he did not care to be called manageable.
“Lie down,” she instructed.
To her mild surprise, he obeyed at once. He lowered himself onto the floor before the hearth with a slow, tired exhale and rested his head on his paws.
The sight softened something in her.
Whatever unease she usually felt near wolves—whatever old caution lived in her bones and woke at the scent of them—was swallowed by the plain fact of his pain. There was blood on her floor now, dark little marks against the wood. There was a torn place in his side. There were wounds where no wound ought to be.
She knelt beside him and parted the fur around his hind leg. The blood was tacky beneath her fingers. The skin below was hot. Bite marks punctured deep through the muscle, and claw marks raked cruelly along the flank. These were not the scrapes of a hunt gone poorly. Not brambles. Not a fall. Not even the ordinary brutality of a scuffle. This had been done with purpose.
Her stomach tightened.
“You really are something,” she murmured, partly to him and partly to herself. “Sneaking out, getting into fights, bleeding in my meadow. What would your mother say?”
The wolf made a muffled sound into his paws. It was not quite a growl. Not quite a sigh. It sounded, impossibly, like a grumble of amusement.
Y/N looked up.
His eyes met hers: amber, watchful, intelligent, and warmer than she expected. There was a person looking out through them. Not merely a wolf with clever instincts, but someone aware and guarded and curious beneath all that pale fur. Again, the thought of Jimin flickered through her mind, and again she pushed it away, though not quite as firmly as before.
“Stay,” she said, though he had made no attempt to rise.
She crossed to the shelf beside the stove and took down a small tin. When she opened it, the cottage filled with the clean, green smell of comfrey, sage, and goldenroot. It was a humble salve by the standards of elaborate healers and proud witches who preferred their medicines to glow dramatically in crystal bowls, but Y/N trusted it more than many spells. It had soothed burns, sealed cuts, calmed bruises, eased bites, and once restored feeling to Yoongi’s thumb after an incident with a cursed pastry fork.
It had earned its place.
“Well then, little wolf,” she said, returning to his side, “let us get acquainted.”
He looked at her.
“I shall begin,” she continued, dipping her fingers into the cool cream. “And next time it will be your turn.”
The wolf’s eyes narrowed faintly, as if to ask whether there would indeed be a next time.
Y/N pretended not to notice.
She smoothed the salve carefully along the torn skin. He did not flinch. His breath changed, growing deeper, but he held himself still with astonishing discipline. The fur beneath her hand was thick and soft, warmer than it looked, and the heat of him came up through her fingers like the heat of banked coals. She worked slowly, parting the fur, cleaning the wound, pressing the salve where it needed to go.
“People call me Bridd,” she said after a while.
The wolf listened. The room listened too, in the way rooms do when secrets are spoken in them.
“But if you are going to spend time here,” she went on, “you may call me Y/N. Bridd sounds far too formal for friends.”
The wolf blinked once, slow and solemn.
It felt like an answer.
“My aunt gave me that name when I came to Lustra,” Y/N said. “No one ever really discovered how I arrived. Not properly. Aldara used to say the Gods guided me.” Her mouth softened around the memory. “She said when she saw me, she simply knew, as if she had been waiting for me all her life.”
The wolf remained still, but his gaze had changed. It was not pity. Y/N would have resented pity. It was something quieter. Attention, perhaps. Or recognition.
The salve in the tin emptied more quickly than she had hoped. She sighed, rose, and went to fetch another. Then another after that, because the wounds were longer than they had first appeared and wolves, apparently, contained an unreasonable amount of surface. When she turned back with both tins in hand, she found him staring at her with such a human expression—one brow lifted, his mouth slightly open, his eyes full of patient judgment—that she laughed.
“You look as though you are about to lecture me,” she said. “And I would remind you that I am not the one who lost a fight.”
His tail thumped once against the floor.
“I wish I knew your name,” she said, kneeling again. “Or even whether I ought to call you he or she. Calling you wolf feels horribly impolite, and little wolf is beginning to sound like an insult when you take up half my hearth.”
The sound that came from him then startled her so badly she nearly dropped the tin.
It was low and warm, rising from his chest in a rumble that shook through the floorboards.
Laughter.
Y/N froze. “You can laugh?”
The wolf’s amber eyes gleamed.
“Oh,” she said, sitting back slightly. “Well. That changes things.”
He blinked at her, visibly pleased with himself.
“All right,” she said, gathering her composure with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. “Let us be practical. Shake your head for no. Nod for yes.”
The wolf lifted his head.
“Are you a woman?”
He shook his head.
“Fluid?” Y/N guessed. “Some wolves are.”
Another shake.
“So,” she said, smiling in spite of herself, “you are a man.”
The wolf dipped his head in a neat, deliberate nod. It was just shy of smug.
“Good,” Y/N said. “That is a start.”
She gestured for him to roll over.
His ears went back.
“Do not look at me like that,” she said. “I need to see the other side.”
The wolf let out a long, suffering breath, as though no creature in the history of the forest had ever been so greatly inconvenienced, and flopped onto his side with dramatic resignation.
Y/N stared.
“This side is worse.”
He avoided her gaze.
“You could have told me.”
The wolf rolled his eyes.
He actually rolled them.
“Oh, don’t you dare,” Y/N said, though a laugh escaped her. “You wolves and your pride. You would rather bleed through my rug than admit you need help.”
He snorted, offended.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “You are very noble and terribly mistreated. Hold still.”
The wounds along his ribs were deeper. Some had clotted poorly beneath the fur, and when she cleaned them, fresh blood welled dark and quick. Y/N’s humor faded. She leaned closer, her brows drawing together.
Bite marks. Claw marks. Cruel angles.
The attack had not been clean or honorable. Whoever had done this had not merely wished to win. They had wished to ruin.
A small anger kindled in her—not loud, for Y/N’s anger rarely was. It burned low and blue, the way certain flames burn hottest when they do not leap.
“You poor thing,” she whispered.
The wolf’s ear flicked, but he did not look away this time.
She rinsed a cloth in the basin beside her. The water clouded pink, then red, rippling with each movement of her hand. Firelight caught the surface and broke itself into trembling pieces. She cleaned one wound and then another, slow enough not to frighten him, firm enough to do good. The salve gleamed pale on her fingers, its sharp green scent mingling with iron, smoke, lavender candle-wax, and the wild musk of wolf.
He flinched once when she pressed near a deep tear below his ribs. Only once. The muscles under her hand tightened, then gradually released.
“I know,” she murmured. “I know. Nearly done.”
She worked along his side, down toward his flank, over bruises that darkened beneath the fur. When she pressed gently near his hind joint, his leg jerked. Y/N startled, then laughed, soft and bright.
“Oh. So that tickles, does it?”
His ear flicked.
“Good,” she said. “Your reflexes are working.”
The wolf made a low sound that might have been complaint.
“I am choosing to take that as gratitude.”
He huffed.
Outside, the forest continued about its morning. The thrush sang again. Leaves whispered against one another in the wind. Somewhere far off, water moved under ice and over stones. But inside the cottage, time seemed to draw close around the two of them, like a shawl pulled over chilled shoulders. There was only the fire, the basin, the smell of herbs, the warmth of the animal beside her, and the steady work of her hands.
When at last the bleeding stopped and the swelling began to ease beneath the salve’s subtle shimmer, Y/N sat back on her heels.
“There,” she said.
The word was small. Too small, perhaps, for the long quiet that had passed between them. But it was what she had.
She wiped her hands on a cloth and examined him with the stern eye of someone who expected healing to behave itself. The wounds were not gone, but they were clean. The worst of the bleeding had ceased. The salve had settled into the torn places, drawing the heat down and leaving a faint silver sheen along the edges.
“You are good to go,” she said, patting his side lightly.
The wolf did not move.
At first she thought he had not understood. Then she saw that he understood perfectly. His ears had flattened a little, and the muscles along his shoulders had gone tense in a conflicted way. He knew he ought to leave. Of course he did. Packs pulled on wolves like tides pulled on the sea. Someone would notice. Someone might already be looking.
The fire crackled softly, sending amber light up the walls and across the low beams of the ceiling. It gleamed along the knives above the hearth, shone in the teal scars of the table, and turned the wolf’s white fur to gold. Outside, the meadow rested under frost and old snow, bare and beautiful in the hard morning light.
For a little while, there was no Bridd and no stranger-wolf, no pack, no name withheld, no old fear, no hidden wound deeper than the ones she had dressed. There was only Y/N in her odd cottage, with herbs on her hands and sunlight on her floor, and a wounded creature resting his head in her lap because, against all the hard sense of the world, he had decided to trust her.
They remained that way until the fire had eaten another inch of wood and the sunlight had moved from the table to the floor, laying itself across the boards in long, pale stripes.
Y/N did not know how much time had passed. It seemed to her that time had gone soft around them, as warm and drowsy as the wolf’s breath against her knees. Her hand moved absently over his head, smoothing the fur between his ears, and every so often he made that low, contented sound again, quiet enough that she felt it more than heard it.
But at last his ears twitched.
Not from comfort this time.
He lifted his head, slow and reluctant, and looked toward the window.
Y/N’s hand stilled.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”
The wolf did not move at once. He only looked back at her, amber eyes warm in the firelight, and for one foolish moment she almost told him to stay.
There was room.
There was always room, somehow, in the cottage. The mismatched chairs made room for one another. The shelves made room for one more jar, one more book, one more strange little relic with nowhere else to go. Surely there could be room for a wounded wolf by the hearth.
But wolves belonged to their own, even when they wandered. Someone, somewhere, must have been missing him.
Y/N gave his head one last careful stroke.
“Come on then, little wolf. Before I become selfish.”
He rose with some stiffness, though the salve had already done him good. His limp remained, but it no longer dragged so cruelly through his body. He followed her to the windowed side of the room, where morning still poured pale and cold through the cottage. Y/N lifted her hand and whispered the old words again.
The doorway opened like a curtain of pale water.
Beyond it waited the meadow, silvered with frost and old snow.
The wolf paused at the threshold. Then he turned and pressed his cold nose once against her wrist.
It was such a small thanks that it hurt more than any grander thing could have.
“You’re welcome,” Y/N whispered.
Then he passed through the light and stood once more in the meadow. For a breath, he looked back at her, white fur bright against the winter field, amber eyes holding hers with an almost human gravity. Then he turned toward the trees and slipped away, moving slower than he had come, but steadier.
Y/N watched until the forest took him.
Only when the last pale flicker of him vanished between the trunks did she let the doorway close.
The cottage felt strangely large afterward.
She stood there a moment with salve on her sleeves, blood drying faintly at her wrists, and the warmth of him still lingering in her lap as if he had left part of himself behind. Then the kettle gave a small, practical click from the stove, and the spell of stillness broke.
“Well,” she said to the room, because there was no one else to say it to, “that was unexpected.”
The room, being used to unexpected things, did not argue.
Y/N washed her hands in warm water scented with rosemary, watching the pink threads of blood loosen from her skin and curl away. Then she tied her hair back, rolled up her sleeves, and went to the long worktable beneath the hanging herbs.
There was medicine to make.
Comfrey first, dried from summer’s stores, then goldenroot, then a pinch of powdered pearlcap mushroom for swelling. She moved gently but with purpose, crushing leaves in the mortar until the cottage filled with green, living fragrance—a small borrowed memory of the warmth still buried beneath January’s frost.
Outside, the morning went on shining cold and bright. Inside, Y/N worked with a small, secret smile tugging at her mouth.
Every now and then, despite herself, she glanced toward the window.
The meadow remained empty.
Still, she set an extra tin of salve aside.
Just in case.
Imbolc came to the Bangtan Forest on a cold and wandering breeze.
It was the sort of breeze that had not yet made up its mind whether it belonged to winter or spring, and so it behaved a little like both. It came out of the north with cold fingers and a sharp nose, but it had a hopeful heart. It moved over the meadow around Y/N’s cottage, bending the stiff brown grasses one way and then another, as if searching beneath them for the first green blade brave enough to rise.
By midafternoon, the meadow shone beneath a thin, wintry light. It was not the rich gold of summer, which made everything look fat and sleepy and pleased with itself, nor even the gentle brightness of true spring, when the world seemed newly washed and still smelling of rain. This light was paler, strained through frost, a silvery kind of sunlight that made every stone and stem look thoughtful. Ice crystals clung to the tips of the grasses and flashed whenever the breeze troubled them, first like tiny knives and then, when the sun softened, like fallen stars. The sky was a pale, high blue, the color of breath on glass, and at the edge of the meadow the forest stood with its branches bare and listening.
The trees always seemed to listen on Imbolc.
That was the feeling of the holiday in Lustra. It was not yet warmth, but the promise of warmth. Not yet blooming, but the held breath before blooming began. It was the hour in the year when winter loosened one finger from the throat of the earth, and somewhere deep below frozen mud, black roots, and the brown lace of dead leaves, life turned over in its sleep.
The cottage knew it too.
A thin stream of incense drifted from Y/N’s open window, curling into the cold afternoon in blue-gray ribbons. Yarrow, hawthorn, and a pinch of cinnamon, because cinnamon had always seemed to Y/N like a small edible flame, and therefore suitable for any holy day that involved coaxing warmth back into the world. The smoke twisted once around the window latch, seemed to hesitate, then slipped out into the air and vanished, as if it had gone to whisper instructions to the clouds.
She had lit the incense before sunrise. It was part of the old custom, though Y/N had long suspected that Aldara had invented at least half the old customs she taught and merely worn a grave expression until everyone believed her. This had been one of Aldara’s great talents. She could say, “It is the old way,” while holding a broom backward, and three grown witches would at once begin sweeping in the same direction.
Still, Y/N kept the customs. One did not stop doing a thing simply because it might once have begun as someone’s mischief. Many sacred things, she thought, had probably started that way.
So she had risen in the blue dark, shivering in her nightdress while the floorboards bit cold through the soles of her feet, and burned herbs at the window to coax the day along. She had whispered thanks to the sleeping fields, poured milk into a little clay bowl for the spirits beneath the elder hedge, and swept the threshold three times: once for winter leaving, once for spring arriving, and once because Shiloh had said there was still dirt by the door.
Outside, the bonfire pit waited in the meadow. Its ring of stones sat half sunk in frost, and old snow still lingered in the shaded places between them. Y/N had cleared the pit that morning with damp boots, cold fingers, and a determination that had lasted almost as long as her patience. Frozen leaves, dead stems, gray ash, half-melted slush, and one offended beetle had all been removed. The beetle, who had apparently considered the pit a respectable winter residence, objected by turning in circles and then departing under a leaf with the air of someone betrayed by civilization.
By nightfall, if the weather was kind and if Jin did not take charge in some dreadful decorative way, those stones would hold a fire tall enough to crack open the year and let the first rumor of spring come pouring through.
Inside the cottage, however, winter had already been defeated.
The little house had bloomed into the cheerful disorder that only holy days and beloved guests can excuse. The teal table had been dragged to the center of the room, where it stood looking enormous, stubborn, and important. Its scratched surface had been scrubbed until the old stains shone beneath the candlelight like a lake under moonwater. Cushions of every shape and questionable origin had been scattered over the floor. There were round cushions, square cushions, embroidered cushions, faded cushions, one cushion with a stitched hare on it, and one Y/N was fairly sure had once belonged to Hoseok and had been left behind during a rainstorm three winters ago.
Every shelf had been dusted. Every candle had been refreshed. The altar beneath the window had been scrubbed until the wood gleamed softly, and a new braid of sweetgrass had been tied at the base of the little goddess statue. The sweetgrass filled the room with a fresh green scent that stood bravely against the cold still hidden in the cottage walls. Small bowls of milk and honey sat among sprigs of rosemary, dried violets, and polished stones. White ribbons had been tied to the window latch. A little dish of salt waited near the door. The whole cottage seemed dressed not grandly, but lovingly, which is usually better.
Shiloh watched over all of this from the rafter beam.
The owl had recovered fully from what Y/N privately thought of as the Great Puppy Incident, though Shiloh herself preferred to call it an assault, a tragedy, and proof that young animals should be licensed. Her feathers had grown sleek again. Her dignity had returned to its usual alarming size. She had resumed her proper place as tyrant of the household.
“That cushion needs angling,” Shiloh said.
Y/N, kneeling beside the hearth with soot on her nose, moved the cushion half an inch.
Ignoring Shiloh only made Shiloh more dramatic, but Y/N had long ago decided that drama was part of the bird’s digestion and must be allowed to pass naturally.
The kitchen had been awake since eight o’clock, which was earlier than any decent kitchen ought to be asked to wake in February. Yet Imbolc demanded food, and food demanded labor, and labor demanded that Y/N mutter under her breath while tracking frost across the floorboards for the fourth time that morning. Pots simmered. Butter hissed around herbs in a little iron pan. Steam rose against the windows and blurred the meadow beyond into a dream of silver, brown, and pale gold.
The table had filled by degrees with dishes, jars, bowls, bundles, and little plates of things that looked like offerings but were, for the most part, supper. Now, with the worst of the cooking finished, Y/N stood at the sink with her sleeves shoved past her elbows, rinsing the last of the bowls. Steam curled around her face and turned her cheeks pink. Her cold nose had gone shiny at the tip. Wisps of hair had escaped their pins and clung damply to her temples. Her apron, which had been clean at sunrise, now bore flour, soot, herb dust, one streak of honey, and a green smear she could not identify and had decided not to think about.
A wilted violet petal, which had somehow attached itself to her sleeve in the morning and refused to be removed by shaking, brushing, or insult, chose that moment to give up its long struggle and drop into the dishwater.
Plop.
Y/N stared at it. “Really? Now?”
From the rafters came Shiloh’s voice, smooth with satisfaction. “Darling, if I plucked every stray flower you dragged into this house, there would be nothing left for your table, your altar, your pockets, or your hair.”
Y/N muttered something uncomplimentary about owls and turned back to the dishes.
The cottage smelled like the holiday itself. There was the sharp green bite of foraged winter leaves, the warm butteriness of eggs, the deep brown comfort of mushrooms, the sweetness of rose and rice, the smoke of the hearth, and beneath it all the colder smell of the world outside waiting to thaw. Every counter had been claimed. On one side stood a great bowl of winter greens: dandelion, violet leaf, garlic mustard, chickweed, and the arugula and butter lettuce Jin had brought days before with a flourish, as though he had personally persuaded them to grow.
Beside it waited a golden frittata made with Thelma’s eggs, still warm enough to fog the plate beneath it. A platter of ramps and dame’s rocket cooled near the window, sharp and clean as the first water running under ice. Oyster mushrooms, fiddleheads, and herbs gathered in earthy little heaps, some dried from the summer before and some brought by Yoongi only yesterday, wrapped in paper and tied with twine because Yoongi made even vegetables look properly behaved.
Dessert waited apart, as dessert often does, with the quiet confidence of something certain it would be loved. There was a chèvre cheesecake pale as melting snow, its top glossed with honey and sugared thyme, and beside it a rose rice pudding for Wendy, its petals floating on the surface like little pink boats.
But Y/N’s eyes kept straying toward the pantry.
She did not want them to. There were many other things to look at: the polished plates, the newly arranged candles, the sweetgrass braid, the little goddess statue, the meadow beyond the window where the light had begun to lean toward evening. But again and again her gaze slipped to the pantry door.
Behind it, on the middle shelf, sat the hen.
It was already cleaned, already spelled, already preserved under one of Jin’s tidy little charms. A perfectly respectable hen. A plump hen. A hen that, by every ordinary measure, was no longer anyone’s problem but the cook’s.
And yet Y/N did not want to roast it.
She had stood in front of it for nearly ten minutes that morning, arms folded, looking at it with the grim suspicion one might reserve for an enemy who had arrived in disguise. Jin’s voice had repeated in her memory, cheerful and sensible and entirely unhelpful.
It is already done, Y/N. You are honoring it by cooking it. Imbolc needs meat.
Perhaps Imbolc did need meat. Perhaps the old gods liked a table with something hearty at its center. Perhaps Jin was right. He often was, which made him unbearable. But every time Y/N looked at the hen, something in her tightened. It was not disgust exactly. Nor fear. It was simply the feeling that she and the hen had reached an understanding, and the understanding was that they would not be dealing with one another today.
Roasting it herself was out of the question. That felt like challenging the holiday to burst into flames.
At last she had shut the pantry door and whispered, “Nope. Not dealing with that.”
Cordelia always brought fish anyway. Sleek winter trout, usually, silver as frost and smelling of the deep cold places under running water. The wolves would swarm it. Jin would praise it extravagantly. Hoseok, if he came, would complain about bones while eating more than anyone. Taehyung would get a bone stuck in his teeth and pretend he had not. Tradition already had meat enough.
The hen could wait.
Perhaps she would quietly give it to Cordelia later and pretend that had been the plan all along.
Y/N rinsed the last clay bowl, set it in the drying rack, and watched water slide in thin, shimmering trails down her arms. When she flicked her hands dry, droplets scattered into the winter sunlight and flashed like sparks.
“There,” she sighed. “That is the last of it.”
Shiloh hopped down from the rafter with the ceremony of a queen descending into a court she found disappointing but necessary.
For a moment, the cottage settled. Even Shiloh’s feathers flattened into something less theatrical. The fire ticked softly in the hearth. The incense curled upward in a slow blue thread. Outside, the meadow paused in the light, as if holding its breath for evening.
Y/N smoothed her palms over her apron and felt warmth lingering in the fabric. For the first time that day, she allowed herself to stand still and look at what she had made.
The cottage was ready.
Not perfect, of course. Nothing in Y/N’s cottage had ever been perfect and would probably have resented the accusation. But it was warm. It was bright. It smelled of food, herbs, smoke, and hope. It held enough cushions for sore knees, enough chairs for proud backs, enough candles for spirits, and enough food for friends who always claimed they would not eat much and then proved themselves liars.
Imbolc braided people together whether they intended it or not. Y/N often forgot, in the quiet months, where she ended and her strange patchwork of companions began. But on days like this, with the table set and the house waiting, she remembered.
The door opened without a knock.
Yoongi slipped inside the way snow falls: quietly, unassumingly, and somehow already belonging to the place where it lands. He wore soft layers the colors of dusk, river stones, and winter bark. His dark hair was tied loosely at the nape of his neck, though a few strands had escaped and lay across his cheekbones like raven feathers. In his hands he carried a woven basket, and from beneath its linen cover rose a thin curl of steam.
“You brought food,” Y/N said, wiping her hands on her apron as she crossed the room.
Yoongi looked around the cottage once, taking in the table, the cushions, the candles, the absurd number of bowls, and perhaps also the faint desperation in Y/N’s expression.
“We’re the only ones here who don’t eat meat,” he said. “I was being practical.”
“You know I made six dishes already.”
Yoongi set the basket on the teal table with a soft thump. “Arriving empty-handed felt rude.”
His voice was dry as winter wood. His expression, as always, seemed determined not to reveal anything as unruly as affection. But one corner of his mouth moved just enough to betray him.
Y/N leaned over the basket and sniffed dramatically. “Is it cabbage?”
Yoongi gave her a look so flat she nearly laughed.
“No.”
She drooped. “Tragic.”
Then he lifted the linen.
Warmth rose out in a fragrant cloud: roasted carrot, red pepper, garlic, earth, sweetness, and the deep, rich heat of gochujang. It smelled like something that had simmered all morning in a patient pot while snow thought better of falling outside.
“Gochujang and roasted carrot stew,” Yoongi said.
Y/N inhaled as if he had opened a door into paradise. “Oh. That is better.”
The ghost of a smile returned.
He nudged the basket toward her. “Don’t eat it all before everyone else arrives.”
“No promises.”
“Y/N.”
His tone sharpened in the familiar way, like a twig snapping under a boot. It was not a loud rebuke. Yoongi’s scolding was almost always quiet, which somehow made it worse.
She grinned. “Fine. Half.”
“Y/N.”
“It’s Imbolc. Rules don’t apply on Imbolc.”
“They do if you want me to keep sharing.”
She groaned with theatrical suffering, then held out her smallest finger. Yoongi hooked his through it without hesitation. Their fingers touched only briefly, but the touch was warm and ordinary and honest in a way that made Y/N’s heart do something foolish behind her ribs.
“Half,” she conceded.
“Reasonable,” he said.
Then he kicked off his boots near the door, leaving faint specks of thawed mud behind him, and wandered farther into the cottage as though he had always known exactly where to stand.
The door flew open again.
It did not simply open. It announced defeat. It struck the wall with such vigor that a hanging bundle of thyme trembled in alarm, and Jin swept into the cottage like a comet that had become convinced the whole sky existed for its entrance.
His cloak was an outrageous sweep of shimmering gold. It billowed behind him though there was not nearly enough wind indoors to justify it, which meant either he had enchanted it or the cloak had learned vanity from its owner. Even the weak February light seemed to follow him in, brightening at his shoulders and catching in his hair.
“Y/N!” he cried, striding forward with the confidence of a man certain that his arrival had improved the weather. “Tell me you missed me.”
“Moderately,” Y/N said, straightening a stack of plates without looking up.
Jin gasped.
It was not an ordinary gasp. It was the gasp of a prince betrayed, a poet wounded, and a swan informed it was merely a goose.
“You wound me.”
“You’ll live.”
“Will I?” He pressed a hand to his chest and staggered. “Will I truly?”
Before she could move out of range, he swept her into an extravagant embrace and lifted her clean off the floor.
“Jin!” she hissed, laughing despite herself. “Put me down.”
He set her down with a flourish, as though presenting her to an invisible audience.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“For what?”
“For blessing your dreary little cottage with my extraordinary presence.”
“Jin,” she said, rubbing her temple, “it is Imbolc. Please try to behave.”
“I am behaving.” He looked offended by the suggestion otherwise. “Look.”
He swung a small wooden container from the basket on his shoulder and opened it with a flourish worthy of a stage magician producing doves.
“I brought scones.”
Inside sat a neat row of pastries, each one perfectly shaped, their tops brushed with butter and sprinkled with herb sugar. The crystals caught the winter sunlight and glittered like frost that had decided to become delicious. A warm savory scent rose from them: bread, basil, spinach, parsley, and something bright and green that did not belong in February but had somehow been persuaded to attend.
“They have basil, spinach, and parsley,” Jin said reverently, as if naming royal heirs.
Y/N leaned in. “They smell wonderful.”
He preened. Truly preened. His spine straightened. His chin lifted. One hand smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from his cloak. If he had possessed tail feathers, they would have opened.
From above, Shiloh made a dry, pointed sound.
“Absolutely a peacock.”
Jin’s head snapped upward. “I heard that.”
“You were meant to,” Shiloh replied.
He pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Even the birds disrespect me.”
“Especially the birds,” Y/N said, patting his arm.
He sighed as though his burdens were ancient and undeserved. But his mouth softened at the corners, and Y/N knew him well enough to see that he was glad to be there. His happiness showed not in quiet, like Yoongi’s, but in light. He seemed to bring it with him, trailing warmth, noise, and ridiculousness in his wake. He moved around the cottage comfortably, adjusting things she had already arranged, setting his scones beside Yoongi’s stew and nudging the container two inches to the left until it sat perfectly aligned.
A shaft of afternoon sunlight caught in his hair and made him look briefly less like a person and more like a rumor about summer.
“All right,” he declared, surveying the table. “Where is the rest of it? I came ready to be dazzled.”
“You say that every year.”
“And every year,” he said solemnly, “I am.”
She tried to hide her smile and failed.
Jin’s eyes slid toward Yoongi, who had taken it upon himself to alphabetize her spice jars, though no one had asked him and no one but Yoongi had ever believed spices needed governance.
“And Yoongi,” Jin said, “for someone who avoids people, you certainly enjoy feeding them.”
Yoongi did not turn around. He moved a jar of marjoram to the left of mint.
“I like feeding her,” he said.
The cottage went very still around Y/N.
Heat rose up her neck so quickly she wondered whether she had leaned too close to the hearth.
Jin blinked. Then he pointed at Yoongi with the solemn delight of a man witnessing history.
Yoongi shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
Jin looked between them with the expression of someone preparing to become unbearable. Y/N could practically see the speech forming behind his eyes, but something about the gentle quiet of the room, or perhaps the look Yoongi gave him without turning his head, softened the worst of it.
Jin settled for patting Y/N on the shoulder. “Someone get Y/N a chair. She’s about to faint.”
“Certainly. Your face is simply celebrating Imbolc.”
Y/N snatched a bowl and pretended to be very busy with it.
Jin, mercifully, wandered toward the porch and paused to encourage the flowers near the threshold. There were daisies there, absurdly early daisies, peering up through the cold as if they had misunderstood the calendar. Jin bent over them and whispered praise in a voice usually reserved for frightened children and dramatic horses.
Y/N reorganized a stack of bowls that did not need reorganizing and waited for her heartbeat to stop behaving like a trapped sparrow.
It did not.
Then a cool breeze drifted in from the west, tinged with brine and distance. It smelled faintly of sea foam riding beneath the first thaw, and Y/N knew at once what it meant.
Ocean witches.
The grasses beyond the gate rippled in a long shiver, brown at the tips but green at the roots, confused by the mild spell warming the day. Through them came three figures, walking with the steady grace of people who had learned from tides rather than roads.
Cordelia led. She was tall and grounded, dependable in the way a lighthouse is dependable: not soft, exactly, but built to remain when weather lost its temper. Her ginger braids were threaded with shells and opals that clicked faintly as she walked. Winter light skimmed across the pale coral woven through her hair, and the hem of her cloak moved about her ankles as though it had not quite forgotten waves.
Darya came behind her, quick-eyed and quick-moving, with dark hair glinting like stormwater beneath a pale sun. The breeze curled around her ankles as though waiting for instruction. She had the look of a person who noticed everything, trusted very little, and enjoyed herself most when both those things proved useful.
Between them walked a girl Y/N had never seen before.
She could not have been more than eleven. She carried a satchel nearly half her own size, which bulged with the mysterious confidence of bags owned by children. Her eyes were wide. Her steps were light and eager, almost skipping, though she tried very hard not to. Curiosity came off her like heat from a hearth.
Before Cordelia could reach the gate, the girl broke into a run.
“Bridd?” she called breathlessly.
Y/N stepped forward, already smiling. “You must be Belinay.”
The girl nodded so hard her braids bounced. She stopped a few feet away and looked up at Y/N with such reverent astonishment that Y/N had the sudden and uncomfortable sensation of having been mistaken for a monument.
“I wanted to see if you were real,” Belinay said. “Mama says the Bridd is as old as the forest.”
Behind Y/N, Yoongi’s voice drifted dryly from the cottage. “She’s been here longer than Northorn has been a colony.”
Y/N elbowed him sharply without looking back.
“Ow,” Yoongi said, though without surprise.
“I am not that old,” Y/N told the girl.
Belinay’s mouth fell open, as though this information had raised more questions than it answered.
Cordelia reached them then and took Y/N’s hands in both of hers. Her palms were cool and steady, smelling faintly of salt, rope, and winter wind.
“Thank you for having us, Snatcher,” she said warmly. “She’s been begging to meet you for months.”
“I haven’t!” Belinay squeaked. “Only weeks.”
Darya snorted. “You built a shrine.”
Belinay turned scarlet. “It was not a shrine.”
Y/N laughed, and the sound went up into the cold air like a little bell.
“Shrine or no shrine, I am very glad you came.”
Belinay beamed so brightly that she looked as if she had smuggled in a piece of the sun.
After that the cottage filled quickly, the way summer rain fills a dry ditch: softly at first, then all at once. Voices entered. Boots came off. Cloaks were hung. Cold hands reached toward the fire. The air thickened with laughter, movement, and the particular kind of chaos that turns a house into a home.
The mismatched chairs were claimed at once. Jin dropped into the star-painted chair with the triumph of a monarch claiming a throne he believed had been waiting for him since the dawn of time.
“This one,” he said, leaning back, “is appropriate for someone of my radiance.”
“You mean your ego,” Y/N said.
“Same thing.”
Darya examined the remaining chairs as if they were suspects in a crime. At last she chose the scorched one near the wall, the chair marked by a crescent burn from a charm that had misfired years before. She traced the blackened edge with one finger and nodded, as though the wood had confessed and she approved of its honesty.
Yoongi unpacked his basket with the quiet precision of a winter ritual. Jars lined themselves into neat rows beneath his hands. The stew pot settled into the center of the table as though it had always been meant to be there and every other dish had simply been waiting to arrange itself around it.
Cordelia moved through the cottage with a slow, tide-like curiosity. Her fingertips brushed the shelves, the jars of dried herbs, the feather charms, the polished stones, the old trinkets, the carved spoons, and the little oddities Y/N had gathered over the years because no one else wanted them and she could not bear to let them feel unwanted.
“You keep entire worlds in here,” Cordelia murmured.
Y/N glanced around, suddenly shy. “I suppose I do.”
Belinay walked through the cottage as if she had stepped into a story and feared that touching anything might wake it. She stared at charms, talismans, jars, candles, and bones with her breath held. Twice she reached out one finger and then snatched it back, looking horrified by her own boldness.
It became painful to watch.
“You may touch things,” Y/N said gently.
Belinay froze. “Really?”
“As long as you don’t drink anything that glows.”
“I won’t drink anything at all,” Belinay vowed.
Across the room, Jin tapped his chin. “I might drink something glowing.”
“Shut up, Jin,” Yoongi said, without looking up from a row of jars.
Y/N hid a smile behind her hand.
Their familiar rhythms settled into the cottage like warmth returning to chilled bones. She had not realized how quiet the winter had been until now, with laughter loosening the silence from the rafters. Someone opened a window a little wider, and a mild February breeze slipped in, carrying damp earth and cold grass. It wove through the smells of bread, mint, stew, incense, and sweet herbs until the whole cottage seemed to breathe like a living thing.
Cordelia set a small wooden crate beside the stew.
“We brought fish,” she said. “But Mel is carrying it up.”
“That sounds like Mel,” Y/N said.
Mel was always last. His timing was tidal, which meant it was dependable only in the broadest possible sense. He was never gone for good, never exactly on time, and never entirely predictable.
“Hopefully with actual fish,” Darya said. “And not another jar of sea foam.”
Jin gasped. “He’d better hurry. Imbolc waits for no one.”
“Mel waits for everyone,” Yoongi said.
Cordelia sighed. “He’s close.”
Y/N looked around the cottage and felt something inside her ease. It had been too quiet here for too long. After Aldara’s passing, silence had settled into the walls like dust. There had been days when Y/N could hear every tick of the cooling stove, every scrape of branch against window, every small absence. But now the house had filled. The chairs creaked. The fire crackled. Shiloh insulted people from above. Belinay whispered questions. Jin praised himself. Yoongi pretended not to smile. Darya argued with a spoon. Cordelia moved gently among all of it.
The cottage had a pulse again.
Hosting, once Y/N surrendered to it, came as naturally as breathing. Her apron sat crooked. Her hair had escaped almost entirely from its knot. She wielded a wooden spoon like some benevolent kitchen deity who had misplaced her crown but not her authority. Somehow, through motion and instinct and the mercy of the gods, it all worked.
She ladled Yoongi’s roasted carrot stew into clay bowls. She tucked fresh herbs onto the frittata. She slid the platter of wild greens within reach of even the laziest hands. She cut the cheesecake into careful slices and threatened Jin with a fork when he tried to steal a corner too early.
From her scorched chair, Darya lifted a forkful of salad. “What’s in this?”
“That depends,” Y/N said. “If your tongue goes numb, that’s garlic mustard. If it tastes like flowers, those are violets.”
Darya chewed thoughtfully. “I like the buzzing.”
“That is not a word I want associated with my salad.”
Jin, eating one of his own scones with the solemn concentration of a judge at a contest, nodded once.
“You’ve outdone yourself, Y/N,” he said. “I did not know ramps could shine.”
Yoongi snorted. “What are you now? A food critic?”
Y/N placed a bowl in front of Belinay, who stared down at the colorful greens and petals as though she had been handed an enchanted relic. Cordelia took her bowl last and gave Y/N a quiet, grateful look.
“We’ll help clean later,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”
Y/N waved her off, though the idea of extra hands washing dishes made her want to sink into the nearest pile of cushions and never rise again.
Then the front door burst open on a gust of salty wind.
“Bel! Darya! I come bearing gifts!”
Melvin stumbled inside like a ship docking badly. He carried an enormous fish across both arms, its silver body gleaming beneath the cottage light. A strand of seaweed clung to his sleeve. His boots were muddy. His hair looked as though the wind had tried to steal it and lost.
“Caught it myself,” he announced. “Mostly. A seal helped. That is irrelevant.”
Cordelia groaned. “Melvin. You tracked sand into the house.”
“Sand,” Mel said proudly, marching toward the kitchen, “is the seasoning of the sea.”
Y/N hurried after him, half laughing and half horrified. “Just don’t blow anything up.”
“Explosions are for Yule,” Mel said breezily, already rolling up his sleeves. “This is Imbolc. It would be out of season.”
The fish landed on her counter with a heavy, reverent thud, rattling a row of jars and sending a puff of dried herb dust into the air. Mel stood over it as solemnly as a priest before an altar. Before Y/N could object, he had taken command of her kitchen.
This was what Mel did. Some people asked permission. Mel entered, declared himself useful, and somehow became so before anyone could stop him. He seized knives, spoons, herbs, bowls of spices, oil, salt, and one little jar Y/N was nearly certain he had no business touching. The pan went onto the stove. Oil hissed the instant it touched iron, snapping and spitting like applause. The fish followed with a slap of skin against heat, and at once the cottage filled with the smell of brine, crisping flesh, herbs, and sea-magic.
It smelled like Imbolc turning its face toward spring. Like cold water running free under ice. Like February forgetting itself for one glorious hour.
Y/N leaned in the doorway, arms folded.
“Should I help?” she asked, though her voice already regretted it.
“No,” Mel said grandly. “But you may admire me if moved.”
“Please clean everything afterward. Thoroughly. I don’t like animals leaving anything behind on my dishes. If I taste even a hint of something leftover, I’ll hex you into next year.”
Mel froze with the solemnity of a knight receiving sacred law.
“You have my word, Bridd.”
The pan answered with a loud sizzle. Mel tossed in rosemary, and the leaves snapped like tiny sparks. Then he splashed in a pale green liquid from a bottle so strange-looking that Y/N straightened at once.
“What is that?”
“Ocean wine,” Mel said.
“That is not a thing.”
From the table, Cordelia called, “Of course it is.”
Y/N looked at her.
Cordelia was completely serious.
“We lower bottles into the sea and let them ferment underwater,” she explained. “Look at the barnacles.”
Y/N stared at the bottle. It was crusted with barnacles, salt, and a clump of seaweed that seemed deeply committed to remaining attached.
“So,” Y/N said slowly, “it is normal wine soaked in salt water, mold, and ocean debris.”
Darya nodded. “For at least a year.”
Yoongi, still arranging a few of her spice jars into some private system of justice, asked, “Does it taste different?”
“Not at all,” Cordelia said. “But it looks pretty.”
For a heartbeat, no one spoke. Then laughter rolled through the cottage.
It rose and spread, warm and bright, catching one person and then another. Jin began reenacting an old battle with a goose, complete with flapping arms and deeply offensive honking. Darya tormented Yoongi about his need to organize everything within reach. Belinay tugged on Cordelia’s sleeve and asked whether she could grow up to be both a witch and a fisher. Yoongi pretended not to listen, which meant he was listening to every word.
Y/N stood in the kitchen doorway and let herself watch.
Her home was loud. Her home was full. Her home smelled of herbs and smoke and fish and bread and the faint wild promise of thaw. For months after Aldara died, the cottage had seemed to hold its breath. Tonight, it breathed again.
Mel lifted the fish from the pan at last and set it on a platter with dramatic reverence.
“Feast,” he declared.
The reaction was immediate. Cheers burst through the cottage like sparks catching dry tinder. Belinay squealed. Jin applauded with the lavish elegance of a nobleman attending an opera. Yoongi gave one decisive nod, which from him was practically a standing ovation. Darya simply armed herself with a fork and prepared for battle.
They crowded around the teal table in a happy scatter of elbows, bowls, chairs, cushions, and passing hands. Plates scraped. Bread traveled in the wrong direction and caused a minor crisis. Someone spilled wine. Someone else knocked over a bowl of violets, and Belinay somehow managed to paint a streak of gochujang across her nose without noticing. Y/N’s frittata disappeared almost as soon as it was cut. Yoongi’s stew was scraped clean with alarming speed. Mel’s fish drew murmurs so reverent that Jin accused everyone of worshiping dinner, then immediately took another bite and joined them.
Outside, the sun dipped low over the meadow. The brittle winter grasses turned bronze. The first smoke from the bonfire pit began to drift upward, thin and blue against the dimming sky. The air was still cool enough to belong to February, but beneath it ran something softer. Something waiting. Something alive.
Imbolc pressed close around the cottage, not grandly, not with trumpets or signs, but with the quiet blessing of a year beginning to turn.
Y/N sat among her friends, her strange beloved patchwork of people, and listened to them laugh over her table.
It was not perfect. The floor was dirty. The kitchen was a disaster. Jin was still talking about the goose. Shiloh had stolen a corner of scone and was pretending she had not. The hen remained uncooked in the pantry, and Y/N would have to decide what to do with it eventually.
But not yet.
For now, the fire was warm. The table was full. The cottage was alive.
And it was a good day.
A very good day.
Dawn had sent only one thin messenger before it: a pale seam of gold trembling low in the east, where the black edge of the world was beginning, very unwillingly, to loosen. All Bangtan Forest lay under that deep winter hush which belongs only to evergreen woods after snow. The pines and firs stood tall and dark against the paling sky, their boughs bent beneath white burdens, while the spruce needles glittered with frost as if some patient hand had threaded them with splinters of glass. The earth below was neither green nor brown nor even properly earth at all, but a hidden thing, tucked beneath old drifts and crusted silver-blue wherever the night wind had hardened the snow.
Mist lingered low between the trees. It was not the kind mist of spring, rising from warm ground and making the world seem secret and forgiving, but a colder, thinner thing: winter’s breath caught among roots and hollows, curling along fallen logs like pale smoke. Spiderwebs abandoned in the elbows of bark and bramble had gone stiff with rime. Somewhere out of sight the river whispered under a skin of ice, its voice small and muffled, like a song sung through clenched teeth. In the darkest places, where morning had not yet dared to enter, faint rings of blue-green mushrooms shone beneath the fallen timber, their ghostly light made stranger by the snow around them.
It was the hour Y/N loved best.
She loved the forest before it woke. Bangtan seemed most itself then, before the pack stirred in Foxglove, before cottage chimneys began to smoke in earnest, before squirrels resumed their noisy arguments and the thin winter birds lifted their brave, sharp songs into the cold. The world seemed balanced between sleeping and waking, as though one soft word might tip it either way. Trees remembered old things then. Snow listened. Even the air appeared to hold still.
Her wings should have cut through that blue-gray silence as easily as ink drawn across parchment.
On any other morning, flying would have been as natural to her as breathing. She would have felt the wind gather beneath her, a living hand under each wing, and she would have risen over the snow-laden pines with frost catching at her feathers, and some secret joy brightening in her breast. The cold could be cruel, certainly, but from above it was also beautiful. The world became simple from that height: white fields, dark woods, silver water, smoke unwinding from chimneys, everything lying under winter’s spell.
But this morning the air did not hold her.
This morning something had gone wrong.
She knew it before she could name it.
It had begun behind her eyes, a deep, throbbing ache that beat steadily against the inside of her skull. It was not ordinary pain. Ordinary pain had borders. This seemed to have none. It pressed outward as if her very thoughts had turned to stone and were now too heavy for her head to carry. After that came weariness: not the honest tiredness that followed work well done, not the pleasant heaviness after a long walk and a warm meal, but something strange and stealing, seeping into her bones like meltwater through cracked stone.
Her wings beat unevenly.
They trembled at the end of each stroke, and the air, instead of lifting her, resisted her.
Y/N blinked hard.
The forest blurred.
Below her, the treetops tilted, swung wide, and then righted themselves again. A blade of new sunlight struck ice on the branches and shattered into a hundred cruel sparks. Pain flashed through her head so fiercely that, for one terrible instant, she forgot the very shape of flying.
Her left wing dipped.
She caught herself, but only just.
Get home.
The words did not leave her beak. In this shape, speech lived mostly in thought, and even thought had gone thin and frayed, like cloth worn nearly through. She forced her wings to spread, caught a cold current, and rode it with the desperate care of someone clinging to a rope above a ravine.
Too soon, she thought.
The shift was coming.
It should not have been. She knew the rhythms of her own magic as a sailor knows the tide. Shape-changing was not always painless, but it had its laws. There were warnings, intervals, the inward gathering of the body before it remembered another form. There should have been time to land. Time to draw breath and make herself ready.
Her feathers prickled along her skin. Her bones ached with a deep and unnatural heat. Warmth crawled up through her veins in sudden pulses, and then came cold so sharp and swift that her whole body shuddered. The magic holding her owl-shape together sparked and split. It no longer moved through her as a clean, living thread, but snagged and tore like yarn dragged through a broken needle.
The forest pitched beneath her. Pines became dark spears. Snow became glare. The pale dawn widened, narrowed, widened again, as if the whole world were struggling for breath.
Then, between the trees, she saw the cottage.
At first it seemed only another pale shape among the drifts, a trick of snow and longing. Then the roof appeared beneath its thick cap of white, and the crooked chimney rose against the brightening sky, breathing one frail ribbon of smoke into the cold. The meadow opened before it, smooth and untouched except where the wind had carved shallow blue shadows. The garden lay buried beyond the little gate, only the woody tops of rosemary and thyme showing through the snow in stiff, frozen sprigs.
Relief came to her, though weakly, like a candle nearly burned to nothing.
Almost there.
She angled downward.
The descent should have been graceful. Y/N had landed in storms, between branches, upon narrow stones, and once, long ago, on the shoulder of a startled giant who had been too courteous to mention the inconvenience. But now the clearing rushed toward her too quickly. The snow glittered and shifted below her, every point of ice too bright, too sharp. The cottage roof seemed to lurch. The garden wall slid strangely sideways. The world had become unreliable.
Her claws struck earth and skidded over frozen grass hidden under powder. She stumbled, wings flung wide, and half-collapsed among the buried garden beds, scattering loose snow from the rosemary stems. Pain pulsed through her head in great black waves. Her vision narrowed, the edges of it darkening, while gold streaks flickered before her like sparks from a dying fire.
She had seconds.
Perhaps fewer.
Y/N dragged herself toward the cottage door.
Feathers came loose behind her. They did not fall prettily. They shed in a ragged trail across the snow, dark and damp and wrong against all that white. Each step sent a tremor up her legs. The garden path had never been long before, but now it stretched before her like a road into another country. The door, which she had opened a thousand times without thought, stood at the end of it like the gate of a besieged castle.
Her talons scraped the threshold.
Then the shift seized her.
There was no grace in it. It struck like lightning through water.
Her body convulsed. Wings folded inward too fast, and bones twisted with a terrible, intimate certainty, remembering the wrong shape before finding the right one. Feathers dissolved into skin. Heat roared along her veins. Her spine arched. Her claws became hands, shaking and pale against the floorboards. The cottage air filled with the faint smell of singed magic, wild feathers, cold rain, and snow.
She fell forward through the doorway.
Her knees struck the wooden floor with a crack that made her gasp. One hand caught the doorframe, the other curled helplessly against the boards. For a moment, her sight broke into pieces: black, gold, pinewood, snowlight, shadow. Then the pain loosened all at once, leaving her hollowed, human, and shaking.
When it was over, Y/N lay naked just inside the cottage door, drenched in cold sweat.
The air touched her skin like winter water. Her breath came in ragged pulls, each one scraping her throat raw. She tried to rise, because some stubborn part of her believed that standing upright would prove she was well, but her legs betrayed her. They buckled beneath her, useless as wet cloth.
“Not good,” she muttered.
Her voice was thin and rough, scarcely more than a breath.
“Not…”
Her hand slipped. She caught herself again, cheek nearly pressed to the floorboards. The pine beneath her smelled faintly of smoke, lavender, and old spilled tea. Ordinarily that smell would have comforted her. Now even comfort seemed to be standing on the far side of a river she could not cross.
She tried to crawl.
It was absurdly difficult. Her limbs felt separate from her, heavy and disobedient, as though someone had tied stones to them while she slept. Her magic, usually bright and living beneath her skin, had dimmed to ragged threads. Each movement seemed to drag those threads across broken glass.
“Y/N?”
The voice came from above.
A flutter of wings followed, then a clumsy thud as Shiloh landed on the back of a chair with none of her usual dignity. The little owl’s amber eyes were wide and bright with alarm.
“What happened?”
Y/N squinted up at her. The room swayed. Shiloh, the chair, the table, and the window all drifted apart from one another and then came together again.
“Shifted,” Y/N croaked. “Too early.”
Shiloh hopped down from the chair, her feathers puffing with distress. “Too early? What do you mean, too early?”
Y/N tried to laugh, but it came out as a dry, miserable rasp.
“Felt… strange.”
“Strange how?”
There was sharpness in the question, but no cruelty. Fear threaded every word. Y/N could hear it even through the feverish fog pressing at her skull. Shiloh could be grand, theatrical, and impossible when it suited her, but she did not turn truly sharp unless something had frightened her badly.
Y/N pressed a shaking hand to her forehead. Her skin burned beneath her fingers.
“Headache,” she managed. “Heavy. Air felt wrong. Couldn’t breathe right.”
Shiloh’s face changed. The irritation did not leave exactly, but it folded itself around something far more tender.
“I told you not to go far,” she said, and her voice was lower now. “There was sleet yesterday, and the frost came in hard before dawn. You know what that does to you.”
“Didn’t want,” Y/N whispered, “to fall out of the sky.”
Shiloh opened her beak, then closed it again.
For once, no scolding came.
The little owl only looked at her, and in that look were all the winter illnesses they had survived together: every fever that had taken too long to break, every cough that had settled in Y/N’s chest like an unwanted guest, every chill that had slipped into her bones and refused to leave. Shiloh knew better than anyone that Y/N did not get sick the way others did. A damp sleeve, a drafty window, one foolish night flight through sleet—any little thing that would have inconvenienced another witch could put Y/N in bed for days.
Y/N had a great deal of magic. That was the part people saw first. They saw the shifting, the old words, the healing hands, the green fire in her charms, the way wild creatures came to her door as if the trees themselves had whispered that she was safe. They saw the Bridd, and forgot there was a body beneath the title.
A body that chilled too quickly.
A body that burned too fast with fever.
A body that had always seemed a little too frail for the fierce spirit housed inside it.
At last Shiloh said, more softly, “You’re impossible.”
Y/N’s mouth twitched. “Only just noticing?”
“Don’t joke.” Shiloh hopped closer, trying very hard to sound stern and only half succeeding. “Not when you’re shaking like that.”
“I’ll be fine.”
The lie was so thin that even the cottage seemed embarrassed by it.
Y/N clawed herself forward another few inches. The bedroom was not far. It had never seemed far before. It was only across the cottage, through the little doorway beyond the hearth. Now it appeared as distant as another kingdom.
“Don’t you dare pass out here,” Shiloh warned, hopping after her. “You’ll freeze before I can get a blanket over you.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Y/N muttered.
“That is not comforting.”
Shiloh fluttered ahead into the bedroom, then back again, unable to decide whether she ought to lead, push, scold, or scream for help. Y/N reached the bed by sheer stubbornness and nothing more. She caught the rumpled blankets in both hands, dragged herself upward, and collapsed into the sheets.
The linen was cool, chamomile-scented, and soft as mercy.
She turned her face into the pillow and shivered.
“Gods,” Shiloh breathed, landing at the foot of the bed. Her voice had gone quiet. “You really do look terrible.”
“Thank you,” Y/N whispered.
“Should I get someone? Yoongi? Jin?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. She shook her head, and the room tipped so violently that she regretted it at once.
“No. They’ll worry.”
“They should worry.” Shiloh’s talons gripped the blanket. “That is rather the point of friends.”
“It’s just fatigue.”
“Fatigue doesn’t make your lips go pale.”
“It’ll pass.”
Shiloh stared at her. Y/N could feel the stare without opening her eyes.
“It will,” Y/N insisted, though the words were already blurring at the edges. “Just need to rest.”
Shiloh did not answer.
That silence was worse than any scolding.
The room tilted gently around Y/N. The walls softened. The faint embers in the hearth beyond the bedroom doorway cast a weak orange glow, flickering over the cottage walls like tired fireflies. Shiloh remained at the foot of the bed, feathers fluffed, talons curled into the blanket, caught between obedience and fear.
Y/N wanted to reassure her. She meant to say something sensible, something kind, something that would make the owl stop looking as if the world had cracked open beneath her feet.
But the words sank before she could catch them.
Her breathing thinned.
The light dissolved.
Sleep took her not like a blanket, but like water closing overhead.
Outside, morning finally arrived.
The first true sunlight crept over the snow and laid fragile gold across the bedroom floor. The forest did not burst into song. It woke thinly and reluctantly, as winter forests do. A few brave birds called from the pines. Ice ticked along the eaves. Snow slid softly from one evergreen branch to another. Somewhere beneath the white crust of the meadow, the buried grasses waited for a spring still many weeks away.
The world went on.
Inside, the Bridd lay still, her magic dimmed to a dull ember, waiting for some careful hand to coax it back to flame.
Shiloh did not wait long.
She had known fear before. Familiars always did. They lived tied to another soul, and love made every danger enormous. It made drafts seem like knives, coughs sound like omens, and foolish decisions feel like betrayals. But this was not a small danger casting a large shadow. The air in the cottage had changed. It had grown dense and strange, heavy in the way the world becomes just before a storm breaks. Y/N’s scent was sharp and fever-bright. Her pulse, when Shiloh pressed close enough to hear it, sounded too faint, too far away, too unlike itself.
Wrongness moved through the room in a way no sensible creature could ignore.
Shiloh watched her for another breath, then another, talons curled tight into the blanket at the foot of the bed. Y/N lay too still beneath the covers, her skin pale under the fever burning in her cheeks, her breaths shallow and uneven. It did not matter that she had said she only needed rest. It did not matter that she had forbidden Shiloh from fetching anyone. Y/N was terribly brave when she ought to be sensible, and terribly stubborn when she ought to be afraid, and Shiloh had long ago learned that loving her meant knowing when not to obey her.
“No,” the little owl murmured at last. “I am not letting you sleep this off.”
With a hard snap of her wings, she launched herself through the open window.
Cold morning air rushed to meet her. The meadow below lay buried in snow, smooth and pale except where the wind had carved blue hollows around the roots of trees. The sun had barely lifted over the treetops, but already its light stretched long across the clearing, turning frost to glass and icicles to thin knives of fire. Shiloh climbed higher, beating her wings hard through the bitter air.
From above, the world spread wide beneath her. There lay the dark sweep of Bangtan Forest, old and watchful, its evergreens bowing beneath their white burdens. There curled the river, half-hidden under ice and bright only where running water still broke through. Farther off, the rooftops of Bangtan village huddled beneath snow. Beyond them rose the soft shimmer of the solar coven’s hill, where Jin lived among warmth, bees, flowers under glass, and far too much self-satisfaction.
It was not a long flight.
That did not make Shiloh like it.
She hated leaving Y/N alone. She hated the weight of the decision, the memory of that shallow breathing behind her, the knowledge that Y/N’s body could fall badly ill from things other people shrugged off. Worst of all, she hated that she was flying to Jin while frightened enough to need him.
Of all the witches in the forest, she thought bitterly, it would have to be the one who will never let me forget this.
Jin’s cottage appeared with the first full spill of sunlight, and even in midwinter, even beneath snow, it could belong to no one else. Golden wards shimmered around it in a soft halo, humming with warmth and light. They had melted the snow from the path and roof, leaving the cottage tucked inside a strange little pocket of false spring. The garden itself was mostly asleep, but not wholly. Glass cloches, charm-warmed frames, and low domes of golden light covered the beds, and beneath them early blossoms nodded drowsily, coaxed open by solar magic rather than season. Vines that were bare and brown outside the wards curled green along the window nearest his workroom.
Then she saw the bees.
Not the wild abundance of summer, thank the gods, but enough to make her sigh with deep personal fatigue. A few dozen drifted lazily through the warmth beneath the eaves, slow and drowsy, their hum softer than it would be in warmer months. Jin’s wards had tempted them from sleep. They moved like living flecks of sunlight, utterly unconcerned by the fact that February still owned the rest of the forest.
Shiloh’s feathers puffed.
The bees ignored her, which was both polite and suspicious. The last time she had visited, one had landed on her beak and refused to leave until Jin bribed it with honey, which Shiloh still considered a betrayal from both parties.
She landed on the doorknob, breathless, and hammered her talons against the wood.
“Jin!” she shouted. “Wake up. It’s urgent.”
Nothing.
She knocked harder.
“Seokjin! Open the door before I do something we shall both regret.”
A faint rustling came from inside. Then a groan followed, long and lazy and so offended by morning that Shiloh might have laughed if fear had not lodged so tightly in her chest.
“It is dawn,” Jin’s voice complained from somewhere within. “The day has not even properly begun. Go home.”
“Y/N is sick.”
Silence.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Then something crashed.
The door flew open.
Jin stood there in a half-tied robe, his hair loose around his shoulders in a tangle of sleep-warmed gold. Even bleary-eyed and barefoot, he had the indecency to look radiant. Sunlight clung to him through the doorway as if it had waited all night for the privilege.
He blinked at her.
“Shiloh?”
“She’s sick,” Shiloh said again, and this time the words came quieter. “Very sick. She collapsed after shifting. She can’t stand, and her breathing is wrong.”
All sleep vanished from his face.
There were some people who only seemed frivolous because joy sat close to the surface of them. Beneath Jin’s ridiculousness there was a steady thing, and it showed itself at once. His eyes sharpened. His shoulders squared. The sleepy, golden foolishness fell away from him like a cloak dropped on the floor.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough. She’s already beginning to sweat.”
Her voice hitched on the last word despite all her efforts, and she hated it. Hated him hearing it. Not because he would mock her. He would not. They had known each other too long for that. He had been a golden, loud, impossible boy once, tripping over his own feet in the solar gardens, and she had been the owl who scolded him from the fence post while secretly making sure he did not fall into the lily pond. She disliked him often. She loved him, in her irritated way, nearly as often.
And because he knew that, he did not tease her now.
Jin swore softly and ran a hand through his hair.
“All right. Give me a moment.”
He disappeared into the cottage.
At once, the house seemed to wake with him. Candles sparked to life. Shelves glimmered gold. Jars chimed and hummed as his magic stirred among them. Shiloh hopped anxiously on the threshold, listening to the clatter of vials, the snap of satchel buckles, and the low murmur of sunlight being drawn into ready hands.
Then came a sound she dreaded.
A deep, throaty woof.
From around the corner barreled Mannix. Jin’s beloved St. Bernard came bounding toward Shiloh in a glorious avalanche of fur, drool, affection, and terrible intentions. His tail wagged with such force that it seemed capable of rearranging the furniture.
Shiloh lifted off the doorknob with a startled flap.
“Mannix, no. Not today.”
Mannix barked once, delighted that she had addressed him personally.
“Sit!” Jin called from inside. “Mannix, sit.”
The dog skidded to a halt so abruptly his paws slid on the floor. He sat, tail thumping, gazing at Shiloh with adoring confusion.
“He’s too big,” Shiloh muttered, more out of habit than genuine complaint. “You know he is too big.”
“He only wants to say hello,” Jin said, striding back with a healer’s satchel over his shoulder. His robe was now tied, though still crooked.
“Can’t believe you let Wendy talk you into getting that beast,” Shiloh huffed.
Jin scratched Mannix behind one ear. “Guard the house. I’ll be back soon.”
Mannix gave a solemn, slobbery huff and settled by the doorway as if he had just been entrusted with the fate of kingdoms.
Shiloh fluttered onto Jin’s shoulder, gripping his robe with her talons. Beneath the fabric and skin, she could feel the hum of solar magic gathering itself, warm and steady and alive. It pulsed in him like a heartbeat made of sunlight.
“You’re flying us there?”
“It’s faster.”
“Try not to singe me.”
“Try not to dig holes in my shoulder.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she snapped.
His mouth softened.
Then he stepped into the morning, lifted one hand, and spoke a word in the old tongue.
The air thickened with gold.
Light wrapped around them, bright but gentle, weightless as breath. The garden, the drowsy bees, the cottage, and the snow-bright hill all blurred into streaks of color. Wind rushed past in a warm roar. For a moment, Shiloh could see nothing but radiance.
Then the world snapped back into shape.
They landed in Y/N’s meadow, soft-footed in the snow. Powder scattered around Jin’s boots in bright crystals. The air smelled of frozen mint, woodsmoke, pine resin, and the cold iron scent of deep winter. Ahead of them stood Y/N’s cottage, crouched between the trees beneath its snow-heavy roof, a thin curl of smoke rising from the chimney like a breath held too long and finally released.
“Inside,” Shiloh said.
Jin was moving before Shiloh had finished speaking.
There are some moments in life when all the little vanities and habits of a person fall away from him as leaves fall from a tree in a sudden frost, and what remains is the true shape of the thing beneath. Jin, who could be vain over the tilt of his hair, ridiculous over the cut of a sleeve, and insufferably pleased when sunlight touched his face at just the right angle, lost all of that in the space between one breath and the next. His expression sharpened. His shoulders squared. The laughter that usually lived so near his mouth disappeared, not because he had become cold, but because something steadier and older had risen in its place.
He went through Y/N’s cottage door without ceremony, bringing with him the faint scent of winter air, solar herbs, and the clean golden warmth that always seemed to cling to him, even on the grayest mornings. Shiloh followed in a flurry of anxious feathers, darting ahead and then circling back again, as though she could hurry him by sheer force of panic.
“In here,” she said, though Jin already knew. “She’s in here. She tried to pretend it was nothing, of course. She always does. As if pretending not to be dying has ever cured anyone.”
“She isn’t dying,” Jin said, but he said it in the careful voice of a healer who has not yet looked closely enough to promise anything.
Y/N’s bedroom was dim and close, warm near the hearth and cold near the window where the winter light pressed pale fingers against the glass. The curtains had not been drawn properly. One corner of them hung loose, allowing a narrow blade of morning to fall across the floorboards and touch the leg of the bed. Beyond the window, the forest stood white and blue and silent beneath its burden of snow. Inside, everything smelled of fever: hot skin, damp hair, herbs, old smoke, and the faint bitter edge of magic strained too thin.
Y/N lay half-hidden under the blankets, small in a way that felt wrong.
She was not, ordinarily, a person anyone thought of as small. There was too much wildness in her for that. Too much old power in her hands. Too much knowing in her gaze. Even when she was quiet, even when she sat with her knees tucked beneath her and a cup of tea cooling forgotten beside her, there was always the sense that she belonged partly to the forest and partly to something older than the forest. People looked at her and saw the Bridd. They saw the witch who mended wing-bones and spoke to stubborn roots, who could take feathers upon herself and ride the dawn winds over Bangtan as if she had been born from them.
But fever had a way of making even the mighty look young.
Her dark hair clung damply to her forehead and temples. Her skin was too pale in the dim room, save where fever had painted two hard spots of color high in her cheeks. Her lips had lost their warmth. Her breathing came shallow and uneven, each breath catching faintly in her chest before the next could find its way out. One hand lay above the blanket, fingers loosely curled, the nails faintly bluish from the cold she had carried home with her.
Concern flickered over Jin’s face. It was there and gone quickly, like the shadow of a bird crossing snow. His hands, however, remained calm.
That, more than anything, steadied Shiloh.
He knelt beside the bed and touched the back of his hand to Y/N’s forehead. The heat there made his mouth tighten.
“Fever,” he murmured. “High, but manageable.”
Shiloh clung to the bedpost. Her talons tapped an anxious little rhythm into the wood before she realized she was doing it and forced herself to stop. “How high is high?”
“High enough that I’m glad you came.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have until I examine her properly.” His voice was gentle, but firm enough to keep her from snapping at him again. “How long has she been like this?”
“Since sunrise. Maybe before.” Shiloh’s feathers ruffled and then settled again in quick, worried waves. “She came home from flying and collapsed inside the door. She said she felt strange.”
Jin opened his satchel. He did it with the swift competence of someone who had packed such bags in the dark, in storms, in kitchens crowded with weeping relatives, in barns, beside wells, and once or twice under circumstances no sensible person would have called safe. Little glass bottles clinked against one another. Dried herbs rustled in folded paper. A spoon, a roll of soft cloth, a stoppered vial of golden oil, and a small copper cup appeared on the bedside table one after another.
“Strange how?” he asked.
“Headache. Trouble breathing. Heavy, she said.” Shiloh paused, trying to remember every word, as though one misplaced syllable might be the thing that mattered. “She said the air felt wrong.”
Jin glanced toward the window, then back to Y/N. “She flew through sleet?”
“Last night, yes. And frost before dawn.” Shiloh’s voice tightened, thin with guilt and irritation tangled together. “I told her not to go far.”
“You did right coming for me.”
It was a simple thing to say. It should not have mattered as much as it did. Yet Shiloh’s feathers settled a little, and the hard knot in her chest loosened by the smallest measure. She had expected questions, perhaps reproach, perhaps one of Jin’s soft sighs that meant he thought everyone in the room was being foolish except him. She had not expected approval.
“I should have come sooner,” she muttered.
“You came when you knew she needed more than rest.”
“She needed more than rest the moment she crawled through the door looking like a plucked ghost.”
“Then you came soon enough.”
Shiloh looked away, but not before Jin saw the fear in her eyes.
He took out a small tin and opened it with his thumb. At once, the room filled with the soft scent of lemon balm and starflower, bright and tender against the feverish air. Beneath it was something else, something warmer and sunlit, like summer honey kept in a cupboard through winter.
Jin leaned closer and listened to Y/N’s breathing. Then he touched two fingers to the pulse below her jaw. His face did not change much, but Shiloh, who had known him since childhood and distrusted most of his expressions on principle, saw enough.
“What?” she demanded.
“It looks like a cold.”
“A cold?” Shiloh repeated, offended by the smallness of the word. “She nearly fell out of the sky.”
“A cold can be a very serious thing in the wrong body.”
“So it isn’t just fatigue.”
“No.” He looked at her then, and his voice was not frightening because he did not dress the truth up in false comfort. “It will likely take a few days to a week before she is properly herself again, but she should be fine.”
“Should be?”
“Will be, if she rests and takes what I give her.”
“You say that as though she has ever willingly done either.”
Jin gave the faintest smile, not enough to be cheerful, only enough to be familiar. “That is why you and I are here.”
He set to work mixing the tonic. He measured partly by sight, partly by scent, and partly by that old healer’s instinct which looks mysterious to everyone watching and perfectly ordinary to the person doing it. Into the copper cup went a pinch of pale dried petals, two drops of golden oil, a spoonful of dark syrup, and a thread of light drawn from his own fingertip. The light did not blaze. It sank into the mixture like dawn entering milk, turning it warm and faintly luminous.
The cottage seemed to hold its breath while he stirred.
“She’s always been like this,” Shiloh said suddenly.
Jin did not look up, but his hands slowed a fraction.
“People forget,” the little owl went on, the words gathering force as if she had carried them too long. “They see her working, and fixing things, and putting on that brave face of hers, and they think she must be well because she is useful. But she hasn’t been properly well since that wolf boy’s ceremony, and already she’s preparing for the Luna’s birthday at the end of March. Orders, charms, garlands, blessings, gods know what else. She’ll run herself into the ground because everyone asks and she hates saying no.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Jin said quietly.
“No,” Shiloh admitted after a moment. “You usually don’t.”
Then he slid one arm behind Y/N’s shoulders and lifted her gently. She stirred, barely. Her head lolled against him, her lashes trembling without opening, as if even that small journey from pillow to arm required more strength than she could spare.
“There now,” Jin murmured. “Just a little. You don’t have to wake.”
Y/N made a faint sound, too weak to be protest and too miserable to be speech.
“I know,” he said softly, as though she had spoken plainly. “I know. But you must swallow this.”
He tipped the tonic carefully to her lips.
For one dreadful heartbeat, nothing happened.
Shiloh’s claws dug into the bedpost.
Then Y/N swallowed by instinct. Once. Twice. A third time, weaker than the others, but enough.
Jin lowered her back against the pillow, and the tight line of his mouth eased by a little. He wiped a stray drop of tonic from the corner of her mouth with the edge of his sleeve and brushed damp hair away from her forehead.
“Aldara was similar, or so my mother always said,” he murmured. “A simple fever could keep her in bed for days.”
At the sound of that name, the room changed.
Not greatly. No candle flickered. No wind stirred. But memory is its own sort of ghost, and when Aldara entered a room, even by name alone, one felt the old floorboards remember her feet.
“Their magic lives close to the skin,” Jin continued. “That makes them powerful, but it wears the body thin. It is like keeping a bright lamp in a paper house.”
“I’m aware,” Shiloh sighed. “It is not unusual in her line. Aldara’s own familiar, Ragnarok, was always fretting after her before his trials. Of course, I got an even sicker girl. Just my luck. At this rate, I shall return as a cow in my next life and spend the whole of it standing in a field, chewing grass, swatting flies, and minding no one’s business but my own.”
His smile softened and faded as he turned back to Y/N. He laid two fingers near her temple, and a small glow gathered there: gold, quiet, and warm. It sank beneath her skin slowly, as sunlight sinks through thin curtains.
“Y/N’s immune system is weaker than Aldara’s was,” he said. “Winter has always been harder on her.”
Shiloh’s talons flexed around the bedpost. Outside, snow slid from the cottage roof with a soft, heavy sigh. The sound made both of them glance toward the window, though nothing else moved. The morning beyond the glass was brightening by degrees, pale and pitiless, beautiful in the way very cold things often are.
“All of us worry about her,” Jin said at last. “But we have to trust that the gods have some sort of plan.”
Shiloh looked at him for a long moment.
There had always been irritation between them, but it was the sort of irritation that had been polished smooth by years. Jin had been too bright as a child, too loud as a boy, and too pleased with his own reflection at every age. Shiloh had pecked him once for calling her adorable, twice for placing ribbons near her nest, and once, memorably, for singing outside Aldara’s window before breakfast. He had never fully forgiven her for that last one, though he had deserved it.
Still, he had brought medicine when Aldara died. He had sat outside Y/N’s cottage for hours during the first terrible fever after the funeral, not demanding to be let in, not making a performance of his concern, simply keeping the lamps warm and the snow melted from the path. He had never treated Y/N’s frailty as weakness. He had never mistaken her suffering for inconvenience.
That counted for something.
Shiloh released the bedpost and hopped onto the nightstand, where she began to pace in small, tight turns. Her claws clicked against the wood. Click, click, click. A tiny sound, but in that quiet room it seemed enormous.
“She can’t die,” Shiloh said.
Jin’s brow softened. “Because of your trial?”
She stopped at once and looked at him sharply.
“I’m not saying it as an accusation,” he said. “I know being human again is your great hope.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t care.” Her feathers lifted, making her seem larger than she was. “Her happiness and well-being are my priority. Keeping her safe may help my judgment, yes, but that is not why I do it. I know I am not always the easiest familiar. I know I am sharp, and proud, and occasionally unkind when frightened.”
Shiloh swallowed, and when she spoke again, the bite had gone out of her voice.
“I try very hard to keep my Bridd all right,” she said. “I love her very much.”
The words hung there, small and fierce.
Then, as though a door inside her had opened too far and could not be closed quickly enough, more words came after them.
“If she dies before judgment is cast, I’ll be stuck between worlds again.”
It began sharply, all beak and claw, as if she meant to make the confession unpleasant before anyone else could. But something broke in the middle of it. She turned her head away, feathers bristling, trying to hide the shake in her voice by making herself look larger.
“She is home,” Shiloh said, softer now. “My home. We have been together longer than you can imagine. In this life and in others before it.”
She looked toward Y/N.
There was something ancient in the little owl’s face then, something no mortal bird had any right to possess. For a moment, Jin could almost see the shadow of all she had once been and all she had lost: not merely a familiar, not merely a scolding owl with sharp opinions and sharper talons, but a soul stretched thin across judgments, lives, punishments, hopes, and love that refused to die properly.
“She is not allowed to simply…”
Her voice cracked.
“…die.”
Jin looked at her for a long moment. The jesting answer he might once have offered did not come. His expression gentled, and for once, the brightness of him did not irritate her. It warmed the room without asking to be admired.
“She won’t die, Shiloh,” he said. “I promise. This is serious, but it is treatable.”
“It doesn’t feel treatable.” Her wings flicked, restless and agitated. “It feels like the world has gone wrong.”
He lowered his gaze briefly to Y/N and checked her pulse again. “Her breathing is a little steadier.”
Shiloh paced to the edge of the nightstand and back again. Then she stopped, as though a thought had struck her with physical force.
“Bring Yoongi.”
Jin blinked. “Yoongi doesn’t heal anymore.”
“I know that.”
“Then why—”
“Because she loves him more than anyone else.” Shiloh looked toward Y/N, and all her sharpness softened into plain fear. “If he is here, she will rest easier. You and I both know it.”
Jin’s jaw shifted slightly.
It was a very small movement. Most people would have missed it. Shiloh did not.
Jin sighed. “Would you like me to fetch Cordelia while I am at it?”
“If she is near enough, I suppose. Sea magic might help balance the fever.” Shiloh considered this with visible reluctance, then made a sour little noise. “Can’t you get Wendy instead? Cordelia is a great deal at the best of times, and I am in no mood for her mouth.”
“Wendy is in Clarcton,” Jin said. “Her sister’s doing that whole suitor parade, remember? Half the coven went with them. They won’t be back for days.”
“Then just Yoongi.”
Jin exhaled slowly and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You are impossible.”
“Only when I’m right.”
The cottage stood quiet around them. Y/N breathed shallowly on the bed. Sunlight crept farther across the floor, thin and winter-pale, touching the woven rug, the leg of the nightstand, the scattered hem of the blanket. Shiloh, puffed and frightened and holding herself together by will alone, stared at the solar witch she had known since he was a vain golden child with scraped knees and too much confidence.
At last, Jin’s shoulders loosened.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll fetch him.”
“And don’t be rude to him.”
Jin gave her a tired look. “Shiloh.”
“No, I mean it.” Sternness returned to her at once, partly because she had won and partly because fear needed somewhere to go. “This whole business between you two is immature. You ought not let a girl get between you, especially when we both know he has no interest in her.”
Jin busied himself with closing the tin of herbs. “That is hardly the point.”
“It is entirely the point. If there were ever a girl that boy would marry, it would be the one in that bed, and even then I suspect she would have to propose with a sword pressed to his throat.”
“Shiloh.”
“And you truly think he and that pretty blond boy from Syrena were only friends?”
Jin said nothing.
It was not, for once, because he had no answer. It was because he had several, and none of them would improve the morning. So he chose instead to tighten the buckle on his satchel and let Shiloh’s words pass over him like sleet against a window.
If Yoongi had an interest in men, Jin thought, he would have said so himself.
And yet the thought did not settle cleanly.
For years, Jin had been very careful not to look too closely at certain things. That was one of the many talents pride gave a person. Pride could turn a memory aside before it stung. Pride could make loneliness seem dignified. Pride could convince a man that he was injured when he was only embarrassed, abandoned when he had merely walked away first.
The truth was that Jin knew his old jealousy over Wendy’s crush on Yoongi had been foolish. Worse than foolish, perhaps. Small. He had known it even while nursing it. He had let it sit in him like a thorn and had then blamed everyone else for the pain. He had pushed Yoongi away over a girl Yoongi had never wanted and Wendy had long since stopped mooning over.
It was ridiculous.
It was lonely.
Yoongi had been his only true male friend, and Jin had adored him in those quiet, ordinary ways men sometimes do not know how to confess without wrapping the confession in a joke. He missed their lunches. He missed Yoongi’s bluntness, which was sometimes rude and often exactly what Jin needed. He missed sitting across from someone who did not require him to shine every moment of the day.
With Wendy gone, and Y/N always burdened with orders and work, and his own pride proving poor company, the solar cottage had lately felt much larger than it was.
Shiloh was right about one thing.
It was long past time to let it go.
Jin’s mouth twitched despite himself. “I’ll tell him it’s urgent.”
“Tell him…” Shiloh’s voice faltered.
The sternness fell from her all at once, and beneath it was only a frightened soul in feathers.
“Tell him it’s Y/N.”
Jin’s face softened again. “That will be enough.”
He turned back to the bed before leaving. For a moment, he simply looked at Y/N. Not as a healer looks at a patient, nor as a friend looks at someone beloved, but as a person looks at a light he has always expected to be burning and has suddenly realized could go out.
Then he brushed his fingers once more over her forehead.
A faint golden warmth sank beneath her skin. Her breathing steadied, barely, but enough that the room itself seemed to unclench. Shiloh felt it. So did Jin. Even the cottage seemed to settle around her, the old beams creaking softly as if relieved.
Shiloh watched him cross to the door, wings half-open, ready to chase him if he hesitated.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
He gave one nod.
Light gathered around him, warm and bright, humming with intention. It did not burst or flare. It folded itself about him like a cloak woven from morning. For an instant his outline blurred, gold at the edges, as though the sun had decided to take human shape and then thought better of it.
Then the light folded inward.
Jin was gone.
The cottage became terribly quiet.
There is a quiet that comforts and a quiet that watches. This was the second sort. It settled over the room and under the doorways and among the rafters. It lay in the hearth where embers glowed low beneath a skin of ash. It gathered around the little bottles Jin had left on the bedside table. It seemed to listen to every breath Y/N took and count the space before the next.
Outside, the forest continued as though nothing had happened. Snow slid from the pines. A single winter bird called from somewhere beyond the window. Sunlight brightened the frozen meadow by degrees, pale and pitiless. The river muttered under ice. The world, which had no manners at all, went on being beautiful while Shiloh’s own small world lay feverish and still beneath the blankets.
She heard almost none of it.
She hopped from the nightstand to the pillow, careful not to jostle Y/N. Then she bowed her head close enough to feel each fragile breath stir the feathers of her breast.
Y/N did not wake. Her lashes lay dark against her cheeks. The fever still burned in her, though the hard edge of it had softened under Jin’s tonic. Her hand twitched once above the blanket, fingers curling faintly as if reaching through some dream.
Shiloh pressed closer.
“I know you can’t hear me,” she whispered. Then, after a pause, “Or perhaps you can, and you’re only pretending not to so I won’t scold you. That would be very like you.”
The room gave no answer. Shiloh’s eyes stung, which she found deeply inconvenient.
“You’re going to wake up,” she continued. “You’re going to wake up, and you’re going to be insufferable about this. You’ll say you are fine, and I’ll call you a liar, and then you’ll ask for tea.”
Her voice thinned.
“And I’ll make it for you.”
She tucked one foot beneath herself, then the other, settling beside Y/N’s pillow like a sentry carved from feathers and fear. Every now and then, she glanced toward the door, willing Jin to return with Yoongi, willing the forest to deliver him quickly, willing the gods, who were so often maddeningly quiet, to make themselves useful for once.
Y/N breathed in.
Y/N breathed out.
Shiloh lowered her head until her beak nearly touched Y/N’s hair.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” she whispered. “Not like this.”
The hours crawled.
Or perhaps they were not hours at all. Fear keeps its own clock, and every tick of it is cruel. It can stretch a minute until it is long enough to walk across, and then snap an hour short so that one finds oneself startled by the light changing in the window. Shiloh, who knew the ordinary measurements of mornings very well—the first stir of the fire, the second settling of frost, the third call of the winter birds—lost all sense of them now.
She stood vigil on the bedpost with her claws curled around the wood and her feathers dulled to a muted gray-brown, as if worry had taken the shine out of her. The cottage, usually so full of little homely sounds, seemed unnervingly still. There should have been the tick and hum of charms in the cupboards, the soft creak of old beams warming themselves, the whisper of herbs drying in their bundles above the hearth, and perhaps the small, pleasing complaint of the kettle as it settled on its hook. But now there was only the faint pop of the dying fire, the needle-thin ticking of ice at the window, and Y/N’s breathing.
Too shallow.
Too quiet.
Too unlike her.
Jin’s magic lingered in the room, tinting the shadows faintly gold. It lay across the blanket in soft threads and glowed dimly at Y/N’s temples, and any sensible creature would have taken comfort in it. Jin was not careless with healing, whatever else Shiloh might accuse him of being. His magic was warm, clean, and capable. It had steadied Y/N’s breath. It had drawn some of the hard, cruel heat down from her face. It had made the room feel less like a place where death might enter unnoticed.
But Shiloh did not trust quiet.
Quiet had deceived her before.
Twice she fluttered down from the bedpost and pressed the soft edge of one wing against Y/N’s cheek. The first time, she did it with the stern little air of someone inspecting a foolish child who had only scraped her knee.
“You’re fine,” she murmured. “You’ve always been fine.”
That, of course, was not true. Y/N had been ill many times. Y/N had frightened her many times. But there are lies the heart tells not because it believes them, but because it needs to hear a friendly voice in the dark.
The second time Shiloh touched her, Y/N’s skin still burned, and her breath shivered faintly against the owl’s feathers.
“You’re fine,” Shiloh tried again.
Her voice cracked before she reached the end of it.
She hated that. She hated fear most when it made her small. Fear ought to sharpen a creature. It ought to give one claws and teeth and a good loud voice. Instead, it had made a trembling thing of her. A little gray-brown bird on a bedpost, watching the person she loved lie pale and feverish beneath blankets.
She did not know how much time had passed when she finally heard voices outside.
At first she thought she had imagined them. The cottage had been so full of listening that any sound seemed possible, even invented ones. But then there came the muffled crunch of boots in snow, the low murmur of someone speaking in the meadow, and a colder gust of air pressing around the doorframe as shadows moved beyond the frosted window.
Shiloh’s head snapped up.
She flew to the sill and peered through the glass, blinking against the pale winter glare. The snow outside was bright enough now to hurt the eyes, blue in the hollows and gold where the morning had touched it. Figures stood near the path, dark against the white meadow. One of them moved with Jin’s unmistakable grace, which would have been irritating under almost any other circumstance.
The other—
“Finally,” Shiloh breathed, and the word came out half relief, half accusation.
Yoongi stepped inside first.
He looked as though he had been dragged from the far side of a long night and had not yet forgiven morning for existing. His dark hair was tied loosely back, though several strands had escaped and fallen near his face. Shadows sat beneath his eyes. A faint roughness clung to him, not untidiness exactly, but the mark of someone who had been awake too long over work that would not hurry itself for anyone. His cloak was dusted with snow at the shoulders, and one of his sleeves had been rolled and forgotten, exposing the pale line of his wrist.
But his presence changed the room at once.
It did not brighten it as Jin’s did. It did not fill the corners with warmth, or set the glass jars glowing, or make the shadows look as though they were considering repentance.
It grounded it.
The cottage seemed to settle more firmly upon its foundations simply because Yoongi had entered. The air grew quieter, but no longer in the dreadful way. It was the quiet of a stone placed at the bottom of a rushing stream. Solid. Certain. Unmoved.
He was not alone.
Behind him came Cordelia, wrapped in a heavy cloak over seafoam-colored robes that moved softly around her legs as she walked. Her long silvered hair fell over her shoulders like water under moonlight, and a faint scent of salt, rain, and crushed shells seemed to enter with her. Her presence carried the calm of deep tides: not weak, not slow, not sleepy, but steady with an old power that did not need to announce itself. There was something in her that made one think of cliffs enduring storms, of moonlit bays, of the great sleeping creatures that move far below the surface of the sea.
“Cori,” Shiloh said, startled despite herself. “You came too?”
“I was with him already,” Cordelia said.
Her voice had the rhythm of the coast in it, gentle and sure, with the faint lilt of waves drawing back over stones. She removed her gloves as she crossed the room, her eyes already moving to Y/N. “He was bartering for kelpwort and sea-mist powder when Jin arrived. I thought it wise to come along.”
“Bartering,” Shiloh repeated, aghast. “Now?”
Yoongi set his satchel on the table and began pulling out vials with the unhurried exactness of a man who had no intention of being rushed by panic, owls, or fever. “We started last night. Time slipped.”
The owl clicked her beak sharply. “While Y/N was dying?”
“She’s not dying,” Jin called from the doorway, brushing snow from his sleeve. “I told you that ten times.”
“Tell me again,” Shiloh said.
It came out quieter than she meant it to.
“Please.”
Jin’s expression changed at the word. It was not often that Shiloh gave anyone a please. She handed out insults like crumbs to sparrows, criticism like festival sweets, and commands as if she had been born wearing a crown. But please was rare from her. Please meant something had gone past pride and into the soft, unguarded country beneath it.
Jin shut the door behind them, crossed the room, and answered without even the shadow of teasing.
“She’s not dying.”
The words did not fix everything. Words seldom do. But they placed a stone beneath Shiloh’s feet, and for a moment she could stand.
Yoongi crossed to the bed. Cordelia followed, her sea-glass eyes softening when she saw Y/N beneath the blankets.
“Oh,” Cordelia murmured.
It was a small sound, and a sad one.
“She looks so much like her aunt.”
She rested a gentle hand on Y/N’s shoulder, not to examine her yet, but to greet her, as if some sleeping part of Y/N might know who had come.
Yoongi crouched beside the bed. He did not touch Y/N at first. His fingers hovered above her temple, still as winter branches, while his eyes narrowed in concentration. For a few breaths he listened, not only with his ears, but with whatever quiet sense kitchen witches have for the hidden workings of a body: heat, pulse, breath, hunger, salt, weakness, the little inward fires that keep flesh from surrendering.
Then he placed two fingers at the pulse below her jaw, waited, and exhaled.
“Strong,” he said.
Shiloh leaned forward so quickly she nearly lost her grip on the bedpost. “Strong?”
“Her pulse.” Yoongi’s voice was low, even, and plain. “Skin’s hot, but not dangerously so.”
He pressed his palm lightly against Y/N’s chest and closed his eyes.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the air stirred.
A ripple of cool silvery energy moved through the room, thin and bright as moonlight caught in water. It did not gleam like Jin’s magic. It did not warm. It soothed. It spread through the blankets, over Y/N’s shoulders, along the line of her throat, and down into the places where her breathing had hitched and struggled. The fever did not vanish, but it seemed to lose its teeth. Y/N drew in a breath, then another, and the second came more easily than the first.
It was a small change.
It was unmistakable.
“Well?” Shiloh asked. “What is it?”
Yoongi opened his eyes.
“What Jin said. Fever. Exhaustion. Cold exposure from flying through bad weather all night.” His gaze moved briefly to the scattered feathers still near the doorway, then back to Y/N. “The shift probably made it worse.”
Shiloh lowered her head.
“So I was right to worry.”
Yoongi looked at her then, really looked, and his voice gentled.
“Yes. You were right.”
Jin leaned lightly against the doorway. “No one said you weren’t.”
She ignored them all after that and brushed a damp strand of hair from Y/N’s forehead. Her touch was light, but not timid. Cordelia had the hands of someone who had tended many fevers, bound many wounds, and carried many secrets without dropping them.
“Aldara was just the same,” she said.
Memory softened her voice, and the name settled into the room like a familiar ghost finding an old chair. “Before she took on the Bridd mantle, she and I would swim in the shallows whenever the weather allowed. If she didn’t dry her hair properly afterward, she would be feverish before nightfall. I scolded her constantly.”
Shiloh let out a small, unsteady breath.
“That sounds like her.”
“She always said, ‘The sea wants to keep me longer.’” Cordelia smiled, but there was ache in it. “Stubborn as stone. Fierce as anything I had ever known. And very sure that consequences were meant for other people.”
“That also sounds like her,” Jin said.
“It sounds like all of them,” Yoongi murmured, checking Y/N’s pulse again. “Same constitution, then. Magic close to the bone. It burns hot and fast, and afterward the body pays for it. Mist, cold, exhaustion, a difficult shift—any of it could have pushed her into fever. All of it together certainly would.”
“And Y/N’s immune system is worse,” Jin added. “So we treat it seriously.”
Shiloh glanced toward him.
There was gratitude in the look, though she would sooner have swallowed a pinecone than named it aloud.
“She was restless,” Shiloh whispered. “She said she felt strange. I should have stopped her.”
Yoongi’s eyes flicked to the owl. “How?”
Shiloh said nothing.
“Truly,” he said. “How would you have stopped her?”
“I could have—”
“Scolded her?”
“That is often effective.”
“With Y/N?”
Shiloh’s feathers sank.
Yoongi’s voice gentled further. “Even if you had tried, she wouldn’t have listened.”
It was the truth, and therefore more terrible than comfort.
Cordelia tucked the blankets more securely around Y/N. She did it with an ease that turned the act into a kind of spell: blanket to shoulder, edge beneath chin, warmth held in, cold kept out. She laid one hand briefly over Y/N’s sternum and another near her brow. A faint misty glow gathered between her palms, sea-pale and quiet, and the fever in Y/N’s face softened another degree.
“She’ll recover,” Cordelia said. “Give her two days of steady warmth and proper rest. No work, no flying, no shifting unless absolutely necessary. I’ll leave a tonic to break the fever by morning.”
“You’re sure?” Shiloh asked.
Cordelia looked at her with a patient smile. “She is Aldara’s blood. Her stubbornness is thicker than iron and twice as enduring. She’ll be all right.”
Jin snorted softly. “Truest thing said all morning.”
Shiloh fluffed herself into a tired little ball. “You’re all calmer than I am.”
“Because panicking won’t help her,” Yoongi said.
His tone was even, unhurried, and infuriatingly solid. He wiped his hands on a cloth, then began arranging his vials on the bedside table in an order that made sense to him and probably no one else. “Rest will. Warmth will. Medicine will. Someone watching her breathing will. She’ll wake when her body is ready.”
Shiloh knew that tone.
It ended arguments. Not by force. Yoongi almost never needed force. It ended them by being immovable in a way that made arguing feel like throwing pebbles at fog.
Still, she flew to the headboard and looked down at Y/N’s pale face.
“You’re certain?” she whispered again.
Yoongi met her gaze.
“Yes. I’m certain.”
“Then stay,” she blurted. “Until she wakes.”
Yoongi stilled.
“Please,” Shiloh added.
That word hung strangely between them.
Jin looked away, politely enough. Cordelia lowered her eyes to the tonic she was preparing, though the corner of her mouth softened. Yoongi remained crouched beside the bed, his hand resting lightly on the edge of the blanket.
Shiloh used many words freely: fool, idiot, menace, sunflower, vain peacock, walking chandelier. Please was not one of them.
Yoongi hesitated.
His eyes flicked toward Cordelia.
“She’ll rest easier with you here,” Cordelia said. “You’ve always been her closest friend. And frankly, you have become more of a hermit than Thelma this past year.”
Jin lifted his brows. “More than Thelma? That’s a grave diagnosis.”
Yoongi ignored him and looked back at Y/N.
She lay still and fever-warmed, breathing in small, fragile pulls of air. One hand had slipped from beneath the blanket, palm half-open as though she had been reaching for something in sleep and forgotten what it was. Yoongi’s gaze rested on that hand for a moment longer than it needed to.
Something passed over his face, quiet and unreadable, like the moment before a tide turns.
“All right,” he said.
Shiloh’s shoulders sank with relief.
Jin leaned one shoulder against the doorway and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll send word to Wendy, though she’s still trapped in Clarcton.”
Cordelia’s mouth twitched. “I received a letter yesterday. Nessa has apparently terrified three suitors already and turned a fourth into a tree.”
Jin groaned. “That sounds about right.”
“A shrub, technically,” Cordelia added. “But a very unhappy one.”
“That family should not be allowed near courtship rituals.”
“She is growing fond of a human boy, though,” Cordelia said. “Says he finds her ditsy.”
Yoongi pulled a chair to Y/N’s bedside and sat down. The chair gave a small wooden complaint beneath him.
“Ditsy is certainly one word for it.”
He tried not to think too long about Nessa.
The ache that accompanied her name nudged at him, quiet and unwelcome. It was not a sharp pain. Those were easier, in some ways. Sharp pain announced itself honestly. This was the duller sort, the kind that had lived too long inside him to be a wound and not long enough to become memory.
Only Y/N knew the whole of it.
Only Y/N knew about the old relationship, the years hidden beneath ordinary conversation, the glances swallowed before others could see them, the meetings made to look accidental, the care taken with letters, names, and silences. Only Y/N knew how some love did not end so much as sink below the surface, where no one else could see it but where it still moved with the tide.
Ten years was a long time to keep a secret.
But he and Nessa had both feared the same thing: that truth, once spoken, would wound Wendy. Wendy, who had loved easily and brightly when they were young. Wendy, who had once looked at Yoongi as though he were a locked door she might someday find the key to. Wendy, who deserved tenderness even in disappointment.
So the secret had remained buried.
Silent as silt at the bottom of the sea.
Now Y/N lay before him, feverish and still, the keeper of that secret and so many others. She had carried it without judgment, as she carried most things: not lightly, exactly, but faithfully. She had never pressed him to speak before he was ready. She had never made his fear seem cowardly. She had only sat beside him on certain evenings, when the cottage windows were dark and the kettle had gone quiet, and let silence be a place where he could breathe.
Yoongi’s hand tightened once on the arm of the chair.
Then he let it loosen.
The cottage settled into a softer quiet.
It was no longer the dreadful silence of a house waiting for bad news. It was the quieter peace that comes after worry has done all the useful things it can and must now sit down by the bed. Cordelia hummed under her breath as she stirred herbs into Y/N’s water, a tune that sounded older than words and smelled faintly, somehow, of salt and rain. Jin stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his head bowed, sunlight still faint along his fingers. For once he did not try to fill the room with speech. His silence was awkward at first, then kind.
Shiloh finally tucked her head beneath one wing, though she did not sleep. Her vigil merely changed shape. It became stillness instead of motion, listening instead of pacing, a small feathered trust placed unwillingly in the hands of others.
Yoongi remained beside the bed.
Every so often he checked Y/N’s pulse. Once he adjusted the blanket. Once he lifted the cup Cordelia had prepared and coaxed a little water past Y/N’s lips when she stirred enough to swallow. He spoke to her each time, low and steady, not with the grand soothing phrases people use when they are frightened by their own helplessness, but as though she were merely very tired and would be annoyed later if everyone made too much of it.
“That’s it,” he murmured once. “Just a little.”
Y/N’s brow tightened faintly.
“I know,” he said. “You can be angry with me when you wake up.”
Shiloh opened one eye from beneath her wing. “She will be.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Cordelia’s mouth curved.
Jin glanced at Yoongi then, and something small and old passed between them. Not forgiveness. Not yet. Forgiveness, when it is real, does not usually come prancing in with trumpets and garlands. It arrives more like a thaw: first one drop from an icicle, then another, then the surprising sound of running water where everything had been frozen the day before.
But it was a beginning.
Outside, the forest brightened with the slow, pale unfolding of a winter morning. Sunlight slid between the snow-heavy evergreens in cold ribbons, catching on frost and ice until the world shone white and gold. The mist lifted by degrees, revealing buried paths, dark trunks, and the long stillness of a forest not yet ready for spring. Somewhere high in the pines, a bird called once and then thought better of it. The river muttered under its ice. Snow fell in soft clumps from burdened branches, leaving little puffs of white powder in the air.
Winter still held Bangtan in both hands.
But inside the cottage, winter had been pushed back from the bed.
There was warmth at the hearth. There was medicine on the table. There were herbs steeping, blankets tucked, hands ready, and three kinds of magic keeping quiet watch around a sleeping girl whose body had been asked to carry too much.
Y/N slept on.
Her fever eased by degrees.
Her breath steadied.
And though the cold pressed its pale hands against the windows and peered in with all the patience of February, it could not come any farther.
𓄿 Chapter Two: In Sickness and in Health
Pairing: Jimin x Reader
Other tags: Werewolf!Jimin, Witch!Reader, Shifter!Reader, Shifter!Jimin, A/B/O Dynamics, Alpha!Jimin, Witch!Yoongi, Witch!Seokjin, Werewolf!Taehyung, Alpha!Taehyung, Werewolf!Namjoon, Alpha!Namjoon, Werewolf!Hoseok, Alpha!Hoseok, Werewolf!Jungkook, Omega!Jungkook
Genre: Fantasy!AU, Werewolf!AU, Witch!AU, friends to lovers, extreme slow burn, mutual pining, angst, fluff, eventual smut, 18+ only
Word Count: 23.8k+
Synopsis: Across the four realms of Lustra lies the enchanted Bangtan Forest, homeland of the southern Foxglove pack and a place whispered about as the “land of magic.” It is also the domain of the Bridd, a line of witches bound by an ancient curse and entrusted as the forest’s sacred guardians. Y/N, the newest Bridd, inherited her role far too young. Now grown, she is honored by the wolves as the most powerful witch they have ever known. Yet beneath the reverence and power lives a woman who must choose between the weight of her destiny and the longings of her heart.
Warnings: blood, witchcraft, shapeshifters, childhood memories, yearning, pining, emotional constipation, magic, talking animals, spirit guides, PTSD, negative self talk, gossiping, meddling woodland friends, unrequited love (or is it?), dreaming of him, long haired Jimin, that will be a reoccurring warning, mating system, politics, injured character, sick character, nightmares, whimsy, bickering, Shiloh is so iconic, Paganism, let me know if i missed anything...
A/N: Thanks for reading!
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Y/N was sitting at her dining table when the morning found her. The sun came first through the high black branches, then over the frosted meadow, then along the sill; only after that did they venture into the cottage, setting pale gold on the floorboards, on the backs of chairs, on the worn stones of the hearth, and finally upon the enormous round table where Y/N had taken her tea.
It was a peculiar table, and the sort of table no tidy-minded person would ever have chosen if he had begun with measurements, color schemes, or any of those sensible things by which houses are so often made dull. It was too large for the cottage, much too round to be useful in a corner, and stained a deep, stubborn teal that had resisted soap, sanding, charms, powders, moon-water, muttered threats, and one rather shameful experiment involving vinegar, a silver spoon, and a great deal of misplaced confidence. The color remained exactly as it had always been, clinging to the wood with the firm cheerfulness of an old joke that refused to stop being funny.
The surface bore all the marks of a life thoroughly lived. There were pale rings left by teacups, dark scars from knives, dents where jars had been dropped in haste, and three blackened places where candles had behaved badly during storms. Its legs, absurdly grand for so battered a thing, were carved with curling leaves and little beasts whose faces had worn down over the years until they appeared to be looking out at the world in sleepy astonishment.
It matched nothing—not the chairs, not the rug, not the cupboards, not the old blue pitcher by the stove, not the brass bell without a tongue, and certainly not the footstool embroidered with foxes by someone who had clearly never seen a fox but had loved the idea of them very much.
But Aldara had loved the table, and that was enough.
Because Aldara had loved it, Y/N kept it as faithfully as if it had been made from the wood of some tree that grew in the courts of heaven. She cleaned it, defended it, and spoke rather sharply to anyone who suggested, even kindly, that perhaps it was time for something smaller, plainer, newer, or less teal. There were many things in the cottage like that—things which had outlived usefulness, fashion, convenience, and, in some cases, good sense, but had not outlived meaning. The cottage did not look arranged so much as gathered. Every shelf, chair, jar, cracked cup, and faded curtain seemed to have come there carrying a story under one arm and no intention whatever of leaving.
The chairs around the table were no better behaved than the table itself. One had armrests carved into the heads of wolves, a gift from Hoseok after a winter hunt that had begun with boasting and ended with three people stuck in a tree until sunrise. Another had once been painted with stars and moons, though time had softened them into cloudy smudges, and one leg was shorter than the others, so that it rocked if anyone sat down too quickly or breathed with too much confidence. A third chair was blackened along one side from an alchemical mishap that Y/N still insisted had not been her fault, though nobody who had been present believed her, and nobody who had not been present believed her either. On damp evenings, if one pressed close to the charred edge, it still smelled faintly of sage, smoke, and embarrassment.
None of the chairs matched. None of them seemed to wish to. Y/N had always thought this one of their better qualities.
The windows were shut against the morning, for late January had no manners and would come straight into a person’s bones if invited too freely. Still, a narrow pane near the stove had been cracked open to let out the old hearth-smoke, and through that little opening the cold slipped in. It smelled of snow, wet bark, woodsmoke, and the hard iron sleep of frozen earth. The curtains moved only a little, lifting and falling as if the cottage itself were breathing carefully, not wanting to wake too much of the winter outside.
Beyond the glass, the meadow lay under its thin white covering. It was not one of those deep, swallowing snows that buried fences and made paths into guesses, but it had softened the world all the same. White gathered in the hollows of the field and along the low stone wall. The grasses stood through it in brittle golden tufts, bent and rimed with frost. The dead heads of foxglove rattled faintly near the fence when the wind moved through them, while the bluebells slept under the hard ground and would sleep for weeks yet. Poppies and daisies were only promises kept deep in the soil. Even the trees seemed less like trees than dark thoughts sketched in charcoal and silver, their bare branches holding small jewels of ice where the night fog had frozen.
Imbolc was only a week away.
Perhaps, Y/N thought, she ought to write to Jin today and ask him to bring extra firewood. He would laugh, of course. She could hear him already, bright as a bell and twice as troublesome.
You live in a forest, Y/N. It is rather famous for having wood.
And he would say it with that impossible sideways grin of his, the one that made rebuke feel like an invitation and foolishness feel like a holiday. He would arrive late, carrying half the forest under one arm and pretending the whole thing had been her idea, and then he would make dreadful toasts while Yoongi pretended not to enjoy them.
But perhaps this year she would surprise him. Perhaps this year she would really do it. She would host her own Imbolc fire. Nothing grand. Nothing with banners or musicians or any ceremony that required people to stand solemnly while pretending their feet were not freezing. Just a proper fire beneath the clean winter dark, a kettle of spiced cider, honey cakes if she remembered them, and enough light to honor the turning of the season.
The thought pleased her. It pleased her so much that she said it aloud, because spoken intentions had weight, and Y/N had always believed that words, once released into the air, began looking for ways to become true.
“This year,” she said into her tea, “I shall host something for Imbolc.”
The cottage listened politely.
Then, because Y/N knew herself very well and had lived with herself long enough not to be fooled by grand declarations made before breakfast, she added, “And I shall not forget.”
The cottage accepted this too, with the same quiet tact.
A moment later, she made a little face at herself and took another sip. Honeysuckle tea spread warm and sweet over her tongue. She had meant to host a gathering the year before, and the year before that, and once she had gone so far as to write down a list. The list had then vanished under a stack of pressed flowers and been rediscovered in autumn by a beetle who appeared to find it inspiring.
“No,” she said firmly, as though speaking to the future version of herself who would almost certainly be elbow-deep in poultice or frog bones when Imbolc arrived. “Not this time.”
Her favorite chair—if one could call a chair favorite without offending all the others—had been angled beside the window for so many years that the floor beneath it had faded in its shape. From there, she could see the meadow rolling away from the cottage in a white, winter hush. Frost clung to every blade of standing grass, making the field glitter as though the night had spilled a box of tiny stars and forgotten to gather them again. Near the fence, last summer’s stems stood brown and hollow, and beneath the snow the sleeping beds held their secrets.
The sight stirred something in her that was not quite happiness and not quite sorrow. She saw herself suddenly, not as she was now, but as she had been: barefoot in summer, wind-burned and wild-haired, running through that same meadow with both arms flung wide, as if she meant to catch the whole sky against her chest. The grass had been taller then, and she had been shorter. Clover had thickened the air with sweetness. Bees had moved sleepily from bloom to bloom. Her laughter had flown all the way to the tree line, where birds startled up from the branches in a flurry of indignant wings.
Yoongi had been there in those days, grumbling even as a child. He had possessed the solemn disapproval of a very small old man and the tender heart of a saint who did not wish anyone to know about it. He complained about mud while stepping directly into it to pull her out. He scolded her for climbing too high, then climbed higher himself to prove the branch was unsafe. He hid sweets in his sleeves and pretended to be baffled when they ended up in her pockets.
Then had come Jin, bright and careless and charming enough to be forgiven for nearly anything, smelling always faintly of citrus peel, sun-warmed wool, and mischief. And Wendy, with hair that carried the salt of the sea no matter how far inland she wandered, leaving damp marks on their books and turning every dull afternoon into an expedition.
By the time they were half-grown, the four of them had become inseparable in the way only children can be, before the world teaches people to divide themselves into duties, homes, griefs, and silences. They had belonged to one another without ceremony. No oath had bound them. No spell had stitched them together. It had been something simpler and stronger than either: the easy gravity of shared youth. They had believed then that the world was wide because it meant to make room for them.
Y/N lowered her cup.
Of course, they had grown. Everyone did, though it was a great inconvenience and almost always happened before one was finished with being young. Life had drawn them away by degrees, gently at first and then with a firmer hand. Yoongi had his kitchen in the deep woods, where every loaf of bread seemed to come out tasting faintly of loyalty. Jin followed sunlight wherever it led, which meant he arrived late, departed early, and always left some warmth behind him. Wendy belonged to the ocean as surely as shells belonged to the tide.
And Y/N belonged here—to the cottage, to the meadow, to the forest, to the animals, to the rituals, to the old bargains and the small healings, to the invisible chains of responsibility she had learned to wear lightly, so that others might mistake them for ribbons.
They would never again be exactly what they had been. She had accepted that long ago, but acceptance, she had discovered, did not always keep a thing from hurting.
From across the room came the soft scrape of talons on wood, and Y/N smiled before she turned.
Shiloh stood on her perch beside the kitchen window, pale feathers puffed around her like a shawl. The owl’s eyes were narrowed with the weary dignity possessed only by creatures who slept in daylight and disapproved of everyone else’s schedule.
“I’m going to sleep for a while,” Shiloh announced, her voice thick with drowsiness. “Wake me if you need me.”
“You should sleep outside,” Y/N said, in the tone of someone who knew she would not be obeyed but felt morally improved by saying the thing anyway. “I’ll be using the kitchen soon, and I might wake you.”
Shiloh ruffled herself with enormous offense. “I beg your pardon.”
Owls did not beg for anything, and familiars even less so. Before Y/N could answer, Shiloh spread her wings and swept through the open window in a pale blur, vanishing into the morning with all the wounded grandeur of a queen exiled by fools.
“You are dramatic even for an owl,” Y/N called after her.
There was no answer, unless the sharp rustle of wings in the trees could be counted as one.
The cottage settled into a quieter quiet after Shiloh left. It was not empty. Y/N’s home was never empty. It held all the little sounds that made solitude bearable: a kettle ticking as it cooled, herbs shifting in their bundles above the hearth, a floorboard sighing under the memory of someone’s step, and the faint scratch of a mouse in the wall whom Y/N had been meaning to evict for three weeks but had not done because he seemed polite.
Beyond the windows, the forest breathed in its winter sleep. Branch touched branch. Ice loosened by slow degrees. Roots spoke to roots beneath the frozen ground in a language that trees remembered and people mostly forgot.
Y/N’s hearing was not so keen as Shiloh’s, nor as sharp as that of the wolves who moved through Bangtan like white shadows, but it had always been better than ordinary. She could tell the difference between a rabbit under the hedge and the spirit fox that sometimes lingered near her land. She knew the dry skitter of frozen leaves, the soft fall of snow slipping from a branch, and the careful tread of deer on crusted ground. When she was younger, she had been rather proud of it. Too proud, perhaps.
At twelve, on one hot afternoon thick with flies and golden light, she had declared before Jin that she could hear wings half a mile away and the footfall of a wolf long before it reached the clearing. He had laughed and called her a showoff.
He had not meant it cruelly. Jin rarely meant things cruelly then. His laughter had been bright and passing, like a coin tossed into water. But she remembered the small burn of embarrassment, the sudden knowledge that a person could reveal too much of herself simply by being pleased with what she was. She had smiled, because children learn very early to smile when they are stung in places no one can see, and after that, she had not boasted anymore.
Now, many years later, the memory only made her laugh softly into her cup.
“Showoff,” she whispered, tasting the word as if it belonged to another life.
The sunlight shifted. It traveled along the table, deepening the teal stain and catching in the shallow scars of the wood until the whole thing seemed lit from beneath like a lantern. Outside, winter held fast, but beneath it, spring had begun its first secret work. Buds tightened on the branches. Clouds drifted like wool torn thin. A brave and foolish bee, drunk on the mere idea of flowers, bumped itself against the window frame and wandered away again.
For the first time in weeks, Y/N did nothing.
This was rarer than it ought to have been. There were always poultices to mix, charms to mend, creatures to soothe, spirits to bargain with, letters to answer, knives to sharpen, candles to dress, and jars to label before she forgot what was in them and had to determine by smell whether something was medicine or supper. But that morning, no task had yet found her. No ritual tugged at her sleeve. No urgency curled like smoke at the edge of her mind.
She simply sat.
Her tea cooled. The meadow glittered. The cottage breathed.
By the time the second cup had gone lukewarm and the third had nearly done the same, she saw something move at the edge of the field.
At first, she took it for light. That was easily done in winter. Sunlight had a habit of putting on shapes in the forest. It flashed on ice and looked like eyes. It caught on frosted bark and pretended to be silver thread. It lay across old stones until they seemed to shift under it. Y/N narrowed her eyes and set her cup down carefully.
The pale shape stood half in the trees and half out of them, thin as a breath against the dark trunks.
Then it moved again.
Not with the easy, floating grace of mist. Not with the sway of grass.
It limped.
Y/N’s hand went at once to the windowsill.
The shape staggered from the shadow of the trees into the open meadow. Sunlight slid across its pelt and turned it briefly to silver. It was a wolf—a large one, pale-furred, long-legged, and moving with the tight, careful steps of an animal who had learned that the ground might hurt him if touched in the wrong way.
Then came the sound.
It was very small for so great a creature, a thin, broken whimper, quickly swallowed as though pride had leapt up and clamped jaws around it. But Y/N heard it, and it hooked into her chest with cruel little claws.
She leaned out the cracked window. “Are you hurt?”
Her voice had changed without her willing it to. The idle softness had gone from it. What remained was the calm, low certainty she used with frightened birds, wounded deer, children with cut knees, and once with an outraged river spirit who had caught his elbow in a fish trap.
The wolf froze. His ears lifted. The crying stopped.
Y/N did not move too quickly. One did not startle a hurt creature, especially one whose teeth were longer than one’s fingers.
“If you are hurt,” she said more gently, “I can help you. I have supplies. Enough to patch you quickly.”
The meadow seemed to hold its breath. A pale winter butterfly wandered between them, unconcerned with injury, dignity, or the delicate negotiations between witch and wolf. It drifted over a dead stem, reconsidered the entire matter, and went elsewhere.
The wolf’s eyes caught the sun. Amber. Sharp. Familiar.
Something stirred uneasily in her memory. Not certainty. Not yet. Only the tug of a thread. The pale wolf from the other night, perhaps—the one who had returned her lantern and vanished before she could decide whether to thank him, scold him, or ask why he had been carrying it in the first place.
White wolves were not strange in Bangtan. Jimin was fair-furred. So was old Ahn, whose pelt shone beneath moonlight like frost. But the thought of Jimin rose before she could stop it, stubborn and unwelcome, and Y/N grimaced faintly at herself.
The wolf limped nearer, slowly and deliberately, with far more pride than was sensible for someone leaving blood in the snow. When he reached the wall beneath her window, she could see the injury plainly. Blood streaked his hind leg, vivid against the white fur. More darkened his side, though he held himself as if nothing at all were wrong and the whole matter were a minor inconvenience caused by the weather.
“Oh,” Y/N breathed, and the sound held more sorrow than she meant it to.
The wolf looked away, as if offended by pity.
“Come around to the door,” she said. “You may need to shift to get inside.”
At that, he stiffened.
The change was subtle but unmistakable. His head lifted. His shoulders tightened. Something proud and hot flickered through him like a coal stirred under ash. Wolves could shift, yes, but they did not always do it gladly. Not when wounded. Not before someone outside their own. Not when the shifting itself might expose more than skin.
“All right,” Y/N said at once. “You do not have to. I can bring you in another way.”
His gaze returned to her.
“It feels odd the first time,” she admitted, because honesty was kinder than reassurance when magic was involved. “But it is safe. I promise.”
The wolf tilted his head. His tail gave the smallest uncertain twitch, which might have meant interest, suspicion, or that he had lost too much blood to argue properly. Then, after a long pause, it wagged once.
Y/N smiled. “Good. Hold still for me.”
She closed her eyes, and the world changed when she did. Not outwardly, not to anyone watching from the meadow, but behind her lids, the cottage bloomed in clear detail. She saw the red and white rug before the hearth, worn soft by years of feet and paws. She saw the mismatched chairs around the teal table, the sewing chair with its cushion gone thin in the middle, and the row of knives above the fireplace stones, each blade polished and named. She saw the kitchen shelves crowded with jars of herbs, roots, bones, salt, feathers, oils, seeds, and things that would have looked alarming to anyone who did not know how useful a dried beetle could be.
She saw the altar beneath the windows, the candles guttering lavender and gold, the little dish of river stones, the sprig of rosemary tied with red thread. She saw sunlight lying on the floorboards like spilled honey, and only when the shape of home was whole in her mind did she begin to murmur.
The words came easily. They always had. They belonged to a language older than Lustra and older than the courts that pretended to rule it. Older, perhaps, than the first witch who learned that air could open if spoken to properly. The chant slipped from her tongue soft and lilting, not commanding the world so much as persuading it to remember that doors were only agreements.
With two fingers, she traced an outline in the air.
The space before the wolf shimmered. Light gathered there, pale and thin at first, then thickening like a curtain woven from moonlit water. The edges trembled. The center grew transparent. Y/N parted it with a gentle push.
The wolf stared.
For one unguarded moment, all the dignity went out of him. His tail wagged faster, and fascination brightened his eyes until he looked, despite the blood and the size of him, almost young. He sniffed the glowing threshold, then stepped through with more courage than caution.
An instant later, he stood beside her hearth.
He was enormous.
Y/N blinked up at him. The wolf blinked down at her.
He took up half the room.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I may need to shrink you a little.”
His ears twitched.
“I know. I know,” she said. “Terribly rude of me.”
The wolf sat down with great care, as if to prove that he was cooperative, civilized, and only accidentally the size of a small pony.
“Very gracious of you,” Y/N said.
She lifted one hand. Blue light pulsed softly through the room, cool and bright as winter dusk. It ran over his fur, passed through the air, brushed the walls, and faded. When it was gone, the wolf remained large, but no longer impossible. He was still magnificent, still broad-chested and powerful, but now he looked less like a creature who might knock over the ceiling beams by sighing.
“There,” Y/N said. “Manageable.”
The wolf gave her a look that suggested he did not care to be called manageable.
“Lie down,” she instructed.
To her mild surprise, he obeyed at once. He lowered himself onto the floor before the hearth with a slow, tired exhale and rested his head on his paws.
The sight softened something in her.
Whatever unease she usually felt near wolves—whatever old caution lived in her bones and woke at the scent of them—was swallowed by the plain fact of his pain. There was blood on her floor now, dark little marks against the wood. There was a torn place in his side. There were wounds where no wound ought to be.
She knelt beside him and parted the fur around his hind leg. The blood was tacky beneath her fingers. The skin below was hot. Bite marks punctured deep through the muscle, and claw marks raked cruelly along the flank. These were not the scrapes of a hunt gone poorly. Not brambles. Not a fall. Not even the ordinary brutality of a scuffle. This had been done with purpose.
Her stomach tightened.
“You really are something,” she murmured, partly to him and partly to herself. “Sneaking out, getting into fights, bleeding in my meadow. What would your mother say?”
The wolf made a muffled sound into his paws. It was not quite a growl. Not quite a sigh. It sounded, impossibly, like a grumble of amusement.
Y/N looked up.
His eyes met hers: amber, watchful, intelligent, and warmer than she expected. There was a person looking out through them. Not merely a wolf with clever instincts, but someone aware and guarded and curious beneath all that pale fur. Again, the thought of Jimin flickered through her mind, and again she pushed it away, though not quite as firmly as before.
“Stay,” she said, though he had made no attempt to rise.
She crossed to the shelf beside the stove and took down a small tin. When she opened it, the cottage filled with the clean, green smell of comfrey, sage, and goldenroot. It was a humble salve by the standards of elaborate healers and proud witches who preferred their medicines to glow dramatically in crystal bowls, but Y/N trusted it more than many spells. It had soothed burns, sealed cuts, calmed bruises, eased bites, and once restored feeling to Yoongi’s thumb after an incident with a cursed pastry fork.
It had earned its place.
“Well then, little wolf,” she said, returning to his side, “let us get acquainted.”
He looked at her.
“I shall begin,” she continued, dipping her fingers into the cool cream. “And next time it will be your turn.”
The wolf’s eyes narrowed faintly, as if to ask whether there would indeed be a next time.
Y/N pretended not to notice.
She smoothed the salve carefully along the torn skin. He did not flinch. His breath changed, growing deeper, but he held himself still with astonishing discipline. The fur beneath her hand was thick and soft, warmer than it looked, and the heat of him came up through her fingers like the heat of banked coals. She worked slowly, parting the fur, cleaning the wound, pressing the salve where it needed to go.
“People call me Bridd,” she said after a while.
The wolf listened. The room listened too, in the way rooms do when secrets are spoken in them.
“But if you are going to spend time here,” she went on, “you may call me Y/N. Bridd sounds far too formal for friends.”
The wolf blinked once, slow and solemn.
It felt like an answer.
“My aunt gave me that name when I came to Lustra,” Y/N said. “No one ever really discovered how I arrived. Not properly. Aldara used to say the Gods guided me.” Her mouth softened around the memory. “She said when she saw me, she simply knew, as if she had been waiting for me all her life.”
The wolf remained still, but his gaze had changed. It was not pity. Y/N would have resented pity. It was something quieter. Attention, perhaps. Or recognition.
The salve in the tin emptied more quickly than she had hoped. She sighed, rose, and went to fetch another. Then another after that, because the wounds were longer than they had first appeared and wolves, apparently, contained an unreasonable amount of surface. When she turned back with both tins in hand, she found him staring at her with such a human expression—one brow lifted, his mouth slightly open, his eyes full of patient judgment—that she laughed.
“You look as though you are about to lecture me,” she said. “And I would remind you that I am not the one who lost a fight.”
His tail thumped once against the floor.
“I wish I knew your name,” she said, kneeling again. “Or even whether I ought to call you he or she. Calling you wolf feels horribly impolite, and little wolf is beginning to sound like an insult when you take up half my hearth.”
The sound that came from him then startled her so badly she nearly dropped the tin.
It was low and warm, rising from his chest in a rumble that shook through the floorboards.
Laughter.
Y/N froze. “You can laugh?”
The wolf’s amber eyes gleamed.
“Oh,” she said, sitting back slightly. “Well. That changes things.”
He blinked at her, visibly pleased with himself.
“All right,” she said, gathering her composure with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. “Let us be practical. Shake your head for no. Nod for yes.”
The wolf lifted his head.
“Are you a woman?”
He shook his head.
“Fluid?” Y/N guessed. “Some wolves are.”
Another shake.
“So,” she said, smiling in spite of herself, “you are a man.”
The wolf dipped his head in a neat, deliberate nod. It was just shy of smug.
“Good,” Y/N said. “That is a start.”
She gestured for him to roll over.
His ears went back.
“Do not look at me like that,” she said. “I need to see the other side.”
The wolf let out a long, suffering breath, as though no creature in the history of the forest had ever been so greatly inconvenienced, and flopped onto his side with dramatic resignation.
Y/N stared.
“This side is worse.”
He avoided her gaze.
“You could have told me.”
The wolf rolled his eyes.
He actually rolled them.
“Oh, don’t you dare,” Y/N said, though a laugh escaped her. “You wolves and your pride. You would rather bleed through my rug than admit you need help.”
He snorted, offended.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “You are very noble and terribly mistreated. Hold still.”
The wounds along his ribs were deeper. Some had clotted poorly beneath the fur, and when she cleaned them, fresh blood welled dark and quick. Y/N’s humor faded. She leaned closer, her brows drawing together.
Bite marks. Claw marks. Cruel angles.
The attack had not been clean or honorable. Whoever had done this had not merely wished to win. They had wished to ruin.
A small anger kindled in her—not loud, for Y/N’s anger rarely was. It burned low and blue, the way certain flames burn hottest when they do not leap.
“You poor thing,” she whispered.
The wolf’s ear flicked, but he did not look away this time.
She rinsed a cloth in the basin beside her. The water clouded pink, then red, rippling with each movement of her hand. Firelight caught the surface and broke itself into trembling pieces. She cleaned one wound and then another, slow enough not to frighten him, firm enough to do good. The salve gleamed pale on her fingers, its sharp green scent mingling with iron, smoke, lavender candle-wax, and the wild musk of wolf.
He flinched once when she pressed near a deep tear below his ribs. Only once. The muscles under her hand tightened, then gradually released.
“I know,” she murmured. “I know. Nearly done.”
She worked along his side, down toward his flank, over bruises that darkened beneath the fur. When she pressed gently near his hind joint, his leg jerked. Y/N startled, then laughed, soft and bright.
“Oh. So that tickles, does it?”
His ear flicked.
“Good,” she said. “Your reflexes are working.”
The wolf made a low sound that might have been complaint.
“I am choosing to take that as gratitude.”
He huffed.
Outside, the forest continued about its morning. The thrush sang again. Leaves whispered against one another in the wind. Somewhere far off, water moved under ice and over stones. But inside the cottage, time seemed to draw close around the two of them, like a shawl pulled over chilled shoulders. There was only the fire, the basin, the smell of herbs, the warmth of the animal beside her, and the steady work of her hands.
When at last the bleeding stopped and the swelling began to ease beneath the salve’s subtle shimmer, Y/N sat back on her heels.
“There,” she said.
The word was small. Too small, perhaps, for the long quiet that had passed between them. But it was what she had.
She wiped her hands on a cloth and examined him with the stern eye of someone who expected healing to behave itself. The wounds were not gone, but they were clean. The worst of the bleeding had ceased. The salve had settled into the torn places, drawing the heat down and leaving a faint silver sheen along the edges.
“You are good to go,” she said, patting his side lightly.
The wolf did not move.
At first she thought he had not understood. Then she saw that he understood perfectly. His ears had flattened a little, and the muscles along his shoulders had gone tense in a conflicted way. He knew he ought to leave. Of course he did. Packs pulled on wolves like tides pulled on the sea. Someone would notice. Someone might already be looking.
The fire crackled softly, sending amber light up the walls and across the low beams of the ceiling. It gleamed along the knives above the hearth, shone in the teal scars of the table, and turned the wolf’s white fur to gold. Outside, the meadow rested under frost and old snow, bare and beautiful in the hard morning light.
For a little while, there was no Bridd and no stranger-wolf, no pack, no name withheld, no old fear, no hidden wound deeper than the ones she had dressed. There was only Y/N in her odd cottage, with herbs on her hands and sunlight on her floor, and a wounded creature resting his head in her lap because, against all the hard sense of the world, he had decided to trust her.
They remained that way until the fire had eaten another inch of wood and the sunlight had moved from the table to the floor, laying itself across the boards in long, pale stripes.
Y/N did not know how much time had passed. It seemed to her that time had gone soft around them, as warm and drowsy as the wolf’s breath against her knees. Her hand moved absently over his head, smoothing the fur between his ears, and every so often he made that low, contented sound again, quiet enough that she felt it more than heard it.
But at last his ears twitched.
Not from comfort this time.
He lifted his head, slow and reluctant, and looked toward the window.
Y/N’s hand stilled.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”
The wolf did not move at once. He only looked back at her, amber eyes warm in the firelight, and for one foolish moment she almost told him to stay.
There was room.
There was always room, somehow, in the cottage. The mismatched chairs made room for one another. The shelves made room for one more jar, one more book, one more strange little relic with nowhere else to go. Surely there could be room for a wounded wolf by the hearth.
But wolves belonged to their own, even when they wandered. Someone, somewhere, must have been missing him.
Y/N gave his head one last careful stroke.
“Come on then, little wolf. Before I become selfish.”
He rose with some stiffness, though the salve had already done him good. His limp remained, but it no longer dragged so cruelly through his body. He followed her to the windowed side of the room, where morning still poured pale and cold through the cottage. Y/N lifted her hand and whispered the old words again.
The doorway opened like a curtain of pale water.
Beyond it waited the meadow, silvered with frost and old snow.
The wolf paused at the threshold. Then he turned and pressed his cold nose once against her wrist.
It was such a small thanks that it hurt more than any grander thing could have.
“You’re welcome,” Y/N whispered.
Then he passed through the light and stood once more in the meadow. For a breath, he looked back at her, white fur bright against the winter field, amber eyes holding hers with an almost human gravity. Then he turned toward the trees and slipped away, moving slower than he had come, but steadier.
Y/N watched until the forest took him.
Only when the last pale flicker of him vanished between the trunks did she let the doorway close.
The cottage felt strangely large afterward.
She stood there a moment with salve on her sleeves, blood drying faintly at her wrists, and the warmth of him still lingering in her lap as if he had left part of himself behind. Then the kettle gave a small, practical click from the stove, and the spell of stillness broke.
“Well,” she said to the room, because there was no one else to say it to, “that was unexpected.”
The room, being used to unexpected things, did not argue.
Y/N washed her hands in warm water scented with rosemary, watching the pink threads of blood loosen from her skin and curl away. Then she tied her hair back, rolled up her sleeves, and went to the long worktable beneath the hanging herbs.
There was medicine to make.
Comfrey first, dried from summer’s stores, then goldenroot, then a pinch of powdered pearlcap mushroom for swelling. She moved gently but with purpose, crushing leaves in the mortar until the cottage filled with green, living fragrance—a small borrowed memory of the warmth still buried beneath January’s frost.
Outside, the morning went on shining cold and bright. Inside, Y/N worked with a small, secret smile tugging at her mouth.
Every now and then, despite herself, she glanced toward the window.
The meadow remained empty.
Still, she set an extra tin of salve aside.
Just in case.
Imbolc came to the Bangtan Forest on a cold and wandering breeze.
It was the sort of breeze that had not yet made up its mind whether it belonged to winter or spring, and so it behaved a little like both. It came out of the north with cold fingers and a sharp nose, but it had a hopeful heart. It moved over the meadow around Y/N’s cottage, bending the stiff brown grasses one way and then another, as if searching beneath them for the first green blade brave enough to rise.
By midafternoon, the meadow shone beneath a thin, wintry light. It was not the rich gold of summer, which made everything look fat and sleepy and pleased with itself, nor even the gentle brightness of true spring, when the world seemed newly washed and still smelling of rain. This light was paler, strained through frost, a silvery kind of sunlight that made every stone and stem look thoughtful. Ice crystals clung to the tips of the grasses and flashed whenever the breeze troubled them, first like tiny knives and then, when the sun softened, like fallen stars. The sky was a pale, high blue, the color of breath on glass, and at the edge of the meadow the forest stood with its branches bare and listening.
The trees always seemed to listen on Imbolc.
That was the feeling of the holiday in Lustra. It was not yet warmth, but the promise of warmth. Not yet blooming, but the held breath before blooming began. It was the hour in the year when winter loosened one finger from the throat of the earth, and somewhere deep below frozen mud, black roots, and the brown lace of dead leaves, life turned over in its sleep.
The cottage knew it too.
A thin stream of incense drifted from Y/N’s open window, curling into the cold afternoon in blue-gray ribbons. Yarrow, hawthorn, and a pinch of cinnamon, because cinnamon had always seemed to Y/N like a small edible flame, and therefore suitable for any holy day that involved coaxing warmth back into the world. The smoke twisted once around the window latch, seemed to hesitate, then slipped out into the air and vanished, as if it had gone to whisper instructions to the clouds.
She had lit the incense before sunrise. It was part of the old custom, though Y/N had long suspected that Aldara had invented at least half the old customs she taught and merely worn a grave expression until everyone believed her. This had been one of Aldara’s great talents. She could say, “It is the old way,” while holding a broom backward, and three grown witches would at once begin sweeping in the same direction.
Still, Y/N kept the customs. One did not stop doing a thing simply because it might once have begun as someone’s mischief. Many sacred things, she thought, had probably started that way.
So she had risen in the blue dark, shivering in her nightdress while the floorboards bit cold through the soles of her feet, and burned herbs at the window to coax the day along. She had whispered thanks to the sleeping fields, poured milk into a little clay bowl for the spirits beneath the elder hedge, and swept the threshold three times: once for winter leaving, once for spring arriving, and once because Shiloh had said there was still dirt by the door.
Outside, the bonfire pit waited in the meadow. Its ring of stones sat half sunk in frost, and old snow still lingered in the shaded places between them. Y/N had cleared the pit that morning with damp boots, cold fingers, and a determination that had lasted almost as long as her patience. Frozen leaves, dead stems, gray ash, half-melted slush, and one offended beetle had all been removed. The beetle, who had apparently considered the pit a respectable winter residence, objected by turning in circles and then departing under a leaf with the air of someone betrayed by civilization.
By nightfall, if the weather was kind and if Jin did not take charge in some dreadful decorative way, those stones would hold a fire tall enough to crack open the year and let the first rumor of spring come pouring through.
Inside the cottage, however, winter had already been defeated.
The little house had bloomed into the cheerful disorder that only holy days and beloved guests can excuse. The teal table had been dragged to the center of the room, where it stood looking enormous, stubborn, and important. Its scratched surface had been scrubbed until the old stains shone beneath the candlelight like a lake under moonwater. Cushions of every shape and questionable origin had been scattered over the floor. There were round cushions, square cushions, embroidered cushions, faded cushions, one cushion with a stitched hare on it, and one Y/N was fairly sure had once belonged to Hoseok and had been left behind during a rainstorm three winters ago.
Every shelf had been dusted. Every candle had been refreshed. The altar beneath the window had been scrubbed until the wood gleamed softly, and a new braid of sweetgrass had been tied at the base of the little goddess statue. The sweetgrass filled the room with a fresh green scent that stood bravely against the cold still hidden in the cottage walls. Small bowls of milk and honey sat among sprigs of rosemary, dried violets, and polished stones. White ribbons had been tied to the window latch. A little dish of salt waited near the door. The whole cottage seemed dressed not grandly, but lovingly, which is usually better.
Shiloh watched over all of this from the rafter beam.
The owl had recovered fully from what Y/N privately thought of as the Great Puppy Incident, though Shiloh herself preferred to call it an assault, a tragedy, and proof that young animals should be licensed. Her feathers had grown sleek again. Her dignity had returned to its usual alarming size. She had resumed her proper place as tyrant of the household.
“That cushion needs angling,” Shiloh said.
Y/N, kneeling beside the hearth with soot on her nose, moved the cushion half an inch.
Ignoring Shiloh only made Shiloh more dramatic, but Y/N had long ago decided that drama was part of the bird’s digestion and must be allowed to pass naturally.
The kitchen had been awake since eight o’clock, which was earlier than any decent kitchen ought to be asked to wake in February. Yet Imbolc demanded food, and food demanded labor, and labor demanded that Y/N mutter under her breath while tracking frost across the floorboards for the fourth time that morning. Pots simmered. Butter hissed around herbs in a little iron pan. Steam rose against the windows and blurred the meadow beyond into a dream of silver, brown, and pale gold.
The table had filled by degrees with dishes, jars, bowls, bundles, and little plates of things that looked like offerings but were, for the most part, supper. Now, with the worst of the cooking finished, Y/N stood at the sink with her sleeves shoved past her elbows, rinsing the last of the bowls. Steam curled around her face and turned her cheeks pink. Her cold nose had gone shiny at the tip. Wisps of hair had escaped their pins and clung damply to her temples. Her apron, which had been clean at sunrise, now bore flour, soot, herb dust, one streak of honey, and a green smear she could not identify and had decided not to think about.
A wilted violet petal, which had somehow attached itself to her sleeve in the morning and refused to be removed by shaking, brushing, or insult, chose that moment to give up its long struggle and drop into the dishwater.
Plop.
Y/N stared at it. “Really? Now?”
From the rafters came Shiloh’s voice, smooth with satisfaction. “Darling, if I plucked every stray flower you dragged into this house, there would be nothing left for your table, your altar, your pockets, or your hair.”
Y/N muttered something uncomplimentary about owls and turned back to the dishes.
The cottage smelled like the holiday itself. There was the sharp green bite of foraged winter leaves, the warm butteriness of eggs, the deep brown comfort of mushrooms, the sweetness of rose and rice, the smoke of the hearth, and beneath it all the colder smell of the world outside waiting to thaw. Every counter had been claimed. On one side stood a great bowl of winter greens: dandelion, violet leaf, garlic mustard, chickweed, and the arugula and butter lettuce Jin had brought days before with a flourish, as though he had personally persuaded them to grow.
Beside it waited a golden frittata made with Thelma’s eggs, still warm enough to fog the plate beneath it. A platter of ramps and dame’s rocket cooled near the window, sharp and clean as the first water running under ice. Oyster mushrooms, fiddleheads, and herbs gathered in earthy little heaps, some dried from the summer before and some brought by Yoongi only yesterday, wrapped in paper and tied with twine because Yoongi made even vegetables look properly behaved.
Dessert waited apart, as dessert often does, with the quiet confidence of something certain it would be loved. There was a chèvre cheesecake pale as melting snow, its top glossed with honey and sugared thyme, and beside it a rose rice pudding for Wendy, its petals floating on the surface like little pink boats.
But Y/N’s eyes kept straying toward the pantry.
She did not want them to. There were many other things to look at: the polished plates, the newly arranged candles, the sweetgrass braid, the little goddess statue, the meadow beyond the window where the light had begun to lean toward evening. But again and again her gaze slipped to the pantry door.
Behind it, on the middle shelf, sat the hen.
It was already cleaned, already spelled, already preserved under one of Jin’s tidy little charms. A perfectly respectable hen. A plump hen. A hen that, by every ordinary measure, was no longer anyone’s problem but the cook’s.
And yet Y/N did not want to roast it.
She had stood in front of it for nearly ten minutes that morning, arms folded, looking at it with the grim suspicion one might reserve for an enemy who had arrived in disguise. Jin’s voice had repeated in her memory, cheerful and sensible and entirely unhelpful.
It is already done, Y/N. You are honoring it by cooking it. Imbolc needs meat.
Perhaps Imbolc did need meat. Perhaps the old gods liked a table with something hearty at its center. Perhaps Jin was right. He often was, which made him unbearable. But every time Y/N looked at the hen, something in her tightened. It was not disgust exactly. Nor fear. It was simply the feeling that she and the hen had reached an understanding, and the understanding was that they would not be dealing with one another today.
Roasting it herself was out of the question. That felt like challenging the holiday to burst into flames.
At last she had shut the pantry door and whispered, “Nope. Not dealing with that.”
Cordelia always brought fish anyway. Sleek winter trout, usually, silver as frost and smelling of the deep cold places under running water. The wolves would swarm it. Jin would praise it extravagantly. Hoseok, if he came, would complain about bones while eating more than anyone. Taehyung would get a bone stuck in his teeth and pretend he had not. Tradition already had meat enough.
The hen could wait.
Perhaps she would quietly give it to Cordelia later and pretend that had been the plan all along.
Y/N rinsed the last clay bowl, set it in the drying rack, and watched water slide in thin, shimmering trails down her arms. When she flicked her hands dry, droplets scattered into the winter sunlight and flashed like sparks.
“There,” she sighed. “That is the last of it.”
Shiloh hopped down from the rafter with the ceremony of a queen descending into a court she found disappointing but necessary.
For a moment, the cottage settled. Even Shiloh’s feathers flattened into something less theatrical. The fire ticked softly in the hearth. The incense curled upward in a slow blue thread. Outside, the meadow paused in the light, as if holding its breath for evening.
Y/N smoothed her palms over her apron and felt warmth lingering in the fabric. For the first time that day, she allowed herself to stand still and look at what she had made.
The cottage was ready.
Not perfect, of course. Nothing in Y/N’s cottage had ever been perfect and would probably have resented the accusation. But it was warm. It was bright. It smelled of food, herbs, smoke, and hope. It held enough cushions for sore knees, enough chairs for proud backs, enough candles for spirits, and enough food for friends who always claimed they would not eat much and then proved themselves liars.
Imbolc braided people together whether they intended it or not. Y/N often forgot, in the quiet months, where she ended and her strange patchwork of companions began. But on days like this, with the table set and the house waiting, she remembered.
The door opened without a knock.
Yoongi slipped inside the way snow falls: quietly, unassumingly, and somehow already belonging to the place where it lands. He wore soft layers the colors of dusk, river stones, and winter bark. His dark hair was tied loosely at the nape of his neck, though a few strands had escaped and lay across his cheekbones like raven feathers. In his hands he carried a woven basket, and from beneath its linen cover rose a thin curl of steam.
“You brought food,” Y/N said, wiping her hands on her apron as she crossed the room.
Yoongi looked around the cottage once, taking in the table, the cushions, the candles, the absurd number of bowls, and perhaps also the faint desperation in Y/N’s expression.
“We’re the only ones here who don’t eat meat,” he said. “I was being practical.”
“You know I made six dishes already.”
Yoongi set the basket on the teal table with a soft thump. “Arriving empty-handed felt rude.”
His voice was dry as winter wood. His expression, as always, seemed determined not to reveal anything as unruly as affection. But one corner of his mouth moved just enough to betray him.
Y/N leaned over the basket and sniffed dramatically. “Is it cabbage?”
Yoongi gave her a look so flat she nearly laughed.
“No.”
She drooped. “Tragic.”
Then he lifted the linen.
Warmth rose out in a fragrant cloud: roasted carrot, red pepper, garlic, earth, sweetness, and the deep, rich heat of gochujang. It smelled like something that had simmered all morning in a patient pot while snow thought better of falling outside.
“Gochujang and roasted carrot stew,” Yoongi said.
Y/N inhaled as if he had opened a door into paradise. “Oh. That is better.”
The ghost of a smile returned.
He nudged the basket toward her. “Don’t eat it all before everyone else arrives.”
“No promises.”
“Y/N.”
His tone sharpened in the familiar way, like a twig snapping under a boot. It was not a loud rebuke. Yoongi’s scolding was almost always quiet, which somehow made it worse.
She grinned. “Fine. Half.”
“Y/N.”
“It’s Imbolc. Rules don’t apply on Imbolc.”
“They do if you want me to keep sharing.”
She groaned with theatrical suffering, then held out her smallest finger. Yoongi hooked his through it without hesitation. Their fingers touched only briefly, but the touch was warm and ordinary and honest in a way that made Y/N’s heart do something foolish behind her ribs.
“Half,” she conceded.
“Reasonable,” he said.
Then he kicked off his boots near the door, leaving faint specks of thawed mud behind him, and wandered farther into the cottage as though he had always known exactly where to stand.
The door flew open again.
It did not simply open. It announced defeat. It struck the wall with such vigor that a hanging bundle of thyme trembled in alarm, and Jin swept into the cottage like a comet that had become convinced the whole sky existed for its entrance.
His cloak was an outrageous sweep of shimmering gold. It billowed behind him though there was not nearly enough wind indoors to justify it, which meant either he had enchanted it or the cloak had learned vanity from its owner. Even the weak February light seemed to follow him in, brightening at his shoulders and catching in his hair.
“Y/N!” he cried, striding forward with the confidence of a man certain that his arrival had improved the weather. “Tell me you missed me.”
“Moderately,” Y/N said, straightening a stack of plates without looking up.
Jin gasped.
It was not an ordinary gasp. It was the gasp of a prince betrayed, a poet wounded, and a swan informed it was merely a goose.
“You wound me.”
“You’ll live.”
“Will I?” He pressed a hand to his chest and staggered. “Will I truly?”
Before she could move out of range, he swept her into an extravagant embrace and lifted her clean off the floor.
“Jin!” she hissed, laughing despite herself. “Put me down.”
He set her down with a flourish, as though presenting her to an invisible audience.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“For what?”
“For blessing your dreary little cottage with my extraordinary presence.”
“Jin,” she said, rubbing her temple, “it is Imbolc. Please try to behave.”
“I am behaving.” He looked offended by the suggestion otherwise. “Look.”
He swung a small wooden container from the basket on his shoulder and opened it with a flourish worthy of a stage magician producing doves.
“I brought scones.”
Inside sat a neat row of pastries, each one perfectly shaped, their tops brushed with butter and sprinkled with herb sugar. The crystals caught the winter sunlight and glittered like frost that had decided to become delicious. A warm savory scent rose from them: bread, basil, spinach, parsley, and something bright and green that did not belong in February but had somehow been persuaded to attend.
“They have basil, spinach, and parsley,” Jin said reverently, as if naming royal heirs.
Y/N leaned in. “They smell wonderful.”
He preened. Truly preened. His spine straightened. His chin lifted. One hand smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from his cloak. If he had possessed tail feathers, they would have opened.
From above, Shiloh made a dry, pointed sound.
“Absolutely a peacock.”
Jin’s head snapped upward. “I heard that.”
“You were meant to,” Shiloh replied.
He pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Even the birds disrespect me.”
“Especially the birds,” Y/N said, patting his arm.
He sighed as though his burdens were ancient and undeserved. But his mouth softened at the corners, and Y/N knew him well enough to see that he was glad to be there. His happiness showed not in quiet, like Yoongi’s, but in light. He seemed to bring it with him, trailing warmth, noise, and ridiculousness in his wake. He moved around the cottage comfortably, adjusting things she had already arranged, setting his scones beside Yoongi’s stew and nudging the container two inches to the left until it sat perfectly aligned.
A shaft of afternoon sunlight caught in his hair and made him look briefly less like a person and more like a rumor about summer.
“All right,” he declared, surveying the table. “Where is the rest of it? I came ready to be dazzled.”
“You say that every year.”
“And every year,” he said solemnly, “I am.”
She tried to hide her smile and failed.
Jin’s eyes slid toward Yoongi, who had taken it upon himself to alphabetize her spice jars, though no one had asked him and no one but Yoongi had ever believed spices needed governance.
“And Yoongi,” Jin said, “for someone who avoids people, you certainly enjoy feeding them.”
Yoongi did not turn around. He moved a jar of marjoram to the left of mint.
“I like feeding her,” he said.
The cottage went very still around Y/N.
Heat rose up her neck so quickly she wondered whether she had leaned too close to the hearth.
Jin blinked. Then he pointed at Yoongi with the solemn delight of a man witnessing history.
Yoongi shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
Jin looked between them with the expression of someone preparing to become unbearable. Y/N could practically see the speech forming behind his eyes, but something about the gentle quiet of the room, or perhaps the look Yoongi gave him without turning his head, softened the worst of it.
Jin settled for patting Y/N on the shoulder. “Someone get Y/N a chair. She’s about to faint.”
“Certainly. Your face is simply celebrating Imbolc.”
Y/N snatched a bowl and pretended to be very busy with it.
Jin, mercifully, wandered toward the porch and paused to encourage the flowers near the threshold. There were daisies there, absurdly early daisies, peering up through the cold as if they had misunderstood the calendar. Jin bent over them and whispered praise in a voice usually reserved for frightened children and dramatic horses.
Y/N reorganized a stack of bowls that did not need reorganizing and waited for her heartbeat to stop behaving like a trapped sparrow.
It did not.
Then a cool breeze drifted in from the west, tinged with brine and distance. It smelled faintly of sea foam riding beneath the first thaw, and Y/N knew at once what it meant.
Ocean witches.
The grasses beyond the gate rippled in a long shiver, brown at the tips but green at the roots, confused by the mild spell warming the day. Through them came three figures, walking with the steady grace of people who had learned from tides rather than roads.
Cordelia led. She was tall and grounded, dependable in the way a lighthouse is dependable: not soft, exactly, but built to remain when weather lost its temper. Her ginger braids were threaded with shells and opals that clicked faintly as she walked. Winter light skimmed across the pale coral woven through her hair, and the hem of her cloak moved about her ankles as though it had not quite forgotten waves.
Darya came behind her, quick-eyed and quick-moving, with dark hair glinting like stormwater beneath a pale sun. The breeze curled around her ankles as though waiting for instruction. She had the look of a person who noticed everything, trusted very little, and enjoyed herself most when both those things proved useful.
Between them walked a girl Y/N had never seen before.
She could not have been more than eleven. She carried a satchel nearly half her own size, which bulged with the mysterious confidence of bags owned by children. Her eyes were wide. Her steps were light and eager, almost skipping, though she tried very hard not to. Curiosity came off her like heat from a hearth.
Before Cordelia could reach the gate, the girl broke into a run.
“Bridd?” she called breathlessly.
Y/N stepped forward, already smiling. “You must be Belinay.”
The girl nodded so hard her braids bounced. She stopped a few feet away and looked up at Y/N with such reverent astonishment that Y/N had the sudden and uncomfortable sensation of having been mistaken for a monument.
“I wanted to see if you were real,” Belinay said. “Mama says the Bridd is as old as the forest.”
Behind Y/N, Yoongi’s voice drifted dryly from the cottage. “She’s been here longer than Northorn has been a colony.”
Y/N elbowed him sharply without looking back.
“Ow,” Yoongi said, though without surprise.
“I am not that old,” Y/N told the girl.
Belinay’s mouth fell open, as though this information had raised more questions than it answered.
Cordelia reached them then and took Y/N’s hands in both of hers. Her palms were cool and steady, smelling faintly of salt, rope, and winter wind.
“Thank you for having us, Snatcher,” she said warmly. “She’s been begging to meet you for months.”
“I haven’t!” Belinay squeaked. “Only weeks.”
Darya snorted. “You built a shrine.”
Belinay turned scarlet. “It was not a shrine.”
Y/N laughed, and the sound went up into the cold air like a little bell.
“Shrine or no shrine, I am very glad you came.”
Belinay beamed so brightly that she looked as if she had smuggled in a piece of the sun.
After that the cottage filled quickly, the way summer rain fills a dry ditch: softly at first, then all at once. Voices entered. Boots came off. Cloaks were hung. Cold hands reached toward the fire. The air thickened with laughter, movement, and the particular kind of chaos that turns a house into a home.
The mismatched chairs were claimed at once. Jin dropped into the star-painted chair with the triumph of a monarch claiming a throne he believed had been waiting for him since the dawn of time.
“This one,” he said, leaning back, “is appropriate for someone of my radiance.”
“You mean your ego,” Y/N said.
“Same thing.”
Darya examined the remaining chairs as if they were suspects in a crime. At last she chose the scorched one near the wall, the chair marked by a crescent burn from a charm that had misfired years before. She traced the blackened edge with one finger and nodded, as though the wood had confessed and she approved of its honesty.
Yoongi unpacked his basket with the quiet precision of a winter ritual. Jars lined themselves into neat rows beneath his hands. The stew pot settled into the center of the table as though it had always been meant to be there and every other dish had simply been waiting to arrange itself around it.
Cordelia moved through the cottage with a slow, tide-like curiosity. Her fingertips brushed the shelves, the jars of dried herbs, the feather charms, the polished stones, the old trinkets, the carved spoons, and the little oddities Y/N had gathered over the years because no one else wanted them and she could not bear to let them feel unwanted.
“You keep entire worlds in here,” Cordelia murmured.
Y/N glanced around, suddenly shy. “I suppose I do.”
Belinay walked through the cottage as if she had stepped into a story and feared that touching anything might wake it. She stared at charms, talismans, jars, candles, and bones with her breath held. Twice she reached out one finger and then snatched it back, looking horrified by her own boldness.
It became painful to watch.
“You may touch things,” Y/N said gently.
Belinay froze. “Really?”
“As long as you don’t drink anything that glows.”
“I won’t drink anything at all,” Belinay vowed.
Across the room, Jin tapped his chin. “I might drink something glowing.”
“Shut up, Jin,” Yoongi said, without looking up from a row of jars.
Y/N hid a smile behind her hand.
Their familiar rhythms settled into the cottage like warmth returning to chilled bones. She had not realized how quiet the winter had been until now, with laughter loosening the silence from the rafters. Someone opened a window a little wider, and a mild February breeze slipped in, carrying damp earth and cold grass. It wove through the smells of bread, mint, stew, incense, and sweet herbs until the whole cottage seemed to breathe like a living thing.
Cordelia set a small wooden crate beside the stew.
“We brought fish,” she said. “But Mel is carrying it up.”
“That sounds like Mel,” Y/N said.
Mel was always last. His timing was tidal, which meant it was dependable only in the broadest possible sense. He was never gone for good, never exactly on time, and never entirely predictable.
“Hopefully with actual fish,” Darya said. “And not another jar of sea foam.”
Jin gasped. “He’d better hurry. Imbolc waits for no one.”
“Mel waits for everyone,” Yoongi said.
Cordelia sighed. “He’s close.”
Y/N looked around the cottage and felt something inside her ease. It had been too quiet here for too long. After Aldara’s passing, silence had settled into the walls like dust. There had been days when Y/N could hear every tick of the cooling stove, every scrape of branch against window, every small absence. But now the house had filled. The chairs creaked. The fire crackled. Shiloh insulted people from above. Belinay whispered questions. Jin praised himself. Yoongi pretended not to smile. Darya argued with a spoon. Cordelia moved gently among all of it.
The cottage had a pulse again.
Hosting, once Y/N surrendered to it, came as naturally as breathing. Her apron sat crooked. Her hair had escaped almost entirely from its knot. She wielded a wooden spoon like some benevolent kitchen deity who had misplaced her crown but not her authority. Somehow, through motion and instinct and the mercy of the gods, it all worked.
She ladled Yoongi’s roasted carrot stew into clay bowls. She tucked fresh herbs onto the frittata. She slid the platter of wild greens within reach of even the laziest hands. She cut the cheesecake into careful slices and threatened Jin with a fork when he tried to steal a corner too early.
From her scorched chair, Darya lifted a forkful of salad. “What’s in this?”
“That depends,” Y/N said. “If your tongue goes numb, that’s garlic mustard. If it tastes like flowers, those are violets.”
Darya chewed thoughtfully. “I like the buzzing.”
“That is not a word I want associated with my salad.”
Jin, eating one of his own scones with the solemn concentration of a judge at a contest, nodded once.
“You’ve outdone yourself, Y/N,” he said. “I did not know ramps could shine.”
Yoongi snorted. “What are you now? A food critic?”
Y/N placed a bowl in front of Belinay, who stared down at the colorful greens and petals as though she had been handed an enchanted relic. Cordelia took her bowl last and gave Y/N a quiet, grateful look.
“We’ll help clean later,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”
Y/N waved her off, though the idea of extra hands washing dishes made her want to sink into the nearest pile of cushions and never rise again.
Then the front door burst open on a gust of salty wind.
“Bel! Darya! I come bearing gifts!”
Melvin stumbled inside like a ship docking badly. He carried an enormous fish across both arms, its silver body gleaming beneath the cottage light. A strand of seaweed clung to his sleeve. His boots were muddy. His hair looked as though the wind had tried to steal it and lost.
“Caught it myself,” he announced. “Mostly. A seal helped. That is irrelevant.”
Cordelia groaned. “Melvin. You tracked sand into the house.”
“Sand,” Mel said proudly, marching toward the kitchen, “is the seasoning of the sea.”
Y/N hurried after him, half laughing and half horrified. “Just don’t blow anything up.”
“Explosions are for Yule,” Mel said breezily, already rolling up his sleeves. “This is Imbolc. It would be out of season.”
The fish landed on her counter with a heavy, reverent thud, rattling a row of jars and sending a puff of dried herb dust into the air. Mel stood over it as solemnly as a priest before an altar. Before Y/N could object, he had taken command of her kitchen.
This was what Mel did. Some people asked permission. Mel entered, declared himself useful, and somehow became so before anyone could stop him. He seized knives, spoons, herbs, bowls of spices, oil, salt, and one little jar Y/N was nearly certain he had no business touching. The pan went onto the stove. Oil hissed the instant it touched iron, snapping and spitting like applause. The fish followed with a slap of skin against heat, and at once the cottage filled with the smell of brine, crisping flesh, herbs, and sea-magic.
It smelled like Imbolc turning its face toward spring. Like cold water running free under ice. Like February forgetting itself for one glorious hour.
Y/N leaned in the doorway, arms folded.
“Should I help?” she asked, though her voice already regretted it.
“No,” Mel said grandly. “But you may admire me if moved.”
“Please clean everything afterward. Thoroughly. I don’t like animals leaving anything behind on my dishes. If I taste even a hint of something leftover, I’ll hex you into next year.”
Mel froze with the solemnity of a knight receiving sacred law.
“You have my word, Bridd.”
The pan answered with a loud sizzle. Mel tossed in rosemary, and the leaves snapped like tiny sparks. Then he splashed in a pale green liquid from a bottle so strange-looking that Y/N straightened at once.
“What is that?”
“Ocean wine,” Mel said.
“That is not a thing.”
From the table, Cordelia called, “Of course it is.”
Y/N looked at her.
Cordelia was completely serious.
“We lower bottles into the sea and let them ferment underwater,” she explained. “Look at the barnacles.”
Y/N stared at the bottle. It was crusted with barnacles, salt, and a clump of seaweed that seemed deeply committed to remaining attached.
“So,” Y/N said slowly, “it is normal wine soaked in salt water, mold, and ocean debris.”
Darya nodded. “For at least a year.”
Yoongi, still arranging a few of her spice jars into some private system of justice, asked, “Does it taste different?”
“Not at all,” Cordelia said. “But it looks pretty.”
For a heartbeat, no one spoke. Then laughter rolled through the cottage.
It rose and spread, warm and bright, catching one person and then another. Jin began reenacting an old battle with a goose, complete with flapping arms and deeply offensive honking. Darya tormented Yoongi about his need to organize everything within reach. Belinay tugged on Cordelia’s sleeve and asked whether she could grow up to be both a witch and a fisher. Yoongi pretended not to listen, which meant he was listening to every word.
Y/N stood in the kitchen doorway and let herself watch.
Her home was loud. Her home was full. Her home smelled of herbs and smoke and fish and bread and the faint wild promise of thaw. For months after Aldara died, the cottage had seemed to hold its breath. Tonight, it breathed again.
Mel lifted the fish from the pan at last and set it on a platter with dramatic reverence.
“Feast,” he declared.
The reaction was immediate. Cheers burst through the cottage like sparks catching dry tinder. Belinay squealed. Jin applauded with the lavish elegance of a nobleman attending an opera. Yoongi gave one decisive nod, which from him was practically a standing ovation. Darya simply armed herself with a fork and prepared for battle.
They crowded around the teal table in a happy scatter of elbows, bowls, chairs, cushions, and passing hands. Plates scraped. Bread traveled in the wrong direction and caused a minor crisis. Someone spilled wine. Someone else knocked over a bowl of violets, and Belinay somehow managed to paint a streak of gochujang across her nose without noticing. Y/N’s frittata disappeared almost as soon as it was cut. Yoongi’s stew was scraped clean with alarming speed. Mel’s fish drew murmurs so reverent that Jin accused everyone of worshiping dinner, then immediately took another bite and joined them.
Outside, the sun dipped low over the meadow. The brittle winter grasses turned bronze. The first smoke from the bonfire pit began to drift upward, thin and blue against the dimming sky. The air was still cool enough to belong to February, but beneath it ran something softer. Something waiting. Something alive.
Imbolc pressed close around the cottage, not grandly, not with trumpets or signs, but with the quiet blessing of a year beginning to turn.
Y/N sat among her friends, her strange beloved patchwork of people, and listened to them laugh over her table.
It was not perfect. The floor was dirty. The kitchen was a disaster. Jin was still talking about the goose. Shiloh had stolen a corner of scone and was pretending she had not. The hen remained uncooked in the pantry, and Y/N would have to decide what to do with it eventually.
But not yet.
For now, the fire was warm. The table was full. The cottage was alive.
And it was a good day.
A very good day.
Dawn had sent only one thin messenger before it: a pale seam of gold trembling low in the east, where the black edge of the world was beginning, very unwillingly, to loosen. All Bangtan Forest lay under that deep winter hush which belongs only to evergreen woods after snow. The pines and firs stood tall and dark against the paling sky, their boughs bent beneath white burdens, while the spruce needles glittered with frost as if some patient hand had threaded them with splinters of glass. The earth below was neither green nor brown nor even properly earth at all, but a hidden thing, tucked beneath old drifts and crusted silver-blue wherever the night wind had hardened the snow.
Mist lingered low between the trees. It was not the kind mist of spring, rising from warm ground and making the world seem secret and forgiving, but a colder, thinner thing: winter’s breath caught among roots and hollows, curling along fallen logs like pale smoke. Spiderwebs abandoned in the elbows of bark and bramble had gone stiff with rime. Somewhere out of sight the river whispered under a skin of ice, its voice small and muffled, like a song sung through clenched teeth. In the darkest places, where morning had not yet dared to enter, faint rings of blue-green mushrooms shone beneath the fallen timber, their ghostly light made stranger by the snow around them.
It was the hour Y/N loved best.
She loved the forest before it woke. Bangtan seemed most itself then, before the pack stirred in Foxglove, before cottage chimneys began to smoke in earnest, before squirrels resumed their noisy arguments and the thin winter birds lifted their brave, sharp songs into the cold. The world seemed balanced between sleeping and waking, as though one soft word might tip it either way. Trees remembered old things then. Snow listened. Even the air appeared to hold still.
Her wings should have cut through that blue-gray silence as easily as ink drawn across parchment.
On any other morning, flying would have been as natural to her as breathing. She would have felt the wind gather beneath her, a living hand under each wing, and she would have risen over the snow-laden pines with frost catching at her feathers, and some secret joy brightening in her breast. The cold could be cruel, certainly, but from above it was also beautiful. The world became simple from that height: white fields, dark woods, silver water, smoke unwinding from chimneys, everything lying under winter’s spell.
But this morning the air did not hold her.
This morning something had gone wrong.
She knew it before she could name it.
It had begun behind her eyes, a deep, throbbing ache that beat steadily against the inside of her skull. It was not ordinary pain. Ordinary pain had borders. This seemed to have none. It pressed outward as if her very thoughts had turned to stone and were now too heavy for her head to carry. After that came weariness: not the honest tiredness that followed work well done, not the pleasant heaviness after a long walk and a warm meal, but something strange and stealing, seeping into her bones like meltwater through cracked stone.
Her wings beat unevenly.
They trembled at the end of each stroke, and the air, instead of lifting her, resisted her.
Y/N blinked hard.
The forest blurred.
Below her, the treetops tilted, swung wide, and then righted themselves again. A blade of new sunlight struck ice on the branches and shattered into a hundred cruel sparks. Pain flashed through her head so fiercely that, for one terrible instant, she forgot the very shape of flying.
Her left wing dipped.
She caught herself, but only just.
Get home.
The words did not leave her beak. In this shape, speech lived mostly in thought, and even thought had gone thin and frayed, like cloth worn nearly through. She forced her wings to spread, caught a cold current, and rode it with the desperate care of someone clinging to a rope above a ravine.
Too soon, she thought.
The shift was coming.
It should not have been. She knew the rhythms of her own magic as a sailor knows the tide. Shape-changing was not always painless, but it had its laws. There were warnings, intervals, the inward gathering of the body before it remembered another form. There should have been time to land. Time to draw breath and make herself ready.
Her feathers prickled along her skin. Her bones ached with a deep and unnatural heat. Warmth crawled up through her veins in sudden pulses, and then came cold so sharp and swift that her whole body shuddered. The magic holding her owl-shape together sparked and split. It no longer moved through her as a clean, living thread, but snagged and tore like yarn dragged through a broken needle.
The forest pitched beneath her. Pines became dark spears. Snow became glare. The pale dawn widened, narrowed, widened again, as if the whole world were struggling for breath.
Then, between the trees, she saw the cottage.
At first it seemed only another pale shape among the drifts, a trick of snow and longing. Then the roof appeared beneath its thick cap of white, and the crooked chimney rose against the brightening sky, breathing one frail ribbon of smoke into the cold. The meadow opened before it, smooth and untouched except where the wind had carved shallow blue shadows. The garden lay buried beyond the little gate, only the woody tops of rosemary and thyme showing through the snow in stiff, frozen sprigs.
Relief came to her, though weakly, like a candle nearly burned to nothing.
Almost there.
She angled downward.
The descent should have been graceful. Y/N had landed in storms, between branches, upon narrow stones, and once, long ago, on the shoulder of a startled giant who had been too courteous to mention the inconvenience. But now the clearing rushed toward her too quickly. The snow glittered and shifted below her, every point of ice too bright, too sharp. The cottage roof seemed to lurch. The garden wall slid strangely sideways. The world had become unreliable.
Her claws struck earth and skidded over frozen grass hidden under powder. She stumbled, wings flung wide, and half-collapsed among the buried garden beds, scattering loose snow from the rosemary stems. Pain pulsed through her head in great black waves. Her vision narrowed, the edges of it darkening, while gold streaks flickered before her like sparks from a dying fire.
She had seconds.
Perhaps fewer.
Y/N dragged herself toward the cottage door.
Feathers came loose behind her. They did not fall prettily. They shed in a ragged trail across the snow, dark and damp and wrong against all that white. Each step sent a tremor up her legs. The garden path had never been long before, but now it stretched before her like a road into another country. The door, which she had opened a thousand times without thought, stood at the end of it like the gate of a besieged castle.
Her talons scraped the threshold.
Then the shift seized her.
There was no grace in it. It struck like lightning through water.
Her body convulsed. Wings folded inward too fast, and bones twisted with a terrible, intimate certainty, remembering the wrong shape before finding the right one. Feathers dissolved into skin. Heat roared along her veins. Her spine arched. Her claws became hands, shaking and pale against the floorboards. The cottage air filled with the faint smell of singed magic, wild feathers, cold rain, and snow.
She fell forward through the doorway.
Her knees struck the wooden floor with a crack that made her gasp. One hand caught the doorframe, the other curled helplessly against the boards. For a moment, her sight broke into pieces: black, gold, pinewood, snowlight, shadow. Then the pain loosened all at once, leaving her hollowed, human, and shaking.
When it was over, Y/N lay naked just inside the cottage door, drenched in cold sweat.
The air touched her skin like winter water. Her breath came in ragged pulls, each one scraping her throat raw. She tried to rise, because some stubborn part of her believed that standing upright would prove she was well, but her legs betrayed her. They buckled beneath her, useless as wet cloth.
“Not good,” she muttered.
Her voice was thin and rough, scarcely more than a breath.
“Not…”
Her hand slipped. She caught herself again, cheek nearly pressed to the floorboards. The pine beneath her smelled faintly of smoke, lavender, and old spilled tea. Ordinarily that smell would have comforted her. Now even comfort seemed to be standing on the far side of a river she could not cross.
She tried to crawl.
It was absurdly difficult. Her limbs felt separate from her, heavy and disobedient, as though someone had tied stones to them while she slept. Her magic, usually bright and living beneath her skin, had dimmed to ragged threads. Each movement seemed to drag those threads across broken glass.
“Y/N?”
The voice came from above.
A flutter of wings followed, then a clumsy thud as Shiloh landed on the back of a chair with none of her usual dignity. The little owl’s amber eyes were wide and bright with alarm.
“What happened?”
Y/N squinted up at her. The room swayed. Shiloh, the chair, the table, and the window all drifted apart from one another and then came together again.
“Shifted,” Y/N croaked. “Too early.”
Shiloh hopped down from the chair, her feathers puffing with distress. “Too early? What do you mean, too early?”
Y/N tried to laugh, but it came out as a dry, miserable rasp.
“Felt… strange.”
“Strange how?”
There was sharpness in the question, but no cruelty. Fear threaded every word. Y/N could hear it even through the feverish fog pressing at her skull. Shiloh could be grand, theatrical, and impossible when it suited her, but she did not turn truly sharp unless something had frightened her badly.
Y/N pressed a shaking hand to her forehead. Her skin burned beneath her fingers.
“Headache,” she managed. “Heavy. Air felt wrong. Couldn’t breathe right.”
Shiloh’s face changed. The irritation did not leave exactly, but it folded itself around something far more tender.
“I told you not to go far,” she said, and her voice was lower now. “There was sleet yesterday, and the frost came in hard before dawn. You know what that does to you.”
“Didn’t want,” Y/N whispered, “to fall out of the sky.”
Shiloh opened her beak, then closed it again.
For once, no scolding came.
The little owl only looked at her, and in that look were all the winter illnesses they had survived together: every fever that had taken too long to break, every cough that had settled in Y/N’s chest like an unwanted guest, every chill that had slipped into her bones and refused to leave. Shiloh knew better than anyone that Y/N did not get sick the way others did. A damp sleeve, a drafty window, one foolish night flight through sleet—any little thing that would have inconvenienced another witch could put Y/N in bed for days.
Y/N had a great deal of magic. That was the part people saw first. They saw the shifting, the old words, the healing hands, the green fire in her charms, the way wild creatures came to her door as if the trees themselves had whispered that she was safe. They saw the Bridd, and forgot there was a body beneath the title.
A body that chilled too quickly.
A body that burned too fast with fever.
A body that had always seemed a little too frail for the fierce spirit housed inside it.
At last Shiloh said, more softly, “You’re impossible.”
Y/N’s mouth twitched. “Only just noticing?”
“Don’t joke.” Shiloh hopped closer, trying very hard to sound stern and only half succeeding. “Not when you’re shaking like that.”
“I’ll be fine.”
The lie was so thin that even the cottage seemed embarrassed by it.
Y/N clawed herself forward another few inches. The bedroom was not far. It had never seemed far before. It was only across the cottage, through the little doorway beyond the hearth. Now it appeared as distant as another kingdom.
“Don’t you dare pass out here,” Shiloh warned, hopping after her. “You’ll freeze before I can get a blanket over you.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Y/N muttered.
“That is not comforting.”
Shiloh fluttered ahead into the bedroom, then back again, unable to decide whether she ought to lead, push, scold, or scream for help. Y/N reached the bed by sheer stubbornness and nothing more. She caught the rumpled blankets in both hands, dragged herself upward, and collapsed into the sheets.
The linen was cool, chamomile-scented, and soft as mercy.
She turned her face into the pillow and shivered.
“Gods,” Shiloh breathed, landing at the foot of the bed. Her voice had gone quiet. “You really do look terrible.”
“Thank you,” Y/N whispered.
“Should I get someone? Yoongi? Jin?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. She shook her head, and the room tipped so violently that she regretted it at once.
“No. They’ll worry.”
“They should worry.” Shiloh’s talons gripped the blanket. “That is rather the point of friends.”
“It’s just fatigue.”
“Fatigue doesn’t make your lips go pale.”
“It’ll pass.”
Shiloh stared at her. Y/N could feel the stare without opening her eyes.
“It will,” Y/N insisted, though the words were already blurring at the edges. “Just need to rest.”
Shiloh did not answer.
That silence was worse than any scolding.
The room tilted gently around Y/N. The walls softened. The faint embers in the hearth beyond the bedroom doorway cast a weak orange glow, flickering over the cottage walls like tired fireflies. Shiloh remained at the foot of the bed, feathers fluffed, talons curled into the blanket, caught between obedience and fear.
Y/N wanted to reassure her. She meant to say something sensible, something kind, something that would make the owl stop looking as if the world had cracked open beneath her feet.
But the words sank before she could catch them.
Her breathing thinned.
The light dissolved.
Sleep took her not like a blanket, but like water closing overhead.
Outside, morning finally arrived.
The first true sunlight crept over the snow and laid fragile gold across the bedroom floor. The forest did not burst into song. It woke thinly and reluctantly, as winter forests do. A few brave birds called from the pines. Ice ticked along the eaves. Snow slid softly from one evergreen branch to another. Somewhere beneath the white crust of the meadow, the buried grasses waited for a spring still many weeks away.
The world went on.
Inside, the Bridd lay still, her magic dimmed to a dull ember, waiting for some careful hand to coax it back to flame.
Shiloh did not wait long.
She had known fear before. Familiars always did. They lived tied to another soul, and love made every danger enormous. It made drafts seem like knives, coughs sound like omens, and foolish decisions feel like betrayals. But this was not a small danger casting a large shadow. The air in the cottage had changed. It had grown dense and strange, heavy in the way the world becomes just before a storm breaks. Y/N’s scent was sharp and fever-bright. Her pulse, when Shiloh pressed close enough to hear it, sounded too faint, too far away, too unlike itself.
Wrongness moved through the room in a way no sensible creature could ignore.
Shiloh watched her for another breath, then another, talons curled tight into the blanket at the foot of the bed. Y/N lay too still beneath the covers, her skin pale under the fever burning in her cheeks, her breaths shallow and uneven. It did not matter that she had said she only needed rest. It did not matter that she had forbidden Shiloh from fetching anyone. Y/N was terribly brave when she ought to be sensible, and terribly stubborn when she ought to be afraid, and Shiloh had long ago learned that loving her meant knowing when not to obey her.
“No,” the little owl murmured at last. “I am not letting you sleep this off.”
With a hard snap of her wings, she launched herself through the open window.
Cold morning air rushed to meet her. The meadow below lay buried in snow, smooth and pale except where the wind had carved blue hollows around the roots of trees. The sun had barely lifted over the treetops, but already its light stretched long across the clearing, turning frost to glass and icicles to thin knives of fire. Shiloh climbed higher, beating her wings hard through the bitter air.
From above, the world spread wide beneath her. There lay the dark sweep of Bangtan Forest, old and watchful, its evergreens bowing beneath their white burdens. There curled the river, half-hidden under ice and bright only where running water still broke through. Farther off, the rooftops of Bangtan village huddled beneath snow. Beyond them rose the soft shimmer of the solar coven’s hill, where Jin lived among warmth, bees, flowers under glass, and far too much self-satisfaction.
It was not a long flight.
That did not make Shiloh like it.
She hated leaving Y/N alone. She hated the weight of the decision, the memory of that shallow breathing behind her, the knowledge that Y/N’s body could fall badly ill from things other people shrugged off. Worst of all, she hated that she was flying to Jin while frightened enough to need him.
Of all the witches in the forest, she thought bitterly, it would have to be the one who will never let me forget this.
Jin’s cottage appeared with the first full spill of sunlight, and even in midwinter, even beneath snow, it could belong to no one else. Golden wards shimmered around it in a soft halo, humming with warmth and light. They had melted the snow from the path and roof, leaving the cottage tucked inside a strange little pocket of false spring. The garden itself was mostly asleep, but not wholly. Glass cloches, charm-warmed frames, and low domes of golden light covered the beds, and beneath them early blossoms nodded drowsily, coaxed open by solar magic rather than season. Vines that were bare and brown outside the wards curled green along the window nearest his workroom.
Then she saw the bees.
Not the wild abundance of summer, thank the gods, but enough to make her sigh with deep personal fatigue. A few dozen drifted lazily through the warmth beneath the eaves, slow and drowsy, their hum softer than it would be in warmer months. Jin’s wards had tempted them from sleep. They moved like living flecks of sunlight, utterly unconcerned by the fact that February still owned the rest of the forest.
Shiloh’s feathers puffed.
The bees ignored her, which was both polite and suspicious. The last time she had visited, one had landed on her beak and refused to leave until Jin bribed it with honey, which Shiloh still considered a betrayal from both parties.
She landed on the doorknob, breathless, and hammered her talons against the wood.
“Jin!” she shouted. “Wake up. It’s urgent.”
Nothing.
She knocked harder.
“Seokjin! Open the door before I do something we shall both regret.”
A faint rustling came from inside. Then a groan followed, long and lazy and so offended by morning that Shiloh might have laughed if fear had not lodged so tightly in her chest.
“It is dawn,” Jin’s voice complained from somewhere within. “The day has not even properly begun. Go home.”
“Y/N is sick.”
Silence.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Then something crashed.
The door flew open.
Jin stood there in a half-tied robe, his hair loose around his shoulders in a tangle of sleep-warmed gold. Even bleary-eyed and barefoot, he had the indecency to look radiant. Sunlight clung to him through the doorway as if it had waited all night for the privilege.
He blinked at her.
“Shiloh?”
“She’s sick,” Shiloh said again, and this time the words came quieter. “Very sick. She collapsed after shifting. She can’t stand, and her breathing is wrong.”
All sleep vanished from his face.
There were some people who only seemed frivolous because joy sat close to the surface of them. Beneath Jin’s ridiculousness there was a steady thing, and it showed itself at once. His eyes sharpened. His shoulders squared. The sleepy, golden foolishness fell away from him like a cloak dropped on the floor.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough. She’s already beginning to sweat.”
Her voice hitched on the last word despite all her efforts, and she hated it. Hated him hearing it. Not because he would mock her. He would not. They had known each other too long for that. He had been a golden, loud, impossible boy once, tripping over his own feet in the solar gardens, and she had been the owl who scolded him from the fence post while secretly making sure he did not fall into the lily pond. She disliked him often. She loved him, in her irritated way, nearly as often.
And because he knew that, he did not tease her now.
Jin swore softly and ran a hand through his hair.
“All right. Give me a moment.”
He disappeared into the cottage.
At once, the house seemed to wake with him. Candles sparked to life. Shelves glimmered gold. Jars chimed and hummed as his magic stirred among them. Shiloh hopped anxiously on the threshold, listening to the clatter of vials, the snap of satchel buckles, and the low murmur of sunlight being drawn into ready hands.
Then came a sound she dreaded.
A deep, throaty woof.
From around the corner barreled Mannix. Jin’s beloved St. Bernard came bounding toward Shiloh in a glorious avalanche of fur, drool, affection, and terrible intentions. His tail wagged with such force that it seemed capable of rearranging the furniture.
Shiloh lifted off the doorknob with a startled flap.
“Mannix, no. Not today.”
Mannix barked once, delighted that she had addressed him personally.
“Sit!” Jin called from inside. “Mannix, sit.”
The dog skidded to a halt so abruptly his paws slid on the floor. He sat, tail thumping, gazing at Shiloh with adoring confusion.
“He’s too big,” Shiloh muttered, more out of habit than genuine complaint. “You know he is too big.”
“He only wants to say hello,” Jin said, striding back with a healer’s satchel over his shoulder. His robe was now tied, though still crooked.
“Can’t believe you let Wendy talk you into getting that beast,” Shiloh huffed.
Jin scratched Mannix behind one ear. “Guard the house. I’ll be back soon.”
Mannix gave a solemn, slobbery huff and settled by the doorway as if he had just been entrusted with the fate of kingdoms.
Shiloh fluttered onto Jin’s shoulder, gripping his robe with her talons. Beneath the fabric and skin, she could feel the hum of solar magic gathering itself, warm and steady and alive. It pulsed in him like a heartbeat made of sunlight.
“You’re flying us there?”
“It’s faster.”
“Try not to singe me.”
“Try not to dig holes in my shoulder.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she snapped.
His mouth softened.
Then he stepped into the morning, lifted one hand, and spoke a word in the old tongue.
The air thickened with gold.
Light wrapped around them, bright but gentle, weightless as breath. The garden, the drowsy bees, the cottage, and the snow-bright hill all blurred into streaks of color. Wind rushed past in a warm roar. For a moment, Shiloh could see nothing but radiance.
Then the world snapped back into shape.
They landed in Y/N’s meadow, soft-footed in the snow. Powder scattered around Jin’s boots in bright crystals. The air smelled of frozen mint, woodsmoke, pine resin, and the cold iron scent of deep winter. Ahead of them stood Y/N’s cottage, crouched between the trees beneath its snow-heavy roof, a thin curl of smoke rising from the chimney like a breath held too long and finally released.
“Inside,” Shiloh said.
Jin was moving before Shiloh had finished speaking.
There are some moments in life when all the little vanities and habits of a person fall away from him as leaves fall from a tree in a sudden frost, and what remains is the true shape of the thing beneath. Jin, who could be vain over the tilt of his hair, ridiculous over the cut of a sleeve, and insufferably pleased when sunlight touched his face at just the right angle, lost all of that in the space between one breath and the next. His expression sharpened. His shoulders squared. The laughter that usually lived so near his mouth disappeared, not because he had become cold, but because something steadier and older had risen in its place.
He went through Y/N’s cottage door without ceremony, bringing with him the faint scent of winter air, solar herbs, and the clean golden warmth that always seemed to cling to him, even on the grayest mornings. Shiloh followed in a flurry of anxious feathers, darting ahead and then circling back again, as though she could hurry him by sheer force of panic.
“In here,” she said, though Jin already knew. “She’s in here. She tried to pretend it was nothing, of course. She always does. As if pretending not to be dying has ever cured anyone.”
“She isn’t dying,” Jin said, but he said it in the careful voice of a healer who has not yet looked closely enough to promise anything.
Y/N’s bedroom was dim and close, warm near the hearth and cold near the window where the winter light pressed pale fingers against the glass. The curtains had not been drawn properly. One corner of them hung loose, allowing a narrow blade of morning to fall across the floorboards and touch the leg of the bed. Beyond the window, the forest stood white and blue and silent beneath its burden of snow. Inside, everything smelled of fever: hot skin, damp hair, herbs, old smoke, and the faint bitter edge of magic strained too thin.
Y/N lay half-hidden under the blankets, small in a way that felt wrong.
She was not, ordinarily, a person anyone thought of as small. There was too much wildness in her for that. Too much old power in her hands. Too much knowing in her gaze. Even when she was quiet, even when she sat with her knees tucked beneath her and a cup of tea cooling forgotten beside her, there was always the sense that she belonged partly to the forest and partly to something older than the forest. People looked at her and saw the Bridd. They saw the witch who mended wing-bones and spoke to stubborn roots, who could take feathers upon herself and ride the dawn winds over Bangtan as if she had been born from them.
But fever had a way of making even the mighty look young.
Her dark hair clung damply to her forehead and temples. Her skin was too pale in the dim room, save where fever had painted two hard spots of color high in her cheeks. Her lips had lost their warmth. Her breathing came shallow and uneven, each breath catching faintly in her chest before the next could find its way out. One hand lay above the blanket, fingers loosely curled, the nails faintly bluish from the cold she had carried home with her.
Concern flickered over Jin’s face. It was there and gone quickly, like the shadow of a bird crossing snow. His hands, however, remained calm.
That, more than anything, steadied Shiloh.
He knelt beside the bed and touched the back of his hand to Y/N’s forehead. The heat there made his mouth tighten.
“Fever,” he murmured. “High, but manageable.”
Shiloh clung to the bedpost. Her talons tapped an anxious little rhythm into the wood before she realized she was doing it and forced herself to stop. “How high is high?”
“High enough that I’m glad you came.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have until I examine her properly.” His voice was gentle, but firm enough to keep her from snapping at him again. “How long has she been like this?”
“Since sunrise. Maybe before.” Shiloh’s feathers ruffled and then settled again in quick, worried waves. “She came home from flying and collapsed inside the door. She said she felt strange.”
Jin opened his satchel. He did it with the swift competence of someone who had packed such bags in the dark, in storms, in kitchens crowded with weeping relatives, in barns, beside wells, and once or twice under circumstances no sensible person would have called safe. Little glass bottles clinked against one another. Dried herbs rustled in folded paper. A spoon, a roll of soft cloth, a stoppered vial of golden oil, and a small copper cup appeared on the bedside table one after another.
“Strange how?” he asked.
“Headache. Trouble breathing. Heavy, she said.” Shiloh paused, trying to remember every word, as though one misplaced syllable might be the thing that mattered. “She said the air felt wrong.”
Jin glanced toward the window, then back to Y/N. “She flew through sleet?”
“Last night, yes. And frost before dawn.” Shiloh’s voice tightened, thin with guilt and irritation tangled together. “I told her not to go far.”
“You did right coming for me.”
It was a simple thing to say. It should not have mattered as much as it did. Yet Shiloh’s feathers settled a little, and the hard knot in her chest loosened by the smallest measure. She had expected questions, perhaps reproach, perhaps one of Jin’s soft sighs that meant he thought everyone in the room was being foolish except him. She had not expected approval.
“I should have come sooner,” she muttered.
“You came when you knew she needed more than rest.”
“She needed more than rest the moment she crawled through the door looking like a plucked ghost.”
“Then you came soon enough.”
Shiloh looked away, but not before Jin saw the fear in her eyes.
He took out a small tin and opened it with his thumb. At once, the room filled with the soft scent of lemon balm and starflower, bright and tender against the feverish air. Beneath it was something else, something warmer and sunlit, like summer honey kept in a cupboard through winter.
Jin leaned closer and listened to Y/N’s breathing. Then he touched two fingers to the pulse below her jaw. His face did not change much, but Shiloh, who had known him since childhood and distrusted most of his expressions on principle, saw enough.
“What?” she demanded.
“It looks like a cold.”
“A cold?” Shiloh repeated, offended by the smallness of the word. “She nearly fell out of the sky.”
“A cold can be a very serious thing in the wrong body.”
“So it isn’t just fatigue.”
“No.” He looked at her then, and his voice was not frightening because he did not dress the truth up in false comfort. “It will likely take a few days to a week before she is properly herself again, but she should be fine.”
“Should be?”
“Will be, if she rests and takes what I give her.”
“You say that as though she has ever willingly done either.”
Jin gave the faintest smile, not enough to be cheerful, only enough to be familiar. “That is why you and I are here.”
He set to work mixing the tonic. He measured partly by sight, partly by scent, and partly by that old healer’s instinct which looks mysterious to everyone watching and perfectly ordinary to the person doing it. Into the copper cup went a pinch of pale dried petals, two drops of golden oil, a spoonful of dark syrup, and a thread of light drawn from his own fingertip. The light did not blaze. It sank into the mixture like dawn entering milk, turning it warm and faintly luminous.
The cottage seemed to hold its breath while he stirred.
“She’s always been like this,” Shiloh said suddenly.
Jin did not look up, but his hands slowed a fraction.
“People forget,” the little owl went on, the words gathering force as if she had carried them too long. “They see her working, and fixing things, and putting on that brave face of hers, and they think she must be well because she is useful. But she hasn’t been properly well since that wolf boy’s ceremony, and already she’s preparing for the Luna’s birthday at the end of March. Orders, charms, garlands, blessings, gods know what else. She’ll run herself into the ground because everyone asks and she hates saying no.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Jin said quietly.
“No,” Shiloh admitted after a moment. “You usually don’t.”
Then he slid one arm behind Y/N’s shoulders and lifted her gently. She stirred, barely. Her head lolled against him, her lashes trembling without opening, as if even that small journey from pillow to arm required more strength than she could spare.
“There now,” Jin murmured. “Just a little. You don’t have to wake.”
Y/N made a faint sound, too weak to be protest and too miserable to be speech.
“I know,” he said softly, as though she had spoken plainly. “I know. But you must swallow this.”
He tipped the tonic carefully to her lips.
For one dreadful heartbeat, nothing happened.
Shiloh’s claws dug into the bedpost.
Then Y/N swallowed by instinct. Once. Twice. A third time, weaker than the others, but enough.
Jin lowered her back against the pillow, and the tight line of his mouth eased by a little. He wiped a stray drop of tonic from the corner of her mouth with the edge of his sleeve and brushed damp hair away from her forehead.
“Aldara was similar, or so my mother always said,” he murmured. “A simple fever could keep her in bed for days.”
At the sound of that name, the room changed.
Not greatly. No candle flickered. No wind stirred. But memory is its own sort of ghost, and when Aldara entered a room, even by name alone, one felt the old floorboards remember her feet.
“Their magic lives close to the skin,” Jin continued. “That makes them powerful, but it wears the body thin. It is like keeping a bright lamp in a paper house.”
“I’m aware,” Shiloh sighed. “It is not unusual in her line. Aldara’s own familiar, Ragnarok, was always fretting after her before his trials. Of course, I got an even sicker girl. Just my luck. At this rate, I shall return as a cow in my next life and spend the whole of it standing in a field, chewing grass, swatting flies, and minding no one’s business but my own.”
His smile softened and faded as he turned back to Y/N. He laid two fingers near her temple, and a small glow gathered there: gold, quiet, and warm. It sank beneath her skin slowly, as sunlight sinks through thin curtains.
“Y/N’s immune system is weaker than Aldara’s was,” he said. “Winter has always been harder on her.”
Shiloh’s talons flexed around the bedpost. Outside, snow slid from the cottage roof with a soft, heavy sigh. The sound made both of them glance toward the window, though nothing else moved. The morning beyond the glass was brightening by degrees, pale and pitiless, beautiful in the way very cold things often are.
“All of us worry about her,” Jin said at last. “But we have to trust that the gods have some sort of plan.”
Shiloh looked at him for a long moment.
There had always been irritation between them, but it was the sort of irritation that had been polished smooth by years. Jin had been too bright as a child, too loud as a boy, and too pleased with his own reflection at every age. Shiloh had pecked him once for calling her adorable, twice for placing ribbons near her nest, and once, memorably, for singing outside Aldara’s window before breakfast. He had never fully forgiven her for that last one, though he had deserved it.
Still, he had brought medicine when Aldara died. He had sat outside Y/N’s cottage for hours during the first terrible fever after the funeral, not demanding to be let in, not making a performance of his concern, simply keeping the lamps warm and the snow melted from the path. He had never treated Y/N’s frailty as weakness. He had never mistaken her suffering for inconvenience.
That counted for something.
Shiloh released the bedpost and hopped onto the nightstand, where she began to pace in small, tight turns. Her claws clicked against the wood. Click, click, click. A tiny sound, but in that quiet room it seemed enormous.
“She can’t die,” Shiloh said.
Jin’s brow softened. “Because of your trial?”
She stopped at once and looked at him sharply.
“I’m not saying it as an accusation,” he said. “I know being human again is your great hope.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t care.” Her feathers lifted, making her seem larger than she was. “Her happiness and well-being are my priority. Keeping her safe may help my judgment, yes, but that is not why I do it. I know I am not always the easiest familiar. I know I am sharp, and proud, and occasionally unkind when frightened.”
Shiloh swallowed, and when she spoke again, the bite had gone out of her voice.
“I try very hard to keep my Bridd all right,” she said. “I love her very much.”
The words hung there, small and fierce.
Then, as though a door inside her had opened too far and could not be closed quickly enough, more words came after them.
“If she dies before judgment is cast, I’ll be stuck between worlds again.”
It began sharply, all beak and claw, as if she meant to make the confession unpleasant before anyone else could. But something broke in the middle of it. She turned her head away, feathers bristling, trying to hide the shake in her voice by making herself look larger.
“She is home,” Shiloh said, softer now. “My home. We have been together longer than you can imagine. In this life and in others before it.”
She looked toward Y/N.
There was something ancient in the little owl’s face then, something no mortal bird had any right to possess. For a moment, Jin could almost see the shadow of all she had once been and all she had lost: not merely a familiar, not merely a scolding owl with sharp opinions and sharper talons, but a soul stretched thin across judgments, lives, punishments, hopes, and love that refused to die properly.
“She is not allowed to simply…”
Her voice cracked.
“…die.”
Jin looked at her for a long moment. The jesting answer he might once have offered did not come. His expression gentled, and for once, the brightness of him did not irritate her. It warmed the room without asking to be admired.
“She won’t die, Shiloh,” he said. “I promise. This is serious, but it is treatable.”
“It doesn’t feel treatable.” Her wings flicked, restless and agitated. “It feels like the world has gone wrong.”
He lowered his gaze briefly to Y/N and checked her pulse again. “Her breathing is a little steadier.”
Shiloh paced to the edge of the nightstand and back again. Then she stopped, as though a thought had struck her with physical force.
“Bring Yoongi.”
Jin blinked. “Yoongi doesn’t heal anymore.”
“I know that.”
“Then why—”
“Because she loves him more than anyone else.” Shiloh looked toward Y/N, and all her sharpness softened into plain fear. “If he is here, she will rest easier. You and I both know it.”
Jin’s jaw shifted slightly.
It was a very small movement. Most people would have missed it. Shiloh did not.
Jin sighed. “Would you like me to fetch Cordelia while I am at it?”
“If she is near enough, I suppose. Sea magic might help balance the fever.” Shiloh considered this with visible reluctance, then made a sour little noise. “Can’t you get Wendy instead? Cordelia is a great deal at the best of times, and I am in no mood for her mouth.”
“Wendy is in Clarcton,” Jin said. “Her sister’s doing that whole suitor parade, remember? Half the coven went with them. They won’t be back for days.”
“Then just Yoongi.”
Jin exhaled slowly and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You are impossible.”
“Only when I’m right.”
The cottage stood quiet around them. Y/N breathed shallowly on the bed. Sunlight crept farther across the floor, thin and winter-pale, touching the woven rug, the leg of the nightstand, the scattered hem of the blanket. Shiloh, puffed and frightened and holding herself together by will alone, stared at the solar witch she had known since he was a vain golden child with scraped knees and too much confidence.
At last, Jin’s shoulders loosened.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll fetch him.”
“And don’t be rude to him.”
Jin gave her a tired look. “Shiloh.”
“No, I mean it.” Sternness returned to her at once, partly because she had won and partly because fear needed somewhere to go. “This whole business between you two is immature. You ought not let a girl get between you, especially when we both know he has no interest in her.”
Jin busied himself with closing the tin of herbs. “That is hardly the point.”
“It is entirely the point. If there were ever a girl that boy would marry, it would be the one in that bed, and even then I suspect she would have to propose with a sword pressed to his throat.”
“Shiloh.”
“And you truly think he and that pretty blond boy from Syrena were only friends?”
Jin said nothing.
It was not, for once, because he had no answer. It was because he had several, and none of them would improve the morning. So he chose instead to tighten the buckle on his satchel and let Shiloh’s words pass over him like sleet against a window.
If Yoongi had an interest in men, Jin thought, he would have said so himself.
And yet the thought did not settle cleanly.
For years, Jin had been very careful not to look too closely at certain things. That was one of the many talents pride gave a person. Pride could turn a memory aside before it stung. Pride could make loneliness seem dignified. Pride could convince a man that he was injured when he was only embarrassed, abandoned when he had merely walked away first.
The truth was that Jin knew his old jealousy over Wendy’s crush on Yoongi had been foolish. Worse than foolish, perhaps. Small. He had known it even while nursing it. He had let it sit in him like a thorn and had then blamed everyone else for the pain. He had pushed Yoongi away over a girl Yoongi had never wanted and Wendy had long since stopped mooning over.
It was ridiculous.
It was lonely.
Yoongi had been his only true male friend, and Jin had adored him in those quiet, ordinary ways men sometimes do not know how to confess without wrapping the confession in a joke. He missed their lunches. He missed Yoongi’s bluntness, which was sometimes rude and often exactly what Jin needed. He missed sitting across from someone who did not require him to shine every moment of the day.
With Wendy gone, and Y/N always burdened with orders and work, and his own pride proving poor company, the solar cottage had lately felt much larger than it was.
Shiloh was right about one thing.
It was long past time to let it go.
Jin’s mouth twitched despite himself. “I’ll tell him it’s urgent.”
“Tell him…” Shiloh’s voice faltered.
The sternness fell from her all at once, and beneath it was only a frightened soul in feathers.
“Tell him it’s Y/N.”
Jin’s face softened again. “That will be enough.”
He turned back to the bed before leaving. For a moment, he simply looked at Y/N. Not as a healer looks at a patient, nor as a friend looks at someone beloved, but as a person looks at a light he has always expected to be burning and has suddenly realized could go out.
Then he brushed his fingers once more over her forehead.
A faint golden warmth sank beneath her skin. Her breathing steadied, barely, but enough that the room itself seemed to unclench. Shiloh felt it. So did Jin. Even the cottage seemed to settle around her, the old beams creaking softly as if relieved.
Shiloh watched him cross to the door, wings half-open, ready to chase him if he hesitated.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
He gave one nod.
Light gathered around him, warm and bright, humming with intention. It did not burst or flare. It folded itself about him like a cloak woven from morning. For an instant his outline blurred, gold at the edges, as though the sun had decided to take human shape and then thought better of it.
Then the light folded inward.
Jin was gone.
The cottage became terribly quiet.
There is a quiet that comforts and a quiet that watches. This was the second sort. It settled over the room and under the doorways and among the rafters. It lay in the hearth where embers glowed low beneath a skin of ash. It gathered around the little bottles Jin had left on the bedside table. It seemed to listen to every breath Y/N took and count the space before the next.
Outside, the forest continued as though nothing had happened. Snow slid from the pines. A single winter bird called from somewhere beyond the window. Sunlight brightened the frozen meadow by degrees, pale and pitiless. The river muttered under ice. The world, which had no manners at all, went on being beautiful while Shiloh’s own small world lay feverish and still beneath the blankets.
She heard almost none of it.
She hopped from the nightstand to the pillow, careful not to jostle Y/N. Then she bowed her head close enough to feel each fragile breath stir the feathers of her breast.
Y/N did not wake. Her lashes lay dark against her cheeks. The fever still burned in her, though the hard edge of it had softened under Jin’s tonic. Her hand twitched once above the blanket, fingers curling faintly as if reaching through some dream.
Shiloh pressed closer.
“I know you can’t hear me,” she whispered. Then, after a pause, “Or perhaps you can, and you’re only pretending not to so I won’t scold you. That would be very like you.”
The room gave no answer. Shiloh’s eyes stung, which she found deeply inconvenient.
“You’re going to wake up,” she continued. “You’re going to wake up, and you’re going to be insufferable about this. You’ll say you are fine, and I’ll call you a liar, and then you’ll ask for tea.”
Her voice thinned.
“And I’ll make it for you.”
She tucked one foot beneath herself, then the other, settling beside Y/N’s pillow like a sentry carved from feathers and fear. Every now and then, she glanced toward the door, willing Jin to return with Yoongi, willing the forest to deliver him quickly, willing the gods, who were so often maddeningly quiet, to make themselves useful for once.
Y/N breathed in.
Y/N breathed out.
Shiloh lowered her head until her beak nearly touched Y/N’s hair.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” she whispered. “Not like this.”
The hours crawled.
Or perhaps they were not hours at all. Fear keeps its own clock, and every tick of it is cruel. It can stretch a minute until it is long enough to walk across, and then snap an hour short so that one finds oneself startled by the light changing in the window. Shiloh, who knew the ordinary measurements of mornings very well—the first stir of the fire, the second settling of frost, the third call of the winter birds—lost all sense of them now.
She stood vigil on the bedpost with her claws curled around the wood and her feathers dulled to a muted gray-brown, as if worry had taken the shine out of her. The cottage, usually so full of little homely sounds, seemed unnervingly still. There should have been the tick and hum of charms in the cupboards, the soft creak of old beams warming themselves, the whisper of herbs drying in their bundles above the hearth, and perhaps the small, pleasing complaint of the kettle as it settled on its hook. But now there was only the faint pop of the dying fire, the needle-thin ticking of ice at the window, and Y/N’s breathing.
Too shallow.
Too quiet.
Too unlike her.
Jin’s magic lingered in the room, tinting the shadows faintly gold. It lay across the blanket in soft threads and glowed dimly at Y/N’s temples, and any sensible creature would have taken comfort in it. Jin was not careless with healing, whatever else Shiloh might accuse him of being. His magic was warm, clean, and capable. It had steadied Y/N’s breath. It had drawn some of the hard, cruel heat down from her face. It had made the room feel less like a place where death might enter unnoticed.
But Shiloh did not trust quiet.
Quiet had deceived her before.
Twice she fluttered down from the bedpost and pressed the soft edge of one wing against Y/N’s cheek. The first time, she did it with the stern little air of someone inspecting a foolish child who had only scraped her knee.
“You’re fine,” she murmured. “You’ve always been fine.”
That, of course, was not true. Y/N had been ill many times. Y/N had frightened her many times. But there are lies the heart tells not because it believes them, but because it needs to hear a friendly voice in the dark.
The second time Shiloh touched her, Y/N’s skin still burned, and her breath shivered faintly against the owl’s feathers.
“You’re fine,” Shiloh tried again.
Her voice cracked before she reached the end of it.
She hated that. She hated fear most when it made her small. Fear ought to sharpen a creature. It ought to give one claws and teeth and a good loud voice. Instead, it had made a trembling thing of her. A little gray-brown bird on a bedpost, watching the person she loved lie pale and feverish beneath blankets.
She did not know how much time had passed when she finally heard voices outside.
At first she thought she had imagined them. The cottage had been so full of listening that any sound seemed possible, even invented ones. But then there came the muffled crunch of boots in snow, the low murmur of someone speaking in the meadow, and a colder gust of air pressing around the doorframe as shadows moved beyond the frosted window.
Shiloh’s head snapped up.
She flew to the sill and peered through the glass, blinking against the pale winter glare. The snow outside was bright enough now to hurt the eyes, blue in the hollows and gold where the morning had touched it. Figures stood near the path, dark against the white meadow. One of them moved with Jin’s unmistakable grace, which would have been irritating under almost any other circumstance.
The other—
“Finally,” Shiloh breathed, and the word came out half relief, half accusation.
Yoongi stepped inside first.
He looked as though he had been dragged from the far side of a long night and had not yet forgiven morning for existing. His dark hair was tied loosely back, though several strands had escaped and fallen near his face. Shadows sat beneath his eyes. A faint roughness clung to him, not untidiness exactly, but the mark of someone who had been awake too long over work that would not hurry itself for anyone. His cloak was dusted with snow at the shoulders, and one of his sleeves had been rolled and forgotten, exposing the pale line of his wrist.
But his presence changed the room at once.
It did not brighten it as Jin’s did. It did not fill the corners with warmth, or set the glass jars glowing, or make the shadows look as though they were considering repentance.
It grounded it.
The cottage seemed to settle more firmly upon its foundations simply because Yoongi had entered. The air grew quieter, but no longer in the dreadful way. It was the quiet of a stone placed at the bottom of a rushing stream. Solid. Certain. Unmoved.
He was not alone.
Behind him came Cordelia, wrapped in a heavy cloak over seafoam-colored robes that moved softly around her legs as she walked. Her long silvered hair fell over her shoulders like water under moonlight, and a faint scent of salt, rain, and crushed shells seemed to enter with her. Her presence carried the calm of deep tides: not weak, not slow, not sleepy, but steady with an old power that did not need to announce itself. There was something in her that made one think of cliffs enduring storms, of moonlit bays, of the great sleeping creatures that move far below the surface of the sea.
“Cori,” Shiloh said, startled despite herself. “You came too?”
“I was with him already,” Cordelia said.
Her voice had the rhythm of the coast in it, gentle and sure, with the faint lilt of waves drawing back over stones. She removed her gloves as she crossed the room, her eyes already moving to Y/N. “He was bartering for kelpwort and sea-mist powder when Jin arrived. I thought it wise to come along.”
“Bartering,” Shiloh repeated, aghast. “Now?”
Yoongi set his satchel on the table and began pulling out vials with the unhurried exactness of a man who had no intention of being rushed by panic, owls, or fever. “We started last night. Time slipped.”
The owl clicked her beak sharply. “While Y/N was dying?”
“She’s not dying,” Jin called from the doorway, brushing snow from his sleeve. “I told you that ten times.”
“Tell me again,” Shiloh said.
It came out quieter than she meant it to.
“Please.”
Jin’s expression changed at the word. It was not often that Shiloh gave anyone a please. She handed out insults like crumbs to sparrows, criticism like festival sweets, and commands as if she had been born wearing a crown. But please was rare from her. Please meant something had gone past pride and into the soft, unguarded country beneath it.
Jin shut the door behind them, crossed the room, and answered without even the shadow of teasing.
“She’s not dying.”
The words did not fix everything. Words seldom do. But they placed a stone beneath Shiloh’s feet, and for a moment she could stand.
Yoongi crossed to the bed. Cordelia followed, her sea-glass eyes softening when she saw Y/N beneath the blankets.
“Oh,” Cordelia murmured.
It was a small sound, and a sad one.
“She looks so much like her aunt.”
She rested a gentle hand on Y/N’s shoulder, not to examine her yet, but to greet her, as if some sleeping part of Y/N might know who had come.
Yoongi crouched beside the bed. He did not touch Y/N at first. His fingers hovered above her temple, still as winter branches, while his eyes narrowed in concentration. For a few breaths he listened, not only with his ears, but with whatever quiet sense kitchen witches have for the hidden workings of a body: heat, pulse, breath, hunger, salt, weakness, the little inward fires that keep flesh from surrendering.
Then he placed two fingers at the pulse below her jaw, waited, and exhaled.
“Strong,” he said.
Shiloh leaned forward so quickly she nearly lost her grip on the bedpost. “Strong?”
“Her pulse.” Yoongi’s voice was low, even, and plain. “Skin’s hot, but not dangerously so.”
He pressed his palm lightly against Y/N’s chest and closed his eyes.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the air stirred.
A ripple of cool silvery energy moved through the room, thin and bright as moonlight caught in water. It did not gleam like Jin’s magic. It did not warm. It soothed. It spread through the blankets, over Y/N’s shoulders, along the line of her throat, and down into the places where her breathing had hitched and struggled. The fever did not vanish, but it seemed to lose its teeth. Y/N drew in a breath, then another, and the second came more easily than the first.
It was a small change.
It was unmistakable.
“Well?” Shiloh asked. “What is it?”
Yoongi opened his eyes.
“What Jin said. Fever. Exhaustion. Cold exposure from flying through bad weather all night.” His gaze moved briefly to the scattered feathers still near the doorway, then back to Y/N. “The shift probably made it worse.”
Shiloh lowered her head.
“So I was right to worry.”
Yoongi looked at her then, really looked, and his voice gentled.
“Yes. You were right.”
Jin leaned lightly against the doorway. “No one said you weren’t.”
She ignored them all after that and brushed a damp strand of hair from Y/N’s forehead. Her touch was light, but not timid. Cordelia had the hands of someone who had tended many fevers, bound many wounds, and carried many secrets without dropping them.
“Aldara was just the same,” she said.
Memory softened her voice, and the name settled into the room like a familiar ghost finding an old chair. “Before she took on the Bridd mantle, she and I would swim in the shallows whenever the weather allowed. If she didn’t dry her hair properly afterward, she would be feverish before nightfall. I scolded her constantly.”
Shiloh let out a small, unsteady breath.
“That sounds like her.”
“She always said, ‘The sea wants to keep me longer.’” Cordelia smiled, but there was ache in it. “Stubborn as stone. Fierce as anything I had ever known. And very sure that consequences were meant for other people.”
“That also sounds like her,” Jin said.
“It sounds like all of them,” Yoongi murmured, checking Y/N’s pulse again. “Same constitution, then. Magic close to the bone. It burns hot and fast, and afterward the body pays for it. Mist, cold, exhaustion, a difficult shift—any of it could have pushed her into fever. All of it together certainly would.”
“And Y/N’s immune system is worse,” Jin added. “So we treat it seriously.”
Shiloh glanced toward him.
There was gratitude in the look, though she would sooner have swallowed a pinecone than named it aloud.
“She was restless,” Shiloh whispered. “She said she felt strange. I should have stopped her.”
Yoongi’s eyes flicked to the owl. “How?”
Shiloh said nothing.
“Truly,” he said. “How would you have stopped her?”
“I could have—”
“Scolded her?”
“That is often effective.”
“With Y/N?”
Shiloh’s feathers sank.
Yoongi’s voice gentled further. “Even if you had tried, she wouldn’t have listened.”
It was the truth, and therefore more terrible than comfort.
Cordelia tucked the blankets more securely around Y/N. She did it with an ease that turned the act into a kind of spell: blanket to shoulder, edge beneath chin, warmth held in, cold kept out. She laid one hand briefly over Y/N’s sternum and another near her brow. A faint misty glow gathered between her palms, sea-pale and quiet, and the fever in Y/N’s face softened another degree.
“She’ll recover,” Cordelia said. “Give her two days of steady warmth and proper rest. No work, no flying, no shifting unless absolutely necessary. I’ll leave a tonic to break the fever by morning.”
“You’re sure?” Shiloh asked.
Cordelia looked at her with a patient smile. “She is Aldara’s blood. Her stubbornness is thicker than iron and twice as enduring. She’ll be all right.”
Jin snorted softly. “Truest thing said all morning.”
Shiloh fluffed herself into a tired little ball. “You’re all calmer than I am.”
“Because panicking won’t help her,” Yoongi said.
His tone was even, unhurried, and infuriatingly solid. He wiped his hands on a cloth, then began arranging his vials on the bedside table in an order that made sense to him and probably no one else. “Rest will. Warmth will. Medicine will. Someone watching her breathing will. She’ll wake when her body is ready.”
Shiloh knew that tone.
It ended arguments. Not by force. Yoongi almost never needed force. It ended them by being immovable in a way that made arguing feel like throwing pebbles at fog.
Still, she flew to the headboard and looked down at Y/N’s pale face.
“You’re certain?” she whispered again.
Yoongi met her gaze.
“Yes. I’m certain.”
“Then stay,” she blurted. “Until she wakes.”
Yoongi stilled.
“Please,” Shiloh added.
That word hung strangely between them.
Jin looked away, politely enough. Cordelia lowered her eyes to the tonic she was preparing, though the corner of her mouth softened. Yoongi remained crouched beside the bed, his hand resting lightly on the edge of the blanket.
Shiloh used many words freely: fool, idiot, menace, sunflower, vain peacock, walking chandelier. Please was not one of them.
Yoongi hesitated.
His eyes flicked toward Cordelia.
“She’ll rest easier with you here,” Cordelia said. “You’ve always been her closest friend. And frankly, you have become more of a hermit than Thelma this past year.”
Jin lifted his brows. “More than Thelma? That’s a grave diagnosis.”
Yoongi ignored him and looked back at Y/N.
She lay still and fever-warmed, breathing in small, fragile pulls of air. One hand had slipped from beneath the blanket, palm half-open as though she had been reaching for something in sleep and forgotten what it was. Yoongi’s gaze rested on that hand for a moment longer than it needed to.
Something passed over his face, quiet and unreadable, like the moment before a tide turns.
“All right,” he said.
Shiloh’s shoulders sank with relief.
Jin leaned one shoulder against the doorway and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll send word to Wendy, though she’s still trapped in Clarcton.”
Cordelia’s mouth twitched. “I received a letter yesterday. Nessa has apparently terrified three suitors already and turned a fourth into a tree.”
Jin groaned. “That sounds about right.”
“A shrub, technically,” Cordelia added. “But a very unhappy one.”
“That family should not be allowed near courtship rituals.”
“She is growing fond of a human boy, though,” Cordelia said. “Says he finds her ditsy.”
Yoongi pulled a chair to Y/N’s bedside and sat down. The chair gave a small wooden complaint beneath him.
“Ditsy is certainly one word for it.”
He tried not to think too long about Nessa.
The ache that accompanied her name nudged at him, quiet and unwelcome. It was not a sharp pain. Those were easier, in some ways. Sharp pain announced itself honestly. This was the duller sort, the kind that had lived too long inside him to be a wound and not long enough to become memory.
Only Y/N knew the whole of it.
Only Y/N knew about the old relationship, the years hidden beneath ordinary conversation, the glances swallowed before others could see them, the meetings made to look accidental, the care taken with letters, names, and silences. Only Y/N knew how some love did not end so much as sink below the surface, where no one else could see it but where it still moved with the tide.
Ten years was a long time to keep a secret.
But he and Nessa had both feared the same thing: that truth, once spoken, would wound Wendy. Wendy, who had loved easily and brightly when they were young. Wendy, who had once looked at Yoongi as though he were a locked door she might someday find the key to. Wendy, who deserved tenderness even in disappointment.
So the secret had remained buried.
Silent as silt at the bottom of the sea.
Now Y/N lay before him, feverish and still, the keeper of that secret and so many others. She had carried it without judgment, as she carried most things: not lightly, exactly, but faithfully. She had never pressed him to speak before he was ready. She had never made his fear seem cowardly. She had only sat beside him on certain evenings, when the cottage windows were dark and the kettle had gone quiet, and let silence be a place where he could breathe.
Yoongi’s hand tightened once on the arm of the chair.
Then he let it loosen.
The cottage settled into a softer quiet.
It was no longer the dreadful silence of a house waiting for bad news. It was the quieter peace that comes after worry has done all the useful things it can and must now sit down by the bed. Cordelia hummed under her breath as she stirred herbs into Y/N’s water, a tune that sounded older than words and smelled faintly, somehow, of salt and rain. Jin stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his head bowed, sunlight still faint along his fingers. For once he did not try to fill the room with speech. His silence was awkward at first, then kind.
Shiloh finally tucked her head beneath one wing, though she did not sleep. Her vigil merely changed shape. It became stillness instead of motion, listening instead of pacing, a small feathered trust placed unwillingly in the hands of others.
Yoongi remained beside the bed.
Every so often he checked Y/N’s pulse. Once he adjusted the blanket. Once he lifted the cup Cordelia had prepared and coaxed a little water past Y/N’s lips when she stirred enough to swallow. He spoke to her each time, low and steady, not with the grand soothing phrases people use when they are frightened by their own helplessness, but as though she were merely very tired and would be annoyed later if everyone made too much of it.
“That’s it,” he murmured once. “Just a little.”
Y/N’s brow tightened faintly.
“I know,” he said. “You can be angry with me when you wake up.”
Shiloh opened one eye from beneath her wing. “She will be.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Cordelia’s mouth curved.
Jin glanced at Yoongi then, and something small and old passed between them. Not forgiveness. Not yet. Forgiveness, when it is real, does not usually come prancing in with trumpets and garlands. It arrives more like a thaw: first one drop from an icicle, then another, then the surprising sound of running water where everything had been frozen the day before.
But it was a beginning.
Outside, the forest brightened with the slow, pale unfolding of a winter morning. Sunlight slid between the snow-heavy evergreens in cold ribbons, catching on frost and ice until the world shone white and gold. The mist lifted by degrees, revealing buried paths, dark trunks, and the long stillness of a forest not yet ready for spring. Somewhere high in the pines, a bird called once and then thought better of it. The river muttered under its ice. Snow fell in soft clumps from burdened branches, leaving little puffs of white powder in the air.
Winter still held Bangtan in both hands.
But inside the cottage, winter had been pushed back from the bed.
There was warmth at the hearth. There was medicine on the table. There were herbs steeping, blankets tucked, hands ready, and three kinds of magic keeping quiet watch around a sleeping girl whose body had been asked to carry too much.
Y/N slept on.
Her fever eased by degrees.
Her breath steadied.
And though the cold pressed its pale hands against the windows and peered in with all the patience of February, it could not come any farther.
𓄿 Chapter Two: In Sickness and in Health
Pairing: Jimin x Reader
Other tags: Werewolf!Jimin, Witch!Reader, Shifter!Reader, Shifter!Jimin, A/B/O Dynamics, Alpha!Jimin, Witch!Yoongi, Witch!Seokjin, Werewolf!Taehyung, Alpha!Taehyung, Werewolf!Namjoon, Alpha!Namjoon, Werewolf!Hoseok, Alpha!Hoseok, Werewolf!Jungkook, Omega!Jungkook
Genre: Fantasy!AU, Werewolf!AU, Witch!AU, friends to lovers, extreme slow burn, mutual pining, angst, fluff, eventual smut, 18+ only
Word Count: 23.8k+
Synopsis: Across the four realms of Lustra lies the enchanted Bangtan Forest, homeland of the southern Foxglove pack and a place whispered about as the “land of magic.” It is also the domain of the Bridd, a line of witches bound by an ancient curse and entrusted as the forest’s sacred guardians. Y/N, the newest Bridd, inherited her role far too young. Now grown, she is honored by the wolves as the most powerful witch they have ever known. Yet beneath the reverence and power lives a woman who must choose between the weight of her destiny and the longings of her heart.
Warnings: blood, witchcraft, shapeshifters, childhood memories, yearning, pining, emotional constipation, magic, talking animals, spirit guides, PTSD, negative self talk, gossiping, meddling woodland friends, unrequited love (or is it?), dreaming of him, long haired Jimin, that will be a reoccurring warning, mating system, politics, injured character, sick character, nightmares, whimsy, bickering, Shiloh is so iconic, Paganism, let me know if i missed anything...
A/N: Thanks for reading!
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Y/N was sitting at her dining table when the morning found her. The sun came first through the high black branches, then over the frosted meadow, then along the sill; only after that did they venture into the cottage, setting pale gold on the floorboards, on the backs of chairs, on the worn stones of the hearth, and finally upon the enormous round table where Y/N had taken her tea.
It was a peculiar table, and the sort of table no tidy-minded person would ever have chosen if he had begun with measurements, color schemes, or any of those sensible things by which houses are so often made dull. It was too large for the cottage, much too round to be useful in a corner, and stained a deep, stubborn teal that had resisted soap, sanding, charms, powders, moon-water, muttered threats, and one rather shameful experiment involving vinegar, a silver spoon, and a great deal of misplaced confidence. The color remained exactly as it had always been, clinging to the wood with the firm cheerfulness of an old joke that refused to stop being funny.
The surface bore all the marks of a life thoroughly lived. There were pale rings left by teacups, dark scars from knives, dents where jars had been dropped in haste, and three blackened places where candles had behaved badly during storms. Its legs, absurdly grand for so battered a thing, were carved with curling leaves and little beasts whose faces had worn down over the years until they appeared to be looking out at the world in sleepy astonishment.
It matched nothing—not the chairs, not the rug, not the cupboards, not the old blue pitcher by the stove, not the brass bell without a tongue, and certainly not the footstool embroidered with foxes by someone who had clearly never seen a fox but had loved the idea of them very much.
But Aldara had loved the table, and that was enough.
Because Aldara had loved it, Y/N kept it as faithfully as if it had been made from the wood of some tree that grew in the courts of heaven. She cleaned it, defended it, and spoke rather sharply to anyone who suggested, even kindly, that perhaps it was time for something smaller, plainer, newer, or less teal. There were many things in the cottage like that—things which had outlived usefulness, fashion, convenience, and, in some cases, good sense, but had not outlived meaning. The cottage did not look arranged so much as gathered. Every shelf, chair, jar, cracked cup, and faded curtain seemed to have come there carrying a story under one arm and no intention whatever of leaving.
The chairs around the table were no better behaved than the table itself. One had armrests carved into the heads of wolves, a gift from Hoseok after a winter hunt that had begun with boasting and ended with three people stuck in a tree until sunrise. Another had once been painted with stars and moons, though time had softened them into cloudy smudges, and one leg was shorter than the others, so that it rocked if anyone sat down too quickly or breathed with too much confidence. A third chair was blackened along one side from an alchemical mishap that Y/N still insisted had not been her fault, though nobody who had been present believed her, and nobody who had not been present believed her either. On damp evenings, if one pressed close to the charred edge, it still smelled faintly of sage, smoke, and embarrassment.
None of the chairs matched. None of them seemed to wish to. Y/N had always thought this one of their better qualities.
The windows were shut against the morning, for late January had no manners and would come straight into a person’s bones if invited too freely. Still, a narrow pane near the stove had been cracked open to let out the old hearth-smoke, and through that little opening the cold slipped in. It smelled of snow, wet bark, woodsmoke, and the hard iron sleep of frozen earth. The curtains moved only a little, lifting and falling as if the cottage itself were breathing carefully, not wanting to wake too much of the winter outside.
Beyond the glass, the meadow lay under its thin white covering. It was not one of those deep, swallowing snows that buried fences and made paths into guesses, but it had softened the world all the same. White gathered in the hollows of the field and along the low stone wall. The grasses stood through it in brittle golden tufts, bent and rimed with frost. The dead heads of foxglove rattled faintly near the fence when the wind moved through them, while the bluebells slept under the hard ground and would sleep for weeks yet. Poppies and daisies were only promises kept deep in the soil. Even the trees seemed less like trees than dark thoughts sketched in charcoal and silver, their bare branches holding small jewels of ice where the night fog had frozen.
Imbolc was only a week away.
Perhaps, Y/N thought, she ought to write to Jin today and ask him to bring extra firewood. He would laugh, of course. She could hear him already, bright as a bell and twice as troublesome.
You live in a forest, Y/N. It is rather famous for having wood.
And he would say it with that impossible sideways grin of his, the one that made rebuke feel like an invitation and foolishness feel like a holiday. He would arrive late, carrying half the forest under one arm and pretending the whole thing had been her idea, and then he would make dreadful toasts while Yoongi pretended not to enjoy them.
But perhaps this year she would surprise him. Perhaps this year she would really do it. She would host her own Imbolc fire. Nothing grand. Nothing with banners or musicians or any ceremony that required people to stand solemnly while pretending their feet were not freezing. Just a proper fire beneath the clean winter dark, a kettle of spiced cider, honey cakes if she remembered them, and enough light to honor the turning of the season.
The thought pleased her. It pleased her so much that she said it aloud, because spoken intentions had weight, and Y/N had always believed that words, once released into the air, began looking for ways to become true.
“This year,” she said into her tea, “I shall host something for Imbolc.”
The cottage listened politely.
Then, because Y/N knew herself very well and had lived with herself long enough not to be fooled by grand declarations made before breakfast, she added, “And I shall not forget.”
The cottage accepted this too, with the same quiet tact.
A moment later, she made a little face at herself and took another sip. Honeysuckle tea spread warm and sweet over her tongue. She had meant to host a gathering the year before, and the year before that, and once she had gone so far as to write down a list. The list had then vanished under a stack of pressed flowers and been rediscovered in autumn by a beetle who appeared to find it inspiring.
“No,” she said firmly, as though speaking to the future version of herself who would almost certainly be elbow-deep in poultice or frog bones when Imbolc arrived. “Not this time.”
Her favorite chair—if one could call a chair favorite without offending all the others—had been angled beside the window for so many years that the floor beneath it had faded in its shape. From there, she could see the meadow rolling away from the cottage in a white, winter hush. Frost clung to every blade of standing grass, making the field glitter as though the night had spilled a box of tiny stars and forgotten to gather them again. Near the fence, last summer’s stems stood brown and hollow, and beneath the snow the sleeping beds held their secrets.
The sight stirred something in her that was not quite happiness and not quite sorrow. She saw herself suddenly, not as she was now, but as she had been: barefoot in summer, wind-burned and wild-haired, running through that same meadow with both arms flung wide, as if she meant to catch the whole sky against her chest. The grass had been taller then, and she had been shorter. Clover had thickened the air with sweetness. Bees had moved sleepily from bloom to bloom. Her laughter had flown all the way to the tree line, where birds startled up from the branches in a flurry of indignant wings.
Yoongi had been there in those days, grumbling even as a child. He had possessed the solemn disapproval of a very small old man and the tender heart of a saint who did not wish anyone to know about it. He complained about mud while stepping directly into it to pull her out. He scolded her for climbing too high, then climbed higher himself to prove the branch was unsafe. He hid sweets in his sleeves and pretended to be baffled when they ended up in her pockets.
Then had come Jin, bright and careless and charming enough to be forgiven for nearly anything, smelling always faintly of citrus peel, sun-warmed wool, and mischief. And Wendy, with hair that carried the salt of the sea no matter how far inland she wandered, leaving damp marks on their books and turning every dull afternoon into an expedition.
By the time they were half-grown, the four of them had become inseparable in the way only children can be, before the world teaches people to divide themselves into duties, homes, griefs, and silences. They had belonged to one another without ceremony. No oath had bound them. No spell had stitched them together. It had been something simpler and stronger than either: the easy gravity of shared youth. They had believed then that the world was wide because it meant to make room for them.
Y/N lowered her cup.
Of course, they had grown. Everyone did, though it was a great inconvenience and almost always happened before one was finished with being young. Life had drawn them away by degrees, gently at first and then with a firmer hand. Yoongi had his kitchen in the deep woods, where every loaf of bread seemed to come out tasting faintly of loyalty. Jin followed sunlight wherever it led, which meant he arrived late, departed early, and always left some warmth behind him. Wendy belonged to the ocean as surely as shells belonged to the tide.
And Y/N belonged here—to the cottage, to the meadow, to the forest, to the animals, to the rituals, to the old bargains and the small healings, to the invisible chains of responsibility she had learned to wear lightly, so that others might mistake them for ribbons.
They would never again be exactly what they had been. She had accepted that long ago, but acceptance, she had discovered, did not always keep a thing from hurting.
From across the room came the soft scrape of talons on wood, and Y/N smiled before she turned.
Shiloh stood on her perch beside the kitchen window, pale feathers puffed around her like a shawl. The owl’s eyes were narrowed with the weary dignity possessed only by creatures who slept in daylight and disapproved of everyone else’s schedule.
“I’m going to sleep for a while,” Shiloh announced, her voice thick with drowsiness. “Wake me if you need me.”
“You should sleep outside,” Y/N said, in the tone of someone who knew she would not be obeyed but felt morally improved by saying the thing anyway. “I’ll be using the kitchen soon, and I might wake you.”
Shiloh ruffled herself with enormous offense. “I beg your pardon.”
Owls did not beg for anything, and familiars even less so. Before Y/N could answer, Shiloh spread her wings and swept through the open window in a pale blur, vanishing into the morning with all the wounded grandeur of a queen exiled by fools.
“You are dramatic even for an owl,” Y/N called after her.
There was no answer, unless the sharp rustle of wings in the trees could be counted as one.
The cottage settled into a quieter quiet after Shiloh left. It was not empty. Y/N’s home was never empty. It held all the little sounds that made solitude bearable: a kettle ticking as it cooled, herbs shifting in their bundles above the hearth, a floorboard sighing under the memory of someone’s step, and the faint scratch of a mouse in the wall whom Y/N had been meaning to evict for three weeks but had not done because he seemed polite.
Beyond the windows, the forest breathed in its winter sleep. Branch touched branch. Ice loosened by slow degrees. Roots spoke to roots beneath the frozen ground in a language that trees remembered and people mostly forgot.
Y/N’s hearing was not so keen as Shiloh’s, nor as sharp as that of the wolves who moved through Bangtan like white shadows, but it had always been better than ordinary. She could tell the difference between a rabbit under the hedge and the spirit fox that sometimes lingered near her land. She knew the dry skitter of frozen leaves, the soft fall of snow slipping from a branch, and the careful tread of deer on crusted ground. When she was younger, she had been rather proud of it. Too proud, perhaps.
At twelve, on one hot afternoon thick with flies and golden light, she had declared before Jin that she could hear wings half a mile away and the footfall of a wolf long before it reached the clearing. He had laughed and called her a showoff.
He had not meant it cruelly. Jin rarely meant things cruelly then. His laughter had been bright and passing, like a coin tossed into water. But she remembered the small burn of embarrassment, the sudden knowledge that a person could reveal too much of herself simply by being pleased with what she was. She had smiled, because children learn very early to smile when they are stung in places no one can see, and after that, she had not boasted anymore.
Now, many years later, the memory only made her laugh softly into her cup.
“Showoff,” she whispered, tasting the word as if it belonged to another life.
The sunlight shifted. It traveled along the table, deepening the teal stain and catching in the shallow scars of the wood until the whole thing seemed lit from beneath like a lantern. Outside, winter held fast, but beneath it, spring had begun its first secret work. Buds tightened on the branches. Clouds drifted like wool torn thin. A brave and foolish bee, drunk on the mere idea of flowers, bumped itself against the window frame and wandered away again.
For the first time in weeks, Y/N did nothing.
This was rarer than it ought to have been. There were always poultices to mix, charms to mend, creatures to soothe, spirits to bargain with, letters to answer, knives to sharpen, candles to dress, and jars to label before she forgot what was in them and had to determine by smell whether something was medicine or supper. But that morning, no task had yet found her. No ritual tugged at her sleeve. No urgency curled like smoke at the edge of her mind.
She simply sat.
Her tea cooled. The meadow glittered. The cottage breathed.
By the time the second cup had gone lukewarm and the third had nearly done the same, she saw something move at the edge of the field.
At first, she took it for light. That was easily done in winter. Sunlight had a habit of putting on shapes in the forest. It flashed on ice and looked like eyes. It caught on frosted bark and pretended to be silver thread. It lay across old stones until they seemed to shift under it. Y/N narrowed her eyes and set her cup down carefully.
The pale shape stood half in the trees and half out of them, thin as a breath against the dark trunks.
Then it moved again.
Not with the easy, floating grace of mist. Not with the sway of grass.
It limped.
Y/N’s hand went at once to the windowsill.
The shape staggered from the shadow of the trees into the open meadow. Sunlight slid across its pelt and turned it briefly to silver. It was a wolf—a large one, pale-furred, long-legged, and moving with the tight, careful steps of an animal who had learned that the ground might hurt him if touched in the wrong way.
Then came the sound.
It was very small for so great a creature, a thin, broken whimper, quickly swallowed as though pride had leapt up and clamped jaws around it. But Y/N heard it, and it hooked into her chest with cruel little claws.
She leaned out the cracked window. “Are you hurt?”
Her voice had changed without her willing it to. The idle softness had gone from it. What remained was the calm, low certainty she used with frightened birds, wounded deer, children with cut knees, and once with an outraged river spirit who had caught his elbow in a fish trap.
The wolf froze. His ears lifted. The crying stopped.
Y/N did not move too quickly. One did not startle a hurt creature, especially one whose teeth were longer than one’s fingers.
“If you are hurt,” she said more gently, “I can help you. I have supplies. Enough to patch you quickly.”
The meadow seemed to hold its breath. A pale winter butterfly wandered between them, unconcerned with injury, dignity, or the delicate negotiations between witch and wolf. It drifted over a dead stem, reconsidered the entire matter, and went elsewhere.
The wolf’s eyes caught the sun. Amber. Sharp. Familiar.
Something stirred uneasily in her memory. Not certainty. Not yet. Only the tug of a thread. The pale wolf from the other night, perhaps—the one who had returned her lantern and vanished before she could decide whether to thank him, scold him, or ask why he had been carrying it in the first place.
White wolves were not strange in Bangtan. Jimin was fair-furred. So was old Ahn, whose pelt shone beneath moonlight like frost. But the thought of Jimin rose before she could stop it, stubborn and unwelcome, and Y/N grimaced faintly at herself.
The wolf limped nearer, slowly and deliberately, with far more pride than was sensible for someone leaving blood in the snow. When he reached the wall beneath her window, she could see the injury plainly. Blood streaked his hind leg, vivid against the white fur. More darkened his side, though he held himself as if nothing at all were wrong and the whole matter were a minor inconvenience caused by the weather.
“Oh,” Y/N breathed, and the sound held more sorrow than she meant it to.
The wolf looked away, as if offended by pity.
“Come around to the door,” she said. “You may need to shift to get inside.”
At that, he stiffened.
The change was subtle but unmistakable. His head lifted. His shoulders tightened. Something proud and hot flickered through him like a coal stirred under ash. Wolves could shift, yes, but they did not always do it gladly. Not when wounded. Not before someone outside their own. Not when the shifting itself might expose more than skin.
“All right,” Y/N said at once. “You do not have to. I can bring you in another way.”
His gaze returned to her.
“It feels odd the first time,” she admitted, because honesty was kinder than reassurance when magic was involved. “But it is safe. I promise.”
The wolf tilted his head. His tail gave the smallest uncertain twitch, which might have meant interest, suspicion, or that he had lost too much blood to argue properly. Then, after a long pause, it wagged once.
Y/N smiled. “Good. Hold still for me.”
She closed her eyes, and the world changed when she did. Not outwardly, not to anyone watching from the meadow, but behind her lids, the cottage bloomed in clear detail. She saw the red and white rug before the hearth, worn soft by years of feet and paws. She saw the mismatched chairs around the teal table, the sewing chair with its cushion gone thin in the middle, and the row of knives above the fireplace stones, each blade polished and named. She saw the kitchen shelves crowded with jars of herbs, roots, bones, salt, feathers, oils, seeds, and things that would have looked alarming to anyone who did not know how useful a dried beetle could be.
She saw the altar beneath the windows, the candles guttering lavender and gold, the little dish of river stones, the sprig of rosemary tied with red thread. She saw sunlight lying on the floorboards like spilled honey, and only when the shape of home was whole in her mind did she begin to murmur.
The words came easily. They always had. They belonged to a language older than Lustra and older than the courts that pretended to rule it. Older, perhaps, than the first witch who learned that air could open if spoken to properly. The chant slipped from her tongue soft and lilting, not commanding the world so much as persuading it to remember that doors were only agreements.
With two fingers, she traced an outline in the air.
The space before the wolf shimmered. Light gathered there, pale and thin at first, then thickening like a curtain woven from moonlit water. The edges trembled. The center grew transparent. Y/N parted it with a gentle push.
The wolf stared.
For one unguarded moment, all the dignity went out of him. His tail wagged faster, and fascination brightened his eyes until he looked, despite the blood and the size of him, almost young. He sniffed the glowing threshold, then stepped through with more courage than caution.
An instant later, he stood beside her hearth.
He was enormous.
Y/N blinked up at him. The wolf blinked down at her.
He took up half the room.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I may need to shrink you a little.”
His ears twitched.
“I know. I know,” she said. “Terribly rude of me.”
The wolf sat down with great care, as if to prove that he was cooperative, civilized, and only accidentally the size of a small pony.
“Very gracious of you,” Y/N said.
She lifted one hand. Blue light pulsed softly through the room, cool and bright as winter dusk. It ran over his fur, passed through the air, brushed the walls, and faded. When it was gone, the wolf remained large, but no longer impossible. He was still magnificent, still broad-chested and powerful, but now he looked less like a creature who might knock over the ceiling beams by sighing.
“There,” Y/N said. “Manageable.”
The wolf gave her a look that suggested he did not care to be called manageable.
“Lie down,” she instructed.
To her mild surprise, he obeyed at once. He lowered himself onto the floor before the hearth with a slow, tired exhale and rested his head on his paws.
The sight softened something in her.
Whatever unease she usually felt near wolves—whatever old caution lived in her bones and woke at the scent of them—was swallowed by the plain fact of his pain. There was blood on her floor now, dark little marks against the wood. There was a torn place in his side. There were wounds where no wound ought to be.
She knelt beside him and parted the fur around his hind leg. The blood was tacky beneath her fingers. The skin below was hot. Bite marks punctured deep through the muscle, and claw marks raked cruelly along the flank. These were not the scrapes of a hunt gone poorly. Not brambles. Not a fall. Not even the ordinary brutality of a scuffle. This had been done with purpose.
Her stomach tightened.
“You really are something,” she murmured, partly to him and partly to herself. “Sneaking out, getting into fights, bleeding in my meadow. What would your mother say?”
The wolf made a muffled sound into his paws. It was not quite a growl. Not quite a sigh. It sounded, impossibly, like a grumble of amusement.
Y/N looked up.
His eyes met hers: amber, watchful, intelligent, and warmer than she expected. There was a person looking out through them. Not merely a wolf with clever instincts, but someone aware and guarded and curious beneath all that pale fur. Again, the thought of Jimin flickered through her mind, and again she pushed it away, though not quite as firmly as before.
“Stay,” she said, though he had made no attempt to rise.
She crossed to the shelf beside the stove and took down a small tin. When she opened it, the cottage filled with the clean, green smell of comfrey, sage, and goldenroot. It was a humble salve by the standards of elaborate healers and proud witches who preferred their medicines to glow dramatically in crystal bowls, but Y/N trusted it more than many spells. It had soothed burns, sealed cuts, calmed bruises, eased bites, and once restored feeling to Yoongi’s thumb after an incident with a cursed pastry fork.
It had earned its place.
“Well then, little wolf,” she said, returning to his side, “let us get acquainted.”
He looked at her.
“I shall begin,” she continued, dipping her fingers into the cool cream. “And next time it will be your turn.”
The wolf’s eyes narrowed faintly, as if to ask whether there would indeed be a next time.
Y/N pretended not to notice.
She smoothed the salve carefully along the torn skin. He did not flinch. His breath changed, growing deeper, but he held himself still with astonishing discipline. The fur beneath her hand was thick and soft, warmer than it looked, and the heat of him came up through her fingers like the heat of banked coals. She worked slowly, parting the fur, cleaning the wound, pressing the salve where it needed to go.
“People call me Bridd,” she said after a while.
The wolf listened. The room listened too, in the way rooms do when secrets are spoken in them.
“But if you are going to spend time here,” she went on, “you may call me Y/N. Bridd sounds far too formal for friends.”
The wolf blinked once, slow and solemn.
It felt like an answer.
“My aunt gave me that name when I came to Lustra,” Y/N said. “No one ever really discovered how I arrived. Not properly. Aldara used to say the Gods guided me.” Her mouth softened around the memory. “She said when she saw me, she simply knew, as if she had been waiting for me all her life.”
The wolf remained still, but his gaze had changed. It was not pity. Y/N would have resented pity. It was something quieter. Attention, perhaps. Or recognition.
The salve in the tin emptied more quickly than she had hoped. She sighed, rose, and went to fetch another. Then another after that, because the wounds were longer than they had first appeared and wolves, apparently, contained an unreasonable amount of surface. When she turned back with both tins in hand, she found him staring at her with such a human expression—one brow lifted, his mouth slightly open, his eyes full of patient judgment—that she laughed.
“You look as though you are about to lecture me,” she said. “And I would remind you that I am not the one who lost a fight.”
His tail thumped once against the floor.
“I wish I knew your name,” she said, kneeling again. “Or even whether I ought to call you he or she. Calling you wolf feels horribly impolite, and little wolf is beginning to sound like an insult when you take up half my hearth.”
The sound that came from him then startled her so badly she nearly dropped the tin.
It was low and warm, rising from his chest in a rumble that shook through the floorboards.
Laughter.
Y/N froze. “You can laugh?”
The wolf’s amber eyes gleamed.
“Oh,” she said, sitting back slightly. “Well. That changes things.”
He blinked at her, visibly pleased with himself.
“All right,” she said, gathering her composure with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. “Let us be practical. Shake your head for no. Nod for yes.”
The wolf lifted his head.
“Are you a woman?”
He shook his head.
“Fluid?” Y/N guessed. “Some wolves are.”
Another shake.
“So,” she said, smiling in spite of herself, “you are a man.”
The wolf dipped his head in a neat, deliberate nod. It was just shy of smug.
“Good,” Y/N said. “That is a start.”
She gestured for him to roll over.
His ears went back.
“Do not look at me like that,” she said. “I need to see the other side.”
The wolf let out a long, suffering breath, as though no creature in the history of the forest had ever been so greatly inconvenienced, and flopped onto his side with dramatic resignation.
Y/N stared.
“This side is worse.”
He avoided her gaze.
“You could have told me.”
The wolf rolled his eyes.
He actually rolled them.
“Oh, don’t you dare,” Y/N said, though a laugh escaped her. “You wolves and your pride. You would rather bleed through my rug than admit you need help.”
He snorted, offended.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “You are very noble and terribly mistreated. Hold still.”
The wounds along his ribs were deeper. Some had clotted poorly beneath the fur, and when she cleaned them, fresh blood welled dark and quick. Y/N’s humor faded. She leaned closer, her brows drawing together.
Bite marks. Claw marks. Cruel angles.
The attack had not been clean or honorable. Whoever had done this had not merely wished to win. They had wished to ruin.
A small anger kindled in her—not loud, for Y/N’s anger rarely was. It burned low and blue, the way certain flames burn hottest when they do not leap.
“You poor thing,” she whispered.
The wolf’s ear flicked, but he did not look away this time.
She rinsed a cloth in the basin beside her. The water clouded pink, then red, rippling with each movement of her hand. Firelight caught the surface and broke itself into trembling pieces. She cleaned one wound and then another, slow enough not to frighten him, firm enough to do good. The salve gleamed pale on her fingers, its sharp green scent mingling with iron, smoke, lavender candle-wax, and the wild musk of wolf.
He flinched once when she pressed near a deep tear below his ribs. Only once. The muscles under her hand tightened, then gradually released.
“I know,” she murmured. “I know. Nearly done.”
She worked along his side, down toward his flank, over bruises that darkened beneath the fur. When she pressed gently near his hind joint, his leg jerked. Y/N startled, then laughed, soft and bright.
“Oh. So that tickles, does it?”
His ear flicked.
“Good,” she said. “Your reflexes are working.”
The wolf made a low sound that might have been complaint.
“I am choosing to take that as gratitude.”
He huffed.
Outside, the forest continued about its morning. The thrush sang again. Leaves whispered against one another in the wind. Somewhere far off, water moved under ice and over stones. But inside the cottage, time seemed to draw close around the two of them, like a shawl pulled over chilled shoulders. There was only the fire, the basin, the smell of herbs, the warmth of the animal beside her, and the steady work of her hands.
When at last the bleeding stopped and the swelling began to ease beneath the salve’s subtle shimmer, Y/N sat back on her heels.
“There,” she said.
The word was small. Too small, perhaps, for the long quiet that had passed between them. But it was what she had.
She wiped her hands on a cloth and examined him with the stern eye of someone who expected healing to behave itself. The wounds were not gone, but they were clean. The worst of the bleeding had ceased. The salve had settled into the torn places, drawing the heat down and leaving a faint silver sheen along the edges.
“You are good to go,” she said, patting his side lightly.
The wolf did not move.
At first she thought he had not understood. Then she saw that he understood perfectly. His ears had flattened a little, and the muscles along his shoulders had gone tense in a conflicted way. He knew he ought to leave. Of course he did. Packs pulled on wolves like tides pulled on the sea. Someone would notice. Someone might already be looking.
The fire crackled softly, sending amber light up the walls and across the low beams of the ceiling. It gleamed along the knives above the hearth, shone in the teal scars of the table, and turned the wolf’s white fur to gold. Outside, the meadow rested under frost and old snow, bare and beautiful in the hard morning light.
For a little while, there was no Bridd and no stranger-wolf, no pack, no name withheld, no old fear, no hidden wound deeper than the ones she had dressed. There was only Y/N in her odd cottage, with herbs on her hands and sunlight on her floor, and a wounded creature resting his head in her lap because, against all the hard sense of the world, he had decided to trust her.
They remained that way until the fire had eaten another inch of wood and the sunlight had moved from the table to the floor, laying itself across the boards in long, pale stripes.
Y/N did not know how much time had passed. It seemed to her that time had gone soft around them, as warm and drowsy as the wolf’s breath against her knees. Her hand moved absently over his head, smoothing the fur between his ears, and every so often he made that low, contented sound again, quiet enough that she felt it more than heard it.
But at last his ears twitched.
Not from comfort this time.
He lifted his head, slow and reluctant, and looked toward the window.
Y/N’s hand stilled.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”
The wolf did not move at once. He only looked back at her, amber eyes warm in the firelight, and for one foolish moment she almost told him to stay.
There was room.
There was always room, somehow, in the cottage. The mismatched chairs made room for one another. The shelves made room for one more jar, one more book, one more strange little relic with nowhere else to go. Surely there could be room for a wounded wolf by the hearth.
But wolves belonged to their own, even when they wandered. Someone, somewhere, must have been missing him.
Y/N gave his head one last careful stroke.
“Come on then, little wolf. Before I become selfish.”
He rose with some stiffness, though the salve had already done him good. His limp remained, but it no longer dragged so cruelly through his body. He followed her to the windowed side of the room, where morning still poured pale and cold through the cottage. Y/N lifted her hand and whispered the old words again.
The doorway opened like a curtain of pale water.
Beyond it waited the meadow, silvered with frost and old snow.
The wolf paused at the threshold. Then he turned and pressed his cold nose once against her wrist.
It was such a small thanks that it hurt more than any grander thing could have.
“You’re welcome,” Y/N whispered.
Then he passed through the light and stood once more in the meadow. For a breath, he looked back at her, white fur bright against the winter field, amber eyes holding hers with an almost human gravity. Then he turned toward the trees and slipped away, moving slower than he had come, but steadier.
Y/N watched until the forest took him.
Only when the last pale flicker of him vanished between the trunks did she let the doorway close.
The cottage felt strangely large afterward.
She stood there a moment with salve on her sleeves, blood drying faintly at her wrists, and the warmth of him still lingering in her lap as if he had left part of himself behind. Then the kettle gave a small, practical click from the stove, and the spell of stillness broke.
“Well,” she said to the room, because there was no one else to say it to, “that was unexpected.”
The room, being used to unexpected things, did not argue.
Y/N washed her hands in warm water scented with rosemary, watching the pink threads of blood loosen from her skin and curl away. Then she tied her hair back, rolled up her sleeves, and went to the long worktable beneath the hanging herbs.
There was medicine to make.
Comfrey first, dried from summer’s stores, then goldenroot, then a pinch of powdered pearlcap mushroom for swelling. She moved gently but with purpose, crushing leaves in the mortar until the cottage filled with green, living fragrance—a small borrowed memory of the warmth still buried beneath January’s frost.
Outside, the morning went on shining cold and bright. Inside, Y/N worked with a small, secret smile tugging at her mouth.
Every now and then, despite herself, she glanced toward the window.
The meadow remained empty.
Still, she set an extra tin of salve aside.
Just in case.
Imbolc came to the Bangtan Forest on a cold and wandering breeze.
It was the sort of breeze that had not yet made up its mind whether it belonged to winter or spring, and so it behaved a little like both. It came out of the north with cold fingers and a sharp nose, but it had a hopeful heart. It moved over the meadow around Y/N’s cottage, bending the stiff brown grasses one way and then another, as if searching beneath them for the first green blade brave enough to rise.
By midafternoon, the meadow shone beneath a thin, wintry light. It was not the rich gold of summer, which made everything look fat and sleepy and pleased with itself, nor even the gentle brightness of true spring, when the world seemed newly washed and still smelling of rain. This light was paler, strained through frost, a silvery kind of sunlight that made every stone and stem look thoughtful. Ice crystals clung to the tips of the grasses and flashed whenever the breeze troubled them, first like tiny knives and then, when the sun softened, like fallen stars. The sky was a pale, high blue, the color of breath on glass, and at the edge of the meadow the forest stood with its branches bare and listening.
The trees always seemed to listen on Imbolc.
That was the feeling of the holiday in Lustra. It was not yet warmth, but the promise of warmth. Not yet blooming, but the held breath before blooming began. It was the hour in the year when winter loosened one finger from the throat of the earth, and somewhere deep below frozen mud, black roots, and the brown lace of dead leaves, life turned over in its sleep.
The cottage knew it too.
A thin stream of incense drifted from Y/N’s open window, curling into the cold afternoon in blue-gray ribbons. Yarrow, hawthorn, and a pinch of cinnamon, because cinnamon had always seemed to Y/N like a small edible flame, and therefore suitable for any holy day that involved coaxing warmth back into the world. The smoke twisted once around the window latch, seemed to hesitate, then slipped out into the air and vanished, as if it had gone to whisper instructions to the clouds.
She had lit the incense before sunrise. It was part of the old custom, though Y/N had long suspected that Aldara had invented at least half the old customs she taught and merely worn a grave expression until everyone believed her. This had been one of Aldara’s great talents. She could say, “It is the old way,” while holding a broom backward, and three grown witches would at once begin sweeping in the same direction.
Still, Y/N kept the customs. One did not stop doing a thing simply because it might once have begun as someone’s mischief. Many sacred things, she thought, had probably started that way.
So she had risen in the blue dark, shivering in her nightdress while the floorboards bit cold through the soles of her feet, and burned herbs at the window to coax the day along. She had whispered thanks to the sleeping fields, poured milk into a little clay bowl for the spirits beneath the elder hedge, and swept the threshold three times: once for winter leaving, once for spring arriving, and once because Shiloh had said there was still dirt by the door.
Outside, the bonfire pit waited in the meadow. Its ring of stones sat half sunk in frost, and old snow still lingered in the shaded places between them. Y/N had cleared the pit that morning with damp boots, cold fingers, and a determination that had lasted almost as long as her patience. Frozen leaves, dead stems, gray ash, half-melted slush, and one offended beetle had all been removed. The beetle, who had apparently considered the pit a respectable winter residence, objected by turning in circles and then departing under a leaf with the air of someone betrayed by civilization.
By nightfall, if the weather was kind and if Jin did not take charge in some dreadful decorative way, those stones would hold a fire tall enough to crack open the year and let the first rumor of spring come pouring through.
Inside the cottage, however, winter had already been defeated.
The little house had bloomed into the cheerful disorder that only holy days and beloved guests can excuse. The teal table had been dragged to the center of the room, where it stood looking enormous, stubborn, and important. Its scratched surface had been scrubbed until the old stains shone beneath the candlelight like a lake under moonwater. Cushions of every shape and questionable origin had been scattered over the floor. There were round cushions, square cushions, embroidered cushions, faded cushions, one cushion with a stitched hare on it, and one Y/N was fairly sure had once belonged to Hoseok and had been left behind during a rainstorm three winters ago.
Every shelf had been dusted. Every candle had been refreshed. The altar beneath the window had been scrubbed until the wood gleamed softly, and a new braid of sweetgrass had been tied at the base of the little goddess statue. The sweetgrass filled the room with a fresh green scent that stood bravely against the cold still hidden in the cottage walls. Small bowls of milk and honey sat among sprigs of rosemary, dried violets, and polished stones. White ribbons had been tied to the window latch. A little dish of salt waited near the door. The whole cottage seemed dressed not grandly, but lovingly, which is usually better.
Shiloh watched over all of this from the rafter beam.
The owl had recovered fully from what Y/N privately thought of as the Great Puppy Incident, though Shiloh herself preferred to call it an assault, a tragedy, and proof that young animals should be licensed. Her feathers had grown sleek again. Her dignity had returned to its usual alarming size. She had resumed her proper place as tyrant of the household.
“That cushion needs angling,” Shiloh said.
Y/N, kneeling beside the hearth with soot on her nose, moved the cushion half an inch.
Ignoring Shiloh only made Shiloh more dramatic, but Y/N had long ago decided that drama was part of the bird’s digestion and must be allowed to pass naturally.
The kitchen had been awake since eight o’clock, which was earlier than any decent kitchen ought to be asked to wake in February. Yet Imbolc demanded food, and food demanded labor, and labor demanded that Y/N mutter under her breath while tracking frost across the floorboards for the fourth time that morning. Pots simmered. Butter hissed around herbs in a little iron pan. Steam rose against the windows and blurred the meadow beyond into a dream of silver, brown, and pale gold.
The table had filled by degrees with dishes, jars, bowls, bundles, and little plates of things that looked like offerings but were, for the most part, supper. Now, with the worst of the cooking finished, Y/N stood at the sink with her sleeves shoved past her elbows, rinsing the last of the bowls. Steam curled around her face and turned her cheeks pink. Her cold nose had gone shiny at the tip. Wisps of hair had escaped their pins and clung damply to her temples. Her apron, which had been clean at sunrise, now bore flour, soot, herb dust, one streak of honey, and a green smear she could not identify and had decided not to think about.
A wilted violet petal, which had somehow attached itself to her sleeve in the morning and refused to be removed by shaking, brushing, or insult, chose that moment to give up its long struggle and drop into the dishwater.
Plop.
Y/N stared at it. “Really? Now?”
From the rafters came Shiloh’s voice, smooth with satisfaction. “Darling, if I plucked every stray flower you dragged into this house, there would be nothing left for your table, your altar, your pockets, or your hair.”
Y/N muttered something uncomplimentary about owls and turned back to the dishes.
The cottage smelled like the holiday itself. There was the sharp green bite of foraged winter leaves, the warm butteriness of eggs, the deep brown comfort of mushrooms, the sweetness of rose and rice, the smoke of the hearth, and beneath it all the colder smell of the world outside waiting to thaw. Every counter had been claimed. On one side stood a great bowl of winter greens: dandelion, violet leaf, garlic mustard, chickweed, and the arugula and butter lettuce Jin had brought days before with a flourish, as though he had personally persuaded them to grow.
Beside it waited a golden frittata made with Thelma’s eggs, still warm enough to fog the plate beneath it. A platter of ramps and dame’s rocket cooled near the window, sharp and clean as the first water running under ice. Oyster mushrooms, fiddleheads, and herbs gathered in earthy little heaps, some dried from the summer before and some brought by Yoongi only yesterday, wrapped in paper and tied with twine because Yoongi made even vegetables look properly behaved.
Dessert waited apart, as dessert often does, with the quiet confidence of something certain it would be loved. There was a chèvre cheesecake pale as melting snow, its top glossed with honey and sugared thyme, and beside it a rose rice pudding for Wendy, its petals floating on the surface like little pink boats.
But Y/N’s eyes kept straying toward the pantry.
She did not want them to. There were many other things to look at: the polished plates, the newly arranged candles, the sweetgrass braid, the little goddess statue, the meadow beyond the window where the light had begun to lean toward evening. But again and again her gaze slipped to the pantry door.
Behind it, on the middle shelf, sat the hen.
It was already cleaned, already spelled, already preserved under one of Jin’s tidy little charms. A perfectly respectable hen. A plump hen. A hen that, by every ordinary measure, was no longer anyone’s problem but the cook’s.
And yet Y/N did not want to roast it.
She had stood in front of it for nearly ten minutes that morning, arms folded, looking at it with the grim suspicion one might reserve for an enemy who had arrived in disguise. Jin’s voice had repeated in her memory, cheerful and sensible and entirely unhelpful.
It is already done, Y/N. You are honoring it by cooking it. Imbolc needs meat.
Perhaps Imbolc did need meat. Perhaps the old gods liked a table with something hearty at its center. Perhaps Jin was right. He often was, which made him unbearable. But every time Y/N looked at the hen, something in her tightened. It was not disgust exactly. Nor fear. It was simply the feeling that she and the hen had reached an understanding, and the understanding was that they would not be dealing with one another today.
Roasting it herself was out of the question. That felt like challenging the holiday to burst into flames.
At last she had shut the pantry door and whispered, “Nope. Not dealing with that.”
Cordelia always brought fish anyway. Sleek winter trout, usually, silver as frost and smelling of the deep cold places under running water. The wolves would swarm it. Jin would praise it extravagantly. Hoseok, if he came, would complain about bones while eating more than anyone. Taehyung would get a bone stuck in his teeth and pretend he had not. Tradition already had meat enough.
The hen could wait.
Perhaps she would quietly give it to Cordelia later and pretend that had been the plan all along.
Y/N rinsed the last clay bowl, set it in the drying rack, and watched water slide in thin, shimmering trails down her arms. When she flicked her hands dry, droplets scattered into the winter sunlight and flashed like sparks.
“There,” she sighed. “That is the last of it.”
Shiloh hopped down from the rafter with the ceremony of a queen descending into a court she found disappointing but necessary.
For a moment, the cottage settled. Even Shiloh’s feathers flattened into something less theatrical. The fire ticked softly in the hearth. The incense curled upward in a slow blue thread. Outside, the meadow paused in the light, as if holding its breath for evening.
Y/N smoothed her palms over her apron and felt warmth lingering in the fabric. For the first time that day, she allowed herself to stand still and look at what she had made.
The cottage was ready.
Not perfect, of course. Nothing in Y/N’s cottage had ever been perfect and would probably have resented the accusation. But it was warm. It was bright. It smelled of food, herbs, smoke, and hope. It held enough cushions for sore knees, enough chairs for proud backs, enough candles for spirits, and enough food for friends who always claimed they would not eat much and then proved themselves liars.
Imbolc braided people together whether they intended it or not. Y/N often forgot, in the quiet months, where she ended and her strange patchwork of companions began. But on days like this, with the table set and the house waiting, she remembered.
The door opened without a knock.
Yoongi slipped inside the way snow falls: quietly, unassumingly, and somehow already belonging to the place where it lands. He wore soft layers the colors of dusk, river stones, and winter bark. His dark hair was tied loosely at the nape of his neck, though a few strands had escaped and lay across his cheekbones like raven feathers. In his hands he carried a woven basket, and from beneath its linen cover rose a thin curl of steam.
“You brought food,” Y/N said, wiping her hands on her apron as she crossed the room.
Yoongi looked around the cottage once, taking in the table, the cushions, the candles, the absurd number of bowls, and perhaps also the faint desperation in Y/N’s expression.
“We’re the only ones here who don’t eat meat,” he said. “I was being practical.”
“You know I made six dishes already.”
Yoongi set the basket on the teal table with a soft thump. “Arriving empty-handed felt rude.”
His voice was dry as winter wood. His expression, as always, seemed determined not to reveal anything as unruly as affection. But one corner of his mouth moved just enough to betray him.
Y/N leaned over the basket and sniffed dramatically. “Is it cabbage?”
Yoongi gave her a look so flat she nearly laughed.
“No.”
She drooped. “Tragic.”
Then he lifted the linen.
Warmth rose out in a fragrant cloud: roasted carrot, red pepper, garlic, earth, sweetness, and the deep, rich heat of gochujang. It smelled like something that had simmered all morning in a patient pot while snow thought better of falling outside.
“Gochujang and roasted carrot stew,” Yoongi said.
Y/N inhaled as if he had opened a door into paradise. “Oh. That is better.”
The ghost of a smile returned.
He nudged the basket toward her. “Don’t eat it all before everyone else arrives.”
“No promises.”
“Y/N.”
His tone sharpened in the familiar way, like a twig snapping under a boot. It was not a loud rebuke. Yoongi’s scolding was almost always quiet, which somehow made it worse.
She grinned. “Fine. Half.”
“Y/N.”
“It’s Imbolc. Rules don’t apply on Imbolc.”
“They do if you want me to keep sharing.”
She groaned with theatrical suffering, then held out her smallest finger. Yoongi hooked his through it without hesitation. Their fingers touched only briefly, but the touch was warm and ordinary and honest in a way that made Y/N’s heart do something foolish behind her ribs.
“Half,” she conceded.
“Reasonable,” he said.
Then he kicked off his boots near the door, leaving faint specks of thawed mud behind him, and wandered farther into the cottage as though he had always known exactly where to stand.
The door flew open again.
It did not simply open. It announced defeat. It struck the wall with such vigor that a hanging bundle of thyme trembled in alarm, and Jin swept into the cottage like a comet that had become convinced the whole sky existed for its entrance.
His cloak was an outrageous sweep of shimmering gold. It billowed behind him though there was not nearly enough wind indoors to justify it, which meant either he had enchanted it or the cloak had learned vanity from its owner. Even the weak February light seemed to follow him in, brightening at his shoulders and catching in his hair.
“Y/N!” he cried, striding forward with the confidence of a man certain that his arrival had improved the weather. “Tell me you missed me.”
“Moderately,” Y/N said, straightening a stack of plates without looking up.
Jin gasped.
It was not an ordinary gasp. It was the gasp of a prince betrayed, a poet wounded, and a swan informed it was merely a goose.
“You wound me.”
“You’ll live.”
“Will I?” He pressed a hand to his chest and staggered. “Will I truly?”
Before she could move out of range, he swept her into an extravagant embrace and lifted her clean off the floor.
“Jin!” she hissed, laughing despite herself. “Put me down.”
He set her down with a flourish, as though presenting her to an invisible audience.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“For what?”
“For blessing your dreary little cottage with my extraordinary presence.”
“Jin,” she said, rubbing her temple, “it is Imbolc. Please try to behave.”
“I am behaving.” He looked offended by the suggestion otherwise. “Look.”
He swung a small wooden container from the basket on his shoulder and opened it with a flourish worthy of a stage magician producing doves.
“I brought scones.”
Inside sat a neat row of pastries, each one perfectly shaped, their tops brushed with butter and sprinkled with herb sugar. The crystals caught the winter sunlight and glittered like frost that had decided to become delicious. A warm savory scent rose from them: bread, basil, spinach, parsley, and something bright and green that did not belong in February but had somehow been persuaded to attend.
“They have basil, spinach, and parsley,” Jin said reverently, as if naming royal heirs.
Y/N leaned in. “They smell wonderful.”
He preened. Truly preened. His spine straightened. His chin lifted. One hand smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from his cloak. If he had possessed tail feathers, they would have opened.
From above, Shiloh made a dry, pointed sound.
“Absolutely a peacock.”
Jin’s head snapped upward. “I heard that.”
“You were meant to,” Shiloh replied.
He pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Even the birds disrespect me.”
“Especially the birds,” Y/N said, patting his arm.
He sighed as though his burdens were ancient and undeserved. But his mouth softened at the corners, and Y/N knew him well enough to see that he was glad to be there. His happiness showed not in quiet, like Yoongi’s, but in light. He seemed to bring it with him, trailing warmth, noise, and ridiculousness in his wake. He moved around the cottage comfortably, adjusting things she had already arranged, setting his scones beside Yoongi’s stew and nudging the container two inches to the left until it sat perfectly aligned.
A shaft of afternoon sunlight caught in his hair and made him look briefly less like a person and more like a rumor about summer.
“All right,” he declared, surveying the table. “Where is the rest of it? I came ready to be dazzled.”
“You say that every year.”
“And every year,” he said solemnly, “I am.”
She tried to hide her smile and failed.
Jin’s eyes slid toward Yoongi, who had taken it upon himself to alphabetize her spice jars, though no one had asked him and no one but Yoongi had ever believed spices needed governance.
“And Yoongi,” Jin said, “for someone who avoids people, you certainly enjoy feeding them.”
Yoongi did not turn around. He moved a jar of marjoram to the left of mint.
“I like feeding her,” he said.
The cottage went very still around Y/N.
Heat rose up her neck so quickly she wondered whether she had leaned too close to the hearth.
Jin blinked. Then he pointed at Yoongi with the solemn delight of a man witnessing history.
Yoongi shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
Jin looked between them with the expression of someone preparing to become unbearable. Y/N could practically see the speech forming behind his eyes, but something about the gentle quiet of the room, or perhaps the look Yoongi gave him without turning his head, softened the worst of it.
Jin settled for patting Y/N on the shoulder. “Someone get Y/N a chair. She’s about to faint.”
“Certainly. Your face is simply celebrating Imbolc.”
Y/N snatched a bowl and pretended to be very busy with it.
Jin, mercifully, wandered toward the porch and paused to encourage the flowers near the threshold. There were daisies there, absurdly early daisies, peering up through the cold as if they had misunderstood the calendar. Jin bent over them and whispered praise in a voice usually reserved for frightened children and dramatic horses.
Y/N reorganized a stack of bowls that did not need reorganizing and waited for her heartbeat to stop behaving like a trapped sparrow.
It did not.
Then a cool breeze drifted in from the west, tinged with brine and distance. It smelled faintly of sea foam riding beneath the first thaw, and Y/N knew at once what it meant.
Ocean witches.
The grasses beyond the gate rippled in a long shiver, brown at the tips but green at the roots, confused by the mild spell warming the day. Through them came three figures, walking with the steady grace of people who had learned from tides rather than roads.
Cordelia led. She was tall and grounded, dependable in the way a lighthouse is dependable: not soft, exactly, but built to remain when weather lost its temper. Her ginger braids were threaded with shells and opals that clicked faintly as she walked. Winter light skimmed across the pale coral woven through her hair, and the hem of her cloak moved about her ankles as though it had not quite forgotten waves.
Darya came behind her, quick-eyed and quick-moving, with dark hair glinting like stormwater beneath a pale sun. The breeze curled around her ankles as though waiting for instruction. She had the look of a person who noticed everything, trusted very little, and enjoyed herself most when both those things proved useful.
Between them walked a girl Y/N had never seen before.
She could not have been more than eleven. She carried a satchel nearly half her own size, which bulged with the mysterious confidence of bags owned by children. Her eyes were wide. Her steps were light and eager, almost skipping, though she tried very hard not to. Curiosity came off her like heat from a hearth.
Before Cordelia could reach the gate, the girl broke into a run.
“Bridd?” she called breathlessly.
Y/N stepped forward, already smiling. “You must be Belinay.”
The girl nodded so hard her braids bounced. She stopped a few feet away and looked up at Y/N with such reverent astonishment that Y/N had the sudden and uncomfortable sensation of having been mistaken for a monument.
“I wanted to see if you were real,” Belinay said. “Mama says the Bridd is as old as the forest.”
Behind Y/N, Yoongi’s voice drifted dryly from the cottage. “She’s been here longer than Northorn has been a colony.”
Y/N elbowed him sharply without looking back.
“Ow,” Yoongi said, though without surprise.
“I am not that old,” Y/N told the girl.
Belinay’s mouth fell open, as though this information had raised more questions than it answered.
Cordelia reached them then and took Y/N’s hands in both of hers. Her palms were cool and steady, smelling faintly of salt, rope, and winter wind.
“Thank you for having us, Snatcher,” she said warmly. “She’s been begging to meet you for months.”
“I haven’t!” Belinay squeaked. “Only weeks.”
Darya snorted. “You built a shrine.”
Belinay turned scarlet. “It was not a shrine.”
Y/N laughed, and the sound went up into the cold air like a little bell.
“Shrine or no shrine, I am very glad you came.”
Belinay beamed so brightly that she looked as if she had smuggled in a piece of the sun.
After that the cottage filled quickly, the way summer rain fills a dry ditch: softly at first, then all at once. Voices entered. Boots came off. Cloaks were hung. Cold hands reached toward the fire. The air thickened with laughter, movement, and the particular kind of chaos that turns a house into a home.
The mismatched chairs were claimed at once. Jin dropped into the star-painted chair with the triumph of a monarch claiming a throne he believed had been waiting for him since the dawn of time.
“This one,” he said, leaning back, “is appropriate for someone of my radiance.”
“You mean your ego,” Y/N said.
“Same thing.”
Darya examined the remaining chairs as if they were suspects in a crime. At last she chose the scorched one near the wall, the chair marked by a crescent burn from a charm that had misfired years before. She traced the blackened edge with one finger and nodded, as though the wood had confessed and she approved of its honesty.
Yoongi unpacked his basket with the quiet precision of a winter ritual. Jars lined themselves into neat rows beneath his hands. The stew pot settled into the center of the table as though it had always been meant to be there and every other dish had simply been waiting to arrange itself around it.
Cordelia moved through the cottage with a slow, tide-like curiosity. Her fingertips brushed the shelves, the jars of dried herbs, the feather charms, the polished stones, the old trinkets, the carved spoons, and the little oddities Y/N had gathered over the years because no one else wanted them and she could not bear to let them feel unwanted.
“You keep entire worlds in here,” Cordelia murmured.
Y/N glanced around, suddenly shy. “I suppose I do.”
Belinay walked through the cottage as if she had stepped into a story and feared that touching anything might wake it. She stared at charms, talismans, jars, candles, and bones with her breath held. Twice she reached out one finger and then snatched it back, looking horrified by her own boldness.
It became painful to watch.
“You may touch things,” Y/N said gently.
Belinay froze. “Really?”
“As long as you don’t drink anything that glows.”
“I won’t drink anything at all,” Belinay vowed.
Across the room, Jin tapped his chin. “I might drink something glowing.”
“Shut up, Jin,” Yoongi said, without looking up from a row of jars.
Y/N hid a smile behind her hand.
Their familiar rhythms settled into the cottage like warmth returning to chilled bones. She had not realized how quiet the winter had been until now, with laughter loosening the silence from the rafters. Someone opened a window a little wider, and a mild February breeze slipped in, carrying damp earth and cold grass. It wove through the smells of bread, mint, stew, incense, and sweet herbs until the whole cottage seemed to breathe like a living thing.
Cordelia set a small wooden crate beside the stew.
“We brought fish,” she said. “But Mel is carrying it up.”
“That sounds like Mel,” Y/N said.
Mel was always last. His timing was tidal, which meant it was dependable only in the broadest possible sense. He was never gone for good, never exactly on time, and never entirely predictable.
“Hopefully with actual fish,” Darya said. “And not another jar of sea foam.”
Jin gasped. “He’d better hurry. Imbolc waits for no one.”
“Mel waits for everyone,” Yoongi said.
Cordelia sighed. “He’s close.”
Y/N looked around the cottage and felt something inside her ease. It had been too quiet here for too long. After Aldara’s passing, silence had settled into the walls like dust. There had been days when Y/N could hear every tick of the cooling stove, every scrape of branch against window, every small absence. But now the house had filled. The chairs creaked. The fire crackled. Shiloh insulted people from above. Belinay whispered questions. Jin praised himself. Yoongi pretended not to smile. Darya argued with a spoon. Cordelia moved gently among all of it.
The cottage had a pulse again.
Hosting, once Y/N surrendered to it, came as naturally as breathing. Her apron sat crooked. Her hair had escaped almost entirely from its knot. She wielded a wooden spoon like some benevolent kitchen deity who had misplaced her crown but not her authority. Somehow, through motion and instinct and the mercy of the gods, it all worked.
She ladled Yoongi’s roasted carrot stew into clay bowls. She tucked fresh herbs onto the frittata. She slid the platter of wild greens within reach of even the laziest hands. She cut the cheesecake into careful slices and threatened Jin with a fork when he tried to steal a corner too early.
From her scorched chair, Darya lifted a forkful of salad. “What’s in this?”
“That depends,” Y/N said. “If your tongue goes numb, that’s garlic mustard. If it tastes like flowers, those are violets.”
Darya chewed thoughtfully. “I like the buzzing.”
“That is not a word I want associated with my salad.”
Jin, eating one of his own scones with the solemn concentration of a judge at a contest, nodded once.
“You’ve outdone yourself, Y/N,” he said. “I did not know ramps could shine.”
Yoongi snorted. “What are you now? A food critic?”
Y/N placed a bowl in front of Belinay, who stared down at the colorful greens and petals as though she had been handed an enchanted relic. Cordelia took her bowl last and gave Y/N a quiet, grateful look.
“We’ll help clean later,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”
Y/N waved her off, though the idea of extra hands washing dishes made her want to sink into the nearest pile of cushions and never rise again.
Then the front door burst open on a gust of salty wind.
“Bel! Darya! I come bearing gifts!”
Melvin stumbled inside like a ship docking badly. He carried an enormous fish across both arms, its silver body gleaming beneath the cottage light. A strand of seaweed clung to his sleeve. His boots were muddy. His hair looked as though the wind had tried to steal it and lost.
“Caught it myself,” he announced. “Mostly. A seal helped. That is irrelevant.”
Cordelia groaned. “Melvin. You tracked sand into the house.”
“Sand,” Mel said proudly, marching toward the kitchen, “is the seasoning of the sea.”
Y/N hurried after him, half laughing and half horrified. “Just don’t blow anything up.”
“Explosions are for Yule,” Mel said breezily, already rolling up his sleeves. “This is Imbolc. It would be out of season.”
The fish landed on her counter with a heavy, reverent thud, rattling a row of jars and sending a puff of dried herb dust into the air. Mel stood over it as solemnly as a priest before an altar. Before Y/N could object, he had taken command of her kitchen.
This was what Mel did. Some people asked permission. Mel entered, declared himself useful, and somehow became so before anyone could stop him. He seized knives, spoons, herbs, bowls of spices, oil, salt, and one little jar Y/N was nearly certain he had no business touching. The pan went onto the stove. Oil hissed the instant it touched iron, snapping and spitting like applause. The fish followed with a slap of skin against heat, and at once the cottage filled with the smell of brine, crisping flesh, herbs, and sea-magic.
It smelled like Imbolc turning its face toward spring. Like cold water running free under ice. Like February forgetting itself for one glorious hour.
Y/N leaned in the doorway, arms folded.
“Should I help?” she asked, though her voice already regretted it.
“No,” Mel said grandly. “But you may admire me if moved.”
“Please clean everything afterward. Thoroughly. I don’t like animals leaving anything behind on my dishes. If I taste even a hint of something leftover, I’ll hex you into next year.”
Mel froze with the solemnity of a knight receiving sacred law.
“You have my word, Bridd.”
The pan answered with a loud sizzle. Mel tossed in rosemary, and the leaves snapped like tiny sparks. Then he splashed in a pale green liquid from a bottle so strange-looking that Y/N straightened at once.
“What is that?”
“Ocean wine,” Mel said.
“That is not a thing.”
From the table, Cordelia called, “Of course it is.”
Y/N looked at her.
Cordelia was completely serious.
“We lower bottles into the sea and let them ferment underwater,” she explained. “Look at the barnacles.”
Y/N stared at the bottle. It was crusted with barnacles, salt, and a clump of seaweed that seemed deeply committed to remaining attached.
“So,” Y/N said slowly, “it is normal wine soaked in salt water, mold, and ocean debris.”
Darya nodded. “For at least a year.”
Yoongi, still arranging a few of her spice jars into some private system of justice, asked, “Does it taste different?”
“Not at all,” Cordelia said. “But it looks pretty.”
For a heartbeat, no one spoke. Then laughter rolled through the cottage.
It rose and spread, warm and bright, catching one person and then another. Jin began reenacting an old battle with a goose, complete with flapping arms and deeply offensive honking. Darya tormented Yoongi about his need to organize everything within reach. Belinay tugged on Cordelia’s sleeve and asked whether she could grow up to be both a witch and a fisher. Yoongi pretended not to listen, which meant he was listening to every word.
Y/N stood in the kitchen doorway and let herself watch.
Her home was loud. Her home was full. Her home smelled of herbs and smoke and fish and bread and the faint wild promise of thaw. For months after Aldara died, the cottage had seemed to hold its breath. Tonight, it breathed again.
Mel lifted the fish from the pan at last and set it on a platter with dramatic reverence.
“Feast,” he declared.
The reaction was immediate. Cheers burst through the cottage like sparks catching dry tinder. Belinay squealed. Jin applauded with the lavish elegance of a nobleman attending an opera. Yoongi gave one decisive nod, which from him was practically a standing ovation. Darya simply armed herself with a fork and prepared for battle.
They crowded around the teal table in a happy scatter of elbows, bowls, chairs, cushions, and passing hands. Plates scraped. Bread traveled in the wrong direction and caused a minor crisis. Someone spilled wine. Someone else knocked over a bowl of violets, and Belinay somehow managed to paint a streak of gochujang across her nose without noticing. Y/N’s frittata disappeared almost as soon as it was cut. Yoongi’s stew was scraped clean with alarming speed. Mel’s fish drew murmurs so reverent that Jin accused everyone of worshiping dinner, then immediately took another bite and joined them.
Outside, the sun dipped low over the meadow. The brittle winter grasses turned bronze. The first smoke from the bonfire pit began to drift upward, thin and blue against the dimming sky. The air was still cool enough to belong to February, but beneath it ran something softer. Something waiting. Something alive.
Imbolc pressed close around the cottage, not grandly, not with trumpets or signs, but with the quiet blessing of a year beginning to turn.
Y/N sat among her friends, her strange beloved patchwork of people, and listened to them laugh over her table.
It was not perfect. The floor was dirty. The kitchen was a disaster. Jin was still talking about the goose. Shiloh had stolen a corner of scone and was pretending she had not. The hen remained uncooked in the pantry, and Y/N would have to decide what to do with it eventually.
But not yet.
For now, the fire was warm. The table was full. The cottage was alive.
And it was a good day.
A very good day.
Dawn had sent only one thin messenger before it: a pale seam of gold trembling low in the east, where the black edge of the world was beginning, very unwillingly, to loosen. All Bangtan Forest lay under that deep winter hush which belongs only to evergreen woods after snow. The pines and firs stood tall and dark against the paling sky, their boughs bent beneath white burdens, while the spruce needles glittered with frost as if some patient hand had threaded them with splinters of glass. The earth below was neither green nor brown nor even properly earth at all, but a hidden thing, tucked beneath old drifts and crusted silver-blue wherever the night wind had hardened the snow.
Mist lingered low between the trees. It was not the kind mist of spring, rising from warm ground and making the world seem secret and forgiving, but a colder, thinner thing: winter’s breath caught among roots and hollows, curling along fallen logs like pale smoke. Spiderwebs abandoned in the elbows of bark and bramble had gone stiff with rime. Somewhere out of sight the river whispered under a skin of ice, its voice small and muffled, like a song sung through clenched teeth. In the darkest places, where morning had not yet dared to enter, faint rings of blue-green mushrooms shone beneath the fallen timber, their ghostly light made stranger by the snow around them.
It was the hour Y/N loved best.
She loved the forest before it woke. Bangtan seemed most itself then, before the pack stirred in Foxglove, before cottage chimneys began to smoke in earnest, before squirrels resumed their noisy arguments and the thin winter birds lifted their brave, sharp songs into the cold. The world seemed balanced between sleeping and waking, as though one soft word might tip it either way. Trees remembered old things then. Snow listened. Even the air appeared to hold still.
Her wings should have cut through that blue-gray silence as easily as ink drawn across parchment.
On any other morning, flying would have been as natural to her as breathing. She would have felt the wind gather beneath her, a living hand under each wing, and she would have risen over the snow-laden pines with frost catching at her feathers, and some secret joy brightening in her breast. The cold could be cruel, certainly, but from above it was also beautiful. The world became simple from that height: white fields, dark woods, silver water, smoke unwinding from chimneys, everything lying under winter’s spell.
But this morning the air did not hold her.
This morning something had gone wrong.
She knew it before she could name it.
It had begun behind her eyes, a deep, throbbing ache that beat steadily against the inside of her skull. It was not ordinary pain. Ordinary pain had borders. This seemed to have none. It pressed outward as if her very thoughts had turned to stone and were now too heavy for her head to carry. After that came weariness: not the honest tiredness that followed work well done, not the pleasant heaviness after a long walk and a warm meal, but something strange and stealing, seeping into her bones like meltwater through cracked stone.
Her wings beat unevenly.
They trembled at the end of each stroke, and the air, instead of lifting her, resisted her.
Y/N blinked hard.
The forest blurred.
Below her, the treetops tilted, swung wide, and then righted themselves again. A blade of new sunlight struck ice on the branches and shattered into a hundred cruel sparks. Pain flashed through her head so fiercely that, for one terrible instant, she forgot the very shape of flying.
Her left wing dipped.
She caught herself, but only just.
Get home.
The words did not leave her beak. In this shape, speech lived mostly in thought, and even thought had gone thin and frayed, like cloth worn nearly through. She forced her wings to spread, caught a cold current, and rode it with the desperate care of someone clinging to a rope above a ravine.
Too soon, she thought.
The shift was coming.
It should not have been. She knew the rhythms of her own magic as a sailor knows the tide. Shape-changing was not always painless, but it had its laws. There were warnings, intervals, the inward gathering of the body before it remembered another form. There should have been time to land. Time to draw breath and make herself ready.
Her feathers prickled along her skin. Her bones ached with a deep and unnatural heat. Warmth crawled up through her veins in sudden pulses, and then came cold so sharp and swift that her whole body shuddered. The magic holding her owl-shape together sparked and split. It no longer moved through her as a clean, living thread, but snagged and tore like yarn dragged through a broken needle.
The forest pitched beneath her. Pines became dark spears. Snow became glare. The pale dawn widened, narrowed, widened again, as if the whole world were struggling for breath.
Then, between the trees, she saw the cottage.
At first it seemed only another pale shape among the drifts, a trick of snow and longing. Then the roof appeared beneath its thick cap of white, and the crooked chimney rose against the brightening sky, breathing one frail ribbon of smoke into the cold. The meadow opened before it, smooth and untouched except where the wind had carved shallow blue shadows. The garden lay buried beyond the little gate, only the woody tops of rosemary and thyme showing through the snow in stiff, frozen sprigs.
Relief came to her, though weakly, like a candle nearly burned to nothing.
Almost there.
She angled downward.
The descent should have been graceful. Y/N had landed in storms, between branches, upon narrow stones, and once, long ago, on the shoulder of a startled giant who had been too courteous to mention the inconvenience. But now the clearing rushed toward her too quickly. The snow glittered and shifted below her, every point of ice too bright, too sharp. The cottage roof seemed to lurch. The garden wall slid strangely sideways. The world had become unreliable.
Her claws struck earth and skidded over frozen grass hidden under powder. She stumbled, wings flung wide, and half-collapsed among the buried garden beds, scattering loose snow from the rosemary stems. Pain pulsed through her head in great black waves. Her vision narrowed, the edges of it darkening, while gold streaks flickered before her like sparks from a dying fire.
She had seconds.
Perhaps fewer.
Y/N dragged herself toward the cottage door.
Feathers came loose behind her. They did not fall prettily. They shed in a ragged trail across the snow, dark and damp and wrong against all that white. Each step sent a tremor up her legs. The garden path had never been long before, but now it stretched before her like a road into another country. The door, which she had opened a thousand times without thought, stood at the end of it like the gate of a besieged castle.
Her talons scraped the threshold.
Then the shift seized her.
There was no grace in it. It struck like lightning through water.
Her body convulsed. Wings folded inward too fast, and bones twisted with a terrible, intimate certainty, remembering the wrong shape before finding the right one. Feathers dissolved into skin. Heat roared along her veins. Her spine arched. Her claws became hands, shaking and pale against the floorboards. The cottage air filled with the faint smell of singed magic, wild feathers, cold rain, and snow.
She fell forward through the doorway.
Her knees struck the wooden floor with a crack that made her gasp. One hand caught the doorframe, the other curled helplessly against the boards. For a moment, her sight broke into pieces: black, gold, pinewood, snowlight, shadow. Then the pain loosened all at once, leaving her hollowed, human, and shaking.
When it was over, Y/N lay naked just inside the cottage door, drenched in cold sweat.
The air touched her skin like winter water. Her breath came in ragged pulls, each one scraping her throat raw. She tried to rise, because some stubborn part of her believed that standing upright would prove she was well, but her legs betrayed her. They buckled beneath her, useless as wet cloth.
“Not good,” she muttered.
Her voice was thin and rough, scarcely more than a breath.
“Not…”
Her hand slipped. She caught herself again, cheek nearly pressed to the floorboards. The pine beneath her smelled faintly of smoke, lavender, and old spilled tea. Ordinarily that smell would have comforted her. Now even comfort seemed to be standing on the far side of a river she could not cross.
She tried to crawl.
It was absurdly difficult. Her limbs felt separate from her, heavy and disobedient, as though someone had tied stones to them while she slept. Her magic, usually bright and living beneath her skin, had dimmed to ragged threads. Each movement seemed to drag those threads across broken glass.
“Y/N?”
The voice came from above.
A flutter of wings followed, then a clumsy thud as Shiloh landed on the back of a chair with none of her usual dignity. The little owl’s amber eyes were wide and bright with alarm.
“What happened?”
Y/N squinted up at her. The room swayed. Shiloh, the chair, the table, and the window all drifted apart from one another and then came together again.
“Shifted,” Y/N croaked. “Too early.”
Shiloh hopped down from the chair, her feathers puffing with distress. “Too early? What do you mean, too early?”
Y/N tried to laugh, but it came out as a dry, miserable rasp.
“Felt… strange.”
“Strange how?”
There was sharpness in the question, but no cruelty. Fear threaded every word. Y/N could hear it even through the feverish fog pressing at her skull. Shiloh could be grand, theatrical, and impossible when it suited her, but she did not turn truly sharp unless something had frightened her badly.
Y/N pressed a shaking hand to her forehead. Her skin burned beneath her fingers.
“Headache,” she managed. “Heavy. Air felt wrong. Couldn’t breathe right.”
Shiloh’s face changed. The irritation did not leave exactly, but it folded itself around something far more tender.
“I told you not to go far,” she said, and her voice was lower now. “There was sleet yesterday, and the frost came in hard before dawn. You know what that does to you.”
“Didn’t want,” Y/N whispered, “to fall out of the sky.”
Shiloh opened her beak, then closed it again.
For once, no scolding came.
The little owl only looked at her, and in that look were all the winter illnesses they had survived together: every fever that had taken too long to break, every cough that had settled in Y/N’s chest like an unwanted guest, every chill that had slipped into her bones and refused to leave. Shiloh knew better than anyone that Y/N did not get sick the way others did. A damp sleeve, a drafty window, one foolish night flight through sleet—any little thing that would have inconvenienced another witch could put Y/N in bed for days.
Y/N had a great deal of magic. That was the part people saw first. They saw the shifting, the old words, the healing hands, the green fire in her charms, the way wild creatures came to her door as if the trees themselves had whispered that she was safe. They saw the Bridd, and forgot there was a body beneath the title.
A body that chilled too quickly.
A body that burned too fast with fever.
A body that had always seemed a little too frail for the fierce spirit housed inside it.
At last Shiloh said, more softly, “You’re impossible.”
Y/N’s mouth twitched. “Only just noticing?”
“Don’t joke.” Shiloh hopped closer, trying very hard to sound stern and only half succeeding. “Not when you’re shaking like that.”
“I’ll be fine.”
The lie was so thin that even the cottage seemed embarrassed by it.
Y/N clawed herself forward another few inches. The bedroom was not far. It had never seemed far before. It was only across the cottage, through the little doorway beyond the hearth. Now it appeared as distant as another kingdom.
“Don’t you dare pass out here,” Shiloh warned, hopping after her. “You’ll freeze before I can get a blanket over you.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Y/N muttered.
“That is not comforting.”
Shiloh fluttered ahead into the bedroom, then back again, unable to decide whether she ought to lead, push, scold, or scream for help. Y/N reached the bed by sheer stubbornness and nothing more. She caught the rumpled blankets in both hands, dragged herself upward, and collapsed into the sheets.
The linen was cool, chamomile-scented, and soft as mercy.
She turned her face into the pillow and shivered.
“Gods,” Shiloh breathed, landing at the foot of the bed. Her voice had gone quiet. “You really do look terrible.”
“Thank you,” Y/N whispered.
“Should I get someone? Yoongi? Jin?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. She shook her head, and the room tipped so violently that she regretted it at once.
“No. They’ll worry.”
“They should worry.” Shiloh’s talons gripped the blanket. “That is rather the point of friends.”
“It’s just fatigue.”
“Fatigue doesn’t make your lips go pale.”
“It’ll pass.”
Shiloh stared at her. Y/N could feel the stare without opening her eyes.
“It will,” Y/N insisted, though the words were already blurring at the edges. “Just need to rest.”
Shiloh did not answer.
That silence was worse than any scolding.
The room tilted gently around Y/N. The walls softened. The faint embers in the hearth beyond the bedroom doorway cast a weak orange glow, flickering over the cottage walls like tired fireflies. Shiloh remained at the foot of the bed, feathers fluffed, talons curled into the blanket, caught between obedience and fear.
Y/N wanted to reassure her. She meant to say something sensible, something kind, something that would make the owl stop looking as if the world had cracked open beneath her feet.
But the words sank before she could catch them.
Her breathing thinned.
The light dissolved.
Sleep took her not like a blanket, but like water closing overhead.
Outside, morning finally arrived.
The first true sunlight crept over the snow and laid fragile gold across the bedroom floor. The forest did not burst into song. It woke thinly and reluctantly, as winter forests do. A few brave birds called from the pines. Ice ticked along the eaves. Snow slid softly from one evergreen branch to another. Somewhere beneath the white crust of the meadow, the buried grasses waited for a spring still many weeks away.
The world went on.
Inside, the Bridd lay still, her magic dimmed to a dull ember, waiting for some careful hand to coax it back to flame.
Shiloh did not wait long.
She had known fear before. Familiars always did. They lived tied to another soul, and love made every danger enormous. It made drafts seem like knives, coughs sound like omens, and foolish decisions feel like betrayals. But this was not a small danger casting a large shadow. The air in the cottage had changed. It had grown dense and strange, heavy in the way the world becomes just before a storm breaks. Y/N’s scent was sharp and fever-bright. Her pulse, when Shiloh pressed close enough to hear it, sounded too faint, too far away, too unlike itself.
Wrongness moved through the room in a way no sensible creature could ignore.
Shiloh watched her for another breath, then another, talons curled tight into the blanket at the foot of the bed. Y/N lay too still beneath the covers, her skin pale under the fever burning in her cheeks, her breaths shallow and uneven. It did not matter that she had said she only needed rest. It did not matter that she had forbidden Shiloh from fetching anyone. Y/N was terribly brave when she ought to be sensible, and terribly stubborn when she ought to be afraid, and Shiloh had long ago learned that loving her meant knowing when not to obey her.
“No,” the little owl murmured at last. “I am not letting you sleep this off.”
With a hard snap of her wings, she launched herself through the open window.
Cold morning air rushed to meet her. The meadow below lay buried in snow, smooth and pale except where the wind had carved blue hollows around the roots of trees. The sun had barely lifted over the treetops, but already its light stretched long across the clearing, turning frost to glass and icicles to thin knives of fire. Shiloh climbed higher, beating her wings hard through the bitter air.
From above, the world spread wide beneath her. There lay the dark sweep of Bangtan Forest, old and watchful, its evergreens bowing beneath their white burdens. There curled the river, half-hidden under ice and bright only where running water still broke through. Farther off, the rooftops of Bangtan village huddled beneath snow. Beyond them rose the soft shimmer of the solar coven’s hill, where Jin lived among warmth, bees, flowers under glass, and far too much self-satisfaction.
It was not a long flight.
That did not make Shiloh like it.
She hated leaving Y/N alone. She hated the weight of the decision, the memory of that shallow breathing behind her, the knowledge that Y/N’s body could fall badly ill from things other people shrugged off. Worst of all, she hated that she was flying to Jin while frightened enough to need him.
Of all the witches in the forest, she thought bitterly, it would have to be the one who will never let me forget this.
Jin’s cottage appeared with the first full spill of sunlight, and even in midwinter, even beneath snow, it could belong to no one else. Golden wards shimmered around it in a soft halo, humming with warmth and light. They had melted the snow from the path and roof, leaving the cottage tucked inside a strange little pocket of false spring. The garden itself was mostly asleep, but not wholly. Glass cloches, charm-warmed frames, and low domes of golden light covered the beds, and beneath them early blossoms nodded drowsily, coaxed open by solar magic rather than season. Vines that were bare and brown outside the wards curled green along the window nearest his workroom.
Then she saw the bees.
Not the wild abundance of summer, thank the gods, but enough to make her sigh with deep personal fatigue. A few dozen drifted lazily through the warmth beneath the eaves, slow and drowsy, their hum softer than it would be in warmer months. Jin’s wards had tempted them from sleep. They moved like living flecks of sunlight, utterly unconcerned by the fact that February still owned the rest of the forest.
Shiloh’s feathers puffed.
The bees ignored her, which was both polite and suspicious. The last time she had visited, one had landed on her beak and refused to leave until Jin bribed it with honey, which Shiloh still considered a betrayal from both parties.
She landed on the doorknob, breathless, and hammered her talons against the wood.
“Jin!” she shouted. “Wake up. It’s urgent.”
Nothing.
She knocked harder.
“Seokjin! Open the door before I do something we shall both regret.”
A faint rustling came from inside. Then a groan followed, long and lazy and so offended by morning that Shiloh might have laughed if fear had not lodged so tightly in her chest.
“It is dawn,” Jin’s voice complained from somewhere within. “The day has not even properly begun. Go home.”
“Y/N is sick.”
Silence.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Then something crashed.
The door flew open.
Jin stood there in a half-tied robe, his hair loose around his shoulders in a tangle of sleep-warmed gold. Even bleary-eyed and barefoot, he had the indecency to look radiant. Sunlight clung to him through the doorway as if it had waited all night for the privilege.
He blinked at her.
“Shiloh?”
“She’s sick,” Shiloh said again, and this time the words came quieter. “Very sick. She collapsed after shifting. She can’t stand, and her breathing is wrong.”
All sleep vanished from his face.
There were some people who only seemed frivolous because joy sat close to the surface of them. Beneath Jin’s ridiculousness there was a steady thing, and it showed itself at once. His eyes sharpened. His shoulders squared. The sleepy, golden foolishness fell away from him like a cloak dropped on the floor.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough. She’s already beginning to sweat.”
Her voice hitched on the last word despite all her efforts, and she hated it. Hated him hearing it. Not because he would mock her. He would not. They had known each other too long for that. He had been a golden, loud, impossible boy once, tripping over his own feet in the solar gardens, and she had been the owl who scolded him from the fence post while secretly making sure he did not fall into the lily pond. She disliked him often. She loved him, in her irritated way, nearly as often.
And because he knew that, he did not tease her now.
Jin swore softly and ran a hand through his hair.
“All right. Give me a moment.”
He disappeared into the cottage.
At once, the house seemed to wake with him. Candles sparked to life. Shelves glimmered gold. Jars chimed and hummed as his magic stirred among them. Shiloh hopped anxiously on the threshold, listening to the clatter of vials, the snap of satchel buckles, and the low murmur of sunlight being drawn into ready hands.
Then came a sound she dreaded.
A deep, throaty woof.
From around the corner barreled Mannix. Jin’s beloved St. Bernard came bounding toward Shiloh in a glorious avalanche of fur, drool, affection, and terrible intentions. His tail wagged with such force that it seemed capable of rearranging the furniture.
Shiloh lifted off the doorknob with a startled flap.
“Mannix, no. Not today.”
Mannix barked once, delighted that she had addressed him personally.
“Sit!” Jin called from inside. “Mannix, sit.”
The dog skidded to a halt so abruptly his paws slid on the floor. He sat, tail thumping, gazing at Shiloh with adoring confusion.
“He’s too big,” Shiloh muttered, more out of habit than genuine complaint. “You know he is too big.”
“He only wants to say hello,” Jin said, striding back with a healer’s satchel over his shoulder. His robe was now tied, though still crooked.
“Can’t believe you let Wendy talk you into getting that beast,” Shiloh huffed.
Jin scratched Mannix behind one ear. “Guard the house. I’ll be back soon.”
Mannix gave a solemn, slobbery huff and settled by the doorway as if he had just been entrusted with the fate of kingdoms.
Shiloh fluttered onto Jin’s shoulder, gripping his robe with her talons. Beneath the fabric and skin, she could feel the hum of solar magic gathering itself, warm and steady and alive. It pulsed in him like a heartbeat made of sunlight.
“You’re flying us there?”
“It’s faster.”
“Try not to singe me.”
“Try not to dig holes in my shoulder.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she snapped.
His mouth softened.
Then he stepped into the morning, lifted one hand, and spoke a word in the old tongue.
The air thickened with gold.
Light wrapped around them, bright but gentle, weightless as breath. The garden, the drowsy bees, the cottage, and the snow-bright hill all blurred into streaks of color. Wind rushed past in a warm roar. For a moment, Shiloh could see nothing but radiance.
Then the world snapped back into shape.
They landed in Y/N’s meadow, soft-footed in the snow. Powder scattered around Jin’s boots in bright crystals. The air smelled of frozen mint, woodsmoke, pine resin, and the cold iron scent of deep winter. Ahead of them stood Y/N’s cottage, crouched between the trees beneath its snow-heavy roof, a thin curl of smoke rising from the chimney like a breath held too long and finally released.
“Inside,” Shiloh said.
Jin was moving before Shiloh had finished speaking.
There are some moments in life when all the little vanities and habits of a person fall away from him as leaves fall from a tree in a sudden frost, and what remains is the true shape of the thing beneath. Jin, who could be vain over the tilt of his hair, ridiculous over the cut of a sleeve, and insufferably pleased when sunlight touched his face at just the right angle, lost all of that in the space between one breath and the next. His expression sharpened. His shoulders squared. The laughter that usually lived so near his mouth disappeared, not because he had become cold, but because something steadier and older had risen in its place.
He went through Y/N’s cottage door without ceremony, bringing with him the faint scent of winter air, solar herbs, and the clean golden warmth that always seemed to cling to him, even on the grayest mornings. Shiloh followed in a flurry of anxious feathers, darting ahead and then circling back again, as though she could hurry him by sheer force of panic.
“In here,” she said, though Jin already knew. “She’s in here. She tried to pretend it was nothing, of course. She always does. As if pretending not to be dying has ever cured anyone.”
“She isn’t dying,” Jin said, but he said it in the careful voice of a healer who has not yet looked closely enough to promise anything.
Y/N’s bedroom was dim and close, warm near the hearth and cold near the window where the winter light pressed pale fingers against the glass. The curtains had not been drawn properly. One corner of them hung loose, allowing a narrow blade of morning to fall across the floorboards and touch the leg of the bed. Beyond the window, the forest stood white and blue and silent beneath its burden of snow. Inside, everything smelled of fever: hot skin, damp hair, herbs, old smoke, and the faint bitter edge of magic strained too thin.
Y/N lay half-hidden under the blankets, small in a way that felt wrong.
She was not, ordinarily, a person anyone thought of as small. There was too much wildness in her for that. Too much old power in her hands. Too much knowing in her gaze. Even when she was quiet, even when she sat with her knees tucked beneath her and a cup of tea cooling forgotten beside her, there was always the sense that she belonged partly to the forest and partly to something older than the forest. People looked at her and saw the Bridd. They saw the witch who mended wing-bones and spoke to stubborn roots, who could take feathers upon herself and ride the dawn winds over Bangtan as if she had been born from them.
But fever had a way of making even the mighty look young.
Her dark hair clung damply to her forehead and temples. Her skin was too pale in the dim room, save where fever had painted two hard spots of color high in her cheeks. Her lips had lost their warmth. Her breathing came shallow and uneven, each breath catching faintly in her chest before the next could find its way out. One hand lay above the blanket, fingers loosely curled, the nails faintly bluish from the cold she had carried home with her.
Concern flickered over Jin’s face. It was there and gone quickly, like the shadow of a bird crossing snow. His hands, however, remained calm.
That, more than anything, steadied Shiloh.
He knelt beside the bed and touched the back of his hand to Y/N’s forehead. The heat there made his mouth tighten.
“Fever,” he murmured. “High, but manageable.”
Shiloh clung to the bedpost. Her talons tapped an anxious little rhythm into the wood before she realized she was doing it and forced herself to stop. “How high is high?”
“High enough that I’m glad you came.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have until I examine her properly.” His voice was gentle, but firm enough to keep her from snapping at him again. “How long has she been like this?”
“Since sunrise. Maybe before.” Shiloh’s feathers ruffled and then settled again in quick, worried waves. “She came home from flying and collapsed inside the door. She said she felt strange.”
Jin opened his satchel. He did it with the swift competence of someone who had packed such bags in the dark, in storms, in kitchens crowded with weeping relatives, in barns, beside wells, and once or twice under circumstances no sensible person would have called safe. Little glass bottles clinked against one another. Dried herbs rustled in folded paper. A spoon, a roll of soft cloth, a stoppered vial of golden oil, and a small copper cup appeared on the bedside table one after another.
“Strange how?” he asked.
“Headache. Trouble breathing. Heavy, she said.” Shiloh paused, trying to remember every word, as though one misplaced syllable might be the thing that mattered. “She said the air felt wrong.”
Jin glanced toward the window, then back to Y/N. “She flew through sleet?”
“Last night, yes. And frost before dawn.” Shiloh’s voice tightened, thin with guilt and irritation tangled together. “I told her not to go far.”
“You did right coming for me.”
It was a simple thing to say. It should not have mattered as much as it did. Yet Shiloh’s feathers settled a little, and the hard knot in her chest loosened by the smallest measure. She had expected questions, perhaps reproach, perhaps one of Jin’s soft sighs that meant he thought everyone in the room was being foolish except him. She had not expected approval.
“I should have come sooner,” she muttered.
“You came when you knew she needed more than rest.”
“She needed more than rest the moment she crawled through the door looking like a plucked ghost.”
“Then you came soon enough.”
Shiloh looked away, but not before Jin saw the fear in her eyes.
He took out a small tin and opened it with his thumb. At once, the room filled with the soft scent of lemon balm and starflower, bright and tender against the feverish air. Beneath it was something else, something warmer and sunlit, like summer honey kept in a cupboard through winter.
Jin leaned closer and listened to Y/N’s breathing. Then he touched two fingers to the pulse below her jaw. His face did not change much, but Shiloh, who had known him since childhood and distrusted most of his expressions on principle, saw enough.
“What?” she demanded.
“It looks like a cold.”
“A cold?” Shiloh repeated, offended by the smallness of the word. “She nearly fell out of the sky.”
“A cold can be a very serious thing in the wrong body.”
“So it isn’t just fatigue.”
“No.” He looked at her then, and his voice was not frightening because he did not dress the truth up in false comfort. “It will likely take a few days to a week before she is properly herself again, but she should be fine.”
“Should be?”
“Will be, if she rests and takes what I give her.”
“You say that as though she has ever willingly done either.”
Jin gave the faintest smile, not enough to be cheerful, only enough to be familiar. “That is why you and I are here.”
He set to work mixing the tonic. He measured partly by sight, partly by scent, and partly by that old healer’s instinct which looks mysterious to everyone watching and perfectly ordinary to the person doing it. Into the copper cup went a pinch of pale dried petals, two drops of golden oil, a spoonful of dark syrup, and a thread of light drawn from his own fingertip. The light did not blaze. It sank into the mixture like dawn entering milk, turning it warm and faintly luminous.
The cottage seemed to hold its breath while he stirred.
“She’s always been like this,” Shiloh said suddenly.
Jin did not look up, but his hands slowed a fraction.
“People forget,” the little owl went on, the words gathering force as if she had carried them too long. “They see her working, and fixing things, and putting on that brave face of hers, and they think she must be well because she is useful. But she hasn’t been properly well since that wolf boy’s ceremony, and already she’s preparing for the Luna’s birthday at the end of March. Orders, charms, garlands, blessings, gods know what else. She’ll run herself into the ground because everyone asks and she hates saying no.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Jin said quietly.
“No,” Shiloh admitted after a moment. “You usually don’t.”
Then he slid one arm behind Y/N’s shoulders and lifted her gently. She stirred, barely. Her head lolled against him, her lashes trembling without opening, as if even that small journey from pillow to arm required more strength than she could spare.
“There now,” Jin murmured. “Just a little. You don’t have to wake.”
Y/N made a faint sound, too weak to be protest and too miserable to be speech.
“I know,” he said softly, as though she had spoken plainly. “I know. But you must swallow this.”
He tipped the tonic carefully to her lips.
For one dreadful heartbeat, nothing happened.
Shiloh’s claws dug into the bedpost.
Then Y/N swallowed by instinct. Once. Twice. A third time, weaker than the others, but enough.
Jin lowered her back against the pillow, and the tight line of his mouth eased by a little. He wiped a stray drop of tonic from the corner of her mouth with the edge of his sleeve and brushed damp hair away from her forehead.
“Aldara was similar, or so my mother always said,” he murmured. “A simple fever could keep her in bed for days.”
At the sound of that name, the room changed.
Not greatly. No candle flickered. No wind stirred. But memory is its own sort of ghost, and when Aldara entered a room, even by name alone, one felt the old floorboards remember her feet.
“Their magic lives close to the skin,” Jin continued. “That makes them powerful, but it wears the body thin. It is like keeping a bright lamp in a paper house.”
“I’m aware,” Shiloh sighed. “It is not unusual in her line. Aldara’s own familiar, Ragnarok, was always fretting after her before his trials. Of course, I got an even sicker girl. Just my luck. At this rate, I shall return as a cow in my next life and spend the whole of it standing in a field, chewing grass, swatting flies, and minding no one’s business but my own.”
His smile softened and faded as he turned back to Y/N. He laid two fingers near her temple, and a small glow gathered there: gold, quiet, and warm. It sank beneath her skin slowly, as sunlight sinks through thin curtains.
“Y/N’s immune system is weaker than Aldara’s was,” he said. “Winter has always been harder on her.”
Shiloh’s talons flexed around the bedpost. Outside, snow slid from the cottage roof with a soft, heavy sigh. The sound made both of them glance toward the window, though nothing else moved. The morning beyond the glass was brightening by degrees, pale and pitiless, beautiful in the way very cold things often are.
“All of us worry about her,” Jin said at last. “But we have to trust that the gods have some sort of plan.”
Shiloh looked at him for a long moment.
There had always been irritation between them, but it was the sort of irritation that had been polished smooth by years. Jin had been too bright as a child, too loud as a boy, and too pleased with his own reflection at every age. Shiloh had pecked him once for calling her adorable, twice for placing ribbons near her nest, and once, memorably, for singing outside Aldara’s window before breakfast. He had never fully forgiven her for that last one, though he had deserved it.
Still, he had brought medicine when Aldara died. He had sat outside Y/N’s cottage for hours during the first terrible fever after the funeral, not demanding to be let in, not making a performance of his concern, simply keeping the lamps warm and the snow melted from the path. He had never treated Y/N’s frailty as weakness. He had never mistaken her suffering for inconvenience.
That counted for something.
Shiloh released the bedpost and hopped onto the nightstand, where she began to pace in small, tight turns. Her claws clicked against the wood. Click, click, click. A tiny sound, but in that quiet room it seemed enormous.
“She can’t die,” Shiloh said.
Jin’s brow softened. “Because of your trial?”
She stopped at once and looked at him sharply.
“I’m not saying it as an accusation,” he said. “I know being human again is your great hope.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t care.” Her feathers lifted, making her seem larger than she was. “Her happiness and well-being are my priority. Keeping her safe may help my judgment, yes, but that is not why I do it. I know I am not always the easiest familiar. I know I am sharp, and proud, and occasionally unkind when frightened.”
Shiloh swallowed, and when she spoke again, the bite had gone out of her voice.
“I try very hard to keep my Bridd all right,” she said. “I love her very much.”
The words hung there, small and fierce.
Then, as though a door inside her had opened too far and could not be closed quickly enough, more words came after them.
“If she dies before judgment is cast, I’ll be stuck between worlds again.”
It began sharply, all beak and claw, as if she meant to make the confession unpleasant before anyone else could. But something broke in the middle of it. She turned her head away, feathers bristling, trying to hide the shake in her voice by making herself look larger.
“She is home,” Shiloh said, softer now. “My home. We have been together longer than you can imagine. In this life and in others before it.”
She looked toward Y/N.
There was something ancient in the little owl’s face then, something no mortal bird had any right to possess. For a moment, Jin could almost see the shadow of all she had once been and all she had lost: not merely a familiar, not merely a scolding owl with sharp opinions and sharper talons, but a soul stretched thin across judgments, lives, punishments, hopes, and love that refused to die properly.
“She is not allowed to simply…”
Her voice cracked.
“…die.”
Jin looked at her for a long moment. The jesting answer he might once have offered did not come. His expression gentled, and for once, the brightness of him did not irritate her. It warmed the room without asking to be admired.
“She won’t die, Shiloh,” he said. “I promise. This is serious, but it is treatable.”
“It doesn’t feel treatable.” Her wings flicked, restless and agitated. “It feels like the world has gone wrong.”
He lowered his gaze briefly to Y/N and checked her pulse again. “Her breathing is a little steadier.”
Shiloh paced to the edge of the nightstand and back again. Then she stopped, as though a thought had struck her with physical force.
“Bring Yoongi.”
Jin blinked. “Yoongi doesn’t heal anymore.”
“I know that.”
“Then why—”
“Because she loves him more than anyone else.” Shiloh looked toward Y/N, and all her sharpness softened into plain fear. “If he is here, she will rest easier. You and I both know it.”
Jin’s jaw shifted slightly.
It was a very small movement. Most people would have missed it. Shiloh did not.
Jin sighed. “Would you like me to fetch Cordelia while I am at it?”
“If she is near enough, I suppose. Sea magic might help balance the fever.” Shiloh considered this with visible reluctance, then made a sour little noise. “Can’t you get Wendy instead? Cordelia is a great deal at the best of times, and I am in no mood for her mouth.”
“Wendy is in Clarcton,” Jin said. “Her sister’s doing that whole suitor parade, remember? Half the coven went with them. They won’t be back for days.”
“Then just Yoongi.”
Jin exhaled slowly and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You are impossible.”
“Only when I’m right.”
The cottage stood quiet around them. Y/N breathed shallowly on the bed. Sunlight crept farther across the floor, thin and winter-pale, touching the woven rug, the leg of the nightstand, the scattered hem of the blanket. Shiloh, puffed and frightened and holding herself together by will alone, stared at the solar witch she had known since he was a vain golden child with scraped knees and too much confidence.
At last, Jin’s shoulders loosened.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll fetch him.”
“And don’t be rude to him.”
Jin gave her a tired look. “Shiloh.”
“No, I mean it.” Sternness returned to her at once, partly because she had won and partly because fear needed somewhere to go. “This whole business between you two is immature. You ought not let a girl get between you, especially when we both know he has no interest in her.”
Jin busied himself with closing the tin of herbs. “That is hardly the point.”
“It is entirely the point. If there were ever a girl that boy would marry, it would be the one in that bed, and even then I suspect she would have to propose with a sword pressed to his throat.”
“Shiloh.”
“And you truly think he and that pretty blond boy from Syrena were only friends?”
Jin said nothing.
It was not, for once, because he had no answer. It was because he had several, and none of them would improve the morning. So he chose instead to tighten the buckle on his satchel and let Shiloh’s words pass over him like sleet against a window.
If Yoongi had an interest in men, Jin thought, he would have said so himself.
And yet the thought did not settle cleanly.
For years, Jin had been very careful not to look too closely at certain things. That was one of the many talents pride gave a person. Pride could turn a memory aside before it stung. Pride could make loneliness seem dignified. Pride could convince a man that he was injured when he was only embarrassed, abandoned when he had merely walked away first.
The truth was that Jin knew his old jealousy over Wendy’s crush on Yoongi had been foolish. Worse than foolish, perhaps. Small. He had known it even while nursing it. He had let it sit in him like a thorn and had then blamed everyone else for the pain. He had pushed Yoongi away over a girl Yoongi had never wanted and Wendy had long since stopped mooning over.
It was ridiculous.
It was lonely.
Yoongi had been his only true male friend, and Jin had adored him in those quiet, ordinary ways men sometimes do not know how to confess without wrapping the confession in a joke. He missed their lunches. He missed Yoongi’s bluntness, which was sometimes rude and often exactly what Jin needed. He missed sitting across from someone who did not require him to shine every moment of the day.
With Wendy gone, and Y/N always burdened with orders and work, and his own pride proving poor company, the solar cottage had lately felt much larger than it was.
Shiloh was right about one thing.
It was long past time to let it go.
Jin’s mouth twitched despite himself. “I’ll tell him it’s urgent.”
“Tell him…” Shiloh’s voice faltered.
The sternness fell from her all at once, and beneath it was only a frightened soul in feathers.
“Tell him it’s Y/N.”
Jin’s face softened again. “That will be enough.”
He turned back to the bed before leaving. For a moment, he simply looked at Y/N. Not as a healer looks at a patient, nor as a friend looks at someone beloved, but as a person looks at a light he has always expected to be burning and has suddenly realized could go out.
Then he brushed his fingers once more over her forehead.
A faint golden warmth sank beneath her skin. Her breathing steadied, barely, but enough that the room itself seemed to unclench. Shiloh felt it. So did Jin. Even the cottage seemed to settle around her, the old beams creaking softly as if relieved.
Shiloh watched him cross to the door, wings half-open, ready to chase him if he hesitated.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
He gave one nod.
Light gathered around him, warm and bright, humming with intention. It did not burst or flare. It folded itself about him like a cloak woven from morning. For an instant his outline blurred, gold at the edges, as though the sun had decided to take human shape and then thought better of it.
Then the light folded inward.
Jin was gone.
The cottage became terribly quiet.
There is a quiet that comforts and a quiet that watches. This was the second sort. It settled over the room and under the doorways and among the rafters. It lay in the hearth where embers glowed low beneath a skin of ash. It gathered around the little bottles Jin had left on the bedside table. It seemed to listen to every breath Y/N took and count the space before the next.
Outside, the forest continued as though nothing had happened. Snow slid from the pines. A single winter bird called from somewhere beyond the window. Sunlight brightened the frozen meadow by degrees, pale and pitiless. The river muttered under ice. The world, which had no manners at all, went on being beautiful while Shiloh’s own small world lay feverish and still beneath the blankets.
She heard almost none of it.
She hopped from the nightstand to the pillow, careful not to jostle Y/N. Then she bowed her head close enough to feel each fragile breath stir the feathers of her breast.
Y/N did not wake. Her lashes lay dark against her cheeks. The fever still burned in her, though the hard edge of it had softened under Jin’s tonic. Her hand twitched once above the blanket, fingers curling faintly as if reaching through some dream.
Shiloh pressed closer.
“I know you can’t hear me,” she whispered. Then, after a pause, “Or perhaps you can, and you’re only pretending not to so I won’t scold you. That would be very like you.”
The room gave no answer. Shiloh’s eyes stung, which she found deeply inconvenient.
“You’re going to wake up,” she continued. “You’re going to wake up, and you’re going to be insufferable about this. You’ll say you are fine, and I’ll call you a liar, and then you’ll ask for tea.”
Her voice thinned.
“And I’ll make it for you.”
She tucked one foot beneath herself, then the other, settling beside Y/N’s pillow like a sentry carved from feathers and fear. Every now and then, she glanced toward the door, willing Jin to return with Yoongi, willing the forest to deliver him quickly, willing the gods, who were so often maddeningly quiet, to make themselves useful for once.
Y/N breathed in.
Y/N breathed out.
Shiloh lowered her head until her beak nearly touched Y/N’s hair.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” she whispered. “Not like this.”
The hours crawled.
Or perhaps they were not hours at all. Fear keeps its own clock, and every tick of it is cruel. It can stretch a minute until it is long enough to walk across, and then snap an hour short so that one finds oneself startled by the light changing in the window. Shiloh, who knew the ordinary measurements of mornings very well—the first stir of the fire, the second settling of frost, the third call of the winter birds—lost all sense of them now.
She stood vigil on the bedpost with her claws curled around the wood and her feathers dulled to a muted gray-brown, as if worry had taken the shine out of her. The cottage, usually so full of little homely sounds, seemed unnervingly still. There should have been the tick and hum of charms in the cupboards, the soft creak of old beams warming themselves, the whisper of herbs drying in their bundles above the hearth, and perhaps the small, pleasing complaint of the kettle as it settled on its hook. But now there was only the faint pop of the dying fire, the needle-thin ticking of ice at the window, and Y/N’s breathing.
Too shallow.
Too quiet.
Too unlike her.
Jin’s magic lingered in the room, tinting the shadows faintly gold. It lay across the blanket in soft threads and glowed dimly at Y/N’s temples, and any sensible creature would have taken comfort in it. Jin was not careless with healing, whatever else Shiloh might accuse him of being. His magic was warm, clean, and capable. It had steadied Y/N’s breath. It had drawn some of the hard, cruel heat down from her face. It had made the room feel less like a place where death might enter unnoticed.
But Shiloh did not trust quiet.
Quiet had deceived her before.
Twice she fluttered down from the bedpost and pressed the soft edge of one wing against Y/N’s cheek. The first time, she did it with the stern little air of someone inspecting a foolish child who had only scraped her knee.
“You’re fine,” she murmured. “You’ve always been fine.”
That, of course, was not true. Y/N had been ill many times. Y/N had frightened her many times. But there are lies the heart tells not because it believes them, but because it needs to hear a friendly voice in the dark.
The second time Shiloh touched her, Y/N’s skin still burned, and her breath shivered faintly against the owl’s feathers.
“You’re fine,” Shiloh tried again.
Her voice cracked before she reached the end of it.
She hated that. She hated fear most when it made her small. Fear ought to sharpen a creature. It ought to give one claws and teeth and a good loud voice. Instead, it had made a trembling thing of her. A little gray-brown bird on a bedpost, watching the person she loved lie pale and feverish beneath blankets.
She did not know how much time had passed when she finally heard voices outside.
At first she thought she had imagined them. The cottage had been so full of listening that any sound seemed possible, even invented ones. But then there came the muffled crunch of boots in snow, the low murmur of someone speaking in the meadow, and a colder gust of air pressing around the doorframe as shadows moved beyond the frosted window.
Shiloh’s head snapped up.
She flew to the sill and peered through the glass, blinking against the pale winter glare. The snow outside was bright enough now to hurt the eyes, blue in the hollows and gold where the morning had touched it. Figures stood near the path, dark against the white meadow. One of them moved with Jin’s unmistakable grace, which would have been irritating under almost any other circumstance.
The other—
“Finally,” Shiloh breathed, and the word came out half relief, half accusation.
Yoongi stepped inside first.
He looked as though he had been dragged from the far side of a long night and had not yet forgiven morning for existing. His dark hair was tied loosely back, though several strands had escaped and fallen near his face. Shadows sat beneath his eyes. A faint roughness clung to him, not untidiness exactly, but the mark of someone who had been awake too long over work that would not hurry itself for anyone. His cloak was dusted with snow at the shoulders, and one of his sleeves had been rolled and forgotten, exposing the pale line of his wrist.
But his presence changed the room at once.
It did not brighten it as Jin’s did. It did not fill the corners with warmth, or set the glass jars glowing, or make the shadows look as though they were considering repentance.
It grounded it.
The cottage seemed to settle more firmly upon its foundations simply because Yoongi had entered. The air grew quieter, but no longer in the dreadful way. It was the quiet of a stone placed at the bottom of a rushing stream. Solid. Certain. Unmoved.
He was not alone.
Behind him came Cordelia, wrapped in a heavy cloak over seafoam-colored robes that moved softly around her legs as she walked. Her long silvered hair fell over her shoulders like water under moonlight, and a faint scent of salt, rain, and crushed shells seemed to enter with her. Her presence carried the calm of deep tides: not weak, not slow, not sleepy, but steady with an old power that did not need to announce itself. There was something in her that made one think of cliffs enduring storms, of moonlit bays, of the great sleeping creatures that move far below the surface of the sea.
“Cori,” Shiloh said, startled despite herself. “You came too?”
“I was with him already,” Cordelia said.
Her voice had the rhythm of the coast in it, gentle and sure, with the faint lilt of waves drawing back over stones. She removed her gloves as she crossed the room, her eyes already moving to Y/N. “He was bartering for kelpwort and sea-mist powder when Jin arrived. I thought it wise to come along.”
“Bartering,” Shiloh repeated, aghast. “Now?”
Yoongi set his satchel on the table and began pulling out vials with the unhurried exactness of a man who had no intention of being rushed by panic, owls, or fever. “We started last night. Time slipped.”
The owl clicked her beak sharply. “While Y/N was dying?”
“She’s not dying,” Jin called from the doorway, brushing snow from his sleeve. “I told you that ten times.”
“Tell me again,” Shiloh said.
It came out quieter than she meant it to.
“Please.”
Jin’s expression changed at the word. It was not often that Shiloh gave anyone a please. She handed out insults like crumbs to sparrows, criticism like festival sweets, and commands as if she had been born wearing a crown. But please was rare from her. Please meant something had gone past pride and into the soft, unguarded country beneath it.
Jin shut the door behind them, crossed the room, and answered without even the shadow of teasing.
“She’s not dying.”
The words did not fix everything. Words seldom do. But they placed a stone beneath Shiloh’s feet, and for a moment she could stand.
Yoongi crossed to the bed. Cordelia followed, her sea-glass eyes softening when she saw Y/N beneath the blankets.
“Oh,” Cordelia murmured.
It was a small sound, and a sad one.
“She looks so much like her aunt.”
She rested a gentle hand on Y/N’s shoulder, not to examine her yet, but to greet her, as if some sleeping part of Y/N might know who had come.
Yoongi crouched beside the bed. He did not touch Y/N at first. His fingers hovered above her temple, still as winter branches, while his eyes narrowed in concentration. For a few breaths he listened, not only with his ears, but with whatever quiet sense kitchen witches have for the hidden workings of a body: heat, pulse, breath, hunger, salt, weakness, the little inward fires that keep flesh from surrendering.
Then he placed two fingers at the pulse below her jaw, waited, and exhaled.
“Strong,” he said.
Shiloh leaned forward so quickly she nearly lost her grip on the bedpost. “Strong?”
“Her pulse.” Yoongi’s voice was low, even, and plain. “Skin’s hot, but not dangerously so.”
He pressed his palm lightly against Y/N’s chest and closed his eyes.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the air stirred.
A ripple of cool silvery energy moved through the room, thin and bright as moonlight caught in water. It did not gleam like Jin’s magic. It did not warm. It soothed. It spread through the blankets, over Y/N’s shoulders, along the line of her throat, and down into the places where her breathing had hitched and struggled. The fever did not vanish, but it seemed to lose its teeth. Y/N drew in a breath, then another, and the second came more easily than the first.
It was a small change.
It was unmistakable.
“Well?” Shiloh asked. “What is it?”
Yoongi opened his eyes.
“What Jin said. Fever. Exhaustion. Cold exposure from flying through bad weather all night.” His gaze moved briefly to the scattered feathers still near the doorway, then back to Y/N. “The shift probably made it worse.”
Shiloh lowered her head.
“So I was right to worry.”
Yoongi looked at her then, really looked, and his voice gentled.
“Yes. You were right.”
Jin leaned lightly against the doorway. “No one said you weren’t.”
She ignored them all after that and brushed a damp strand of hair from Y/N’s forehead. Her touch was light, but not timid. Cordelia had the hands of someone who had tended many fevers, bound many wounds, and carried many secrets without dropping them.
“Aldara was just the same,” she said.
Memory softened her voice, and the name settled into the room like a familiar ghost finding an old chair. “Before she took on the Bridd mantle, she and I would swim in the shallows whenever the weather allowed. If she didn’t dry her hair properly afterward, she would be feverish before nightfall. I scolded her constantly.”
Shiloh let out a small, unsteady breath.
“That sounds like her.”
“She always said, ‘The sea wants to keep me longer.’” Cordelia smiled, but there was ache in it. “Stubborn as stone. Fierce as anything I had ever known. And very sure that consequences were meant for other people.”
“That also sounds like her,” Jin said.
“It sounds like all of them,” Yoongi murmured, checking Y/N’s pulse again. “Same constitution, then. Magic close to the bone. It burns hot and fast, and afterward the body pays for it. Mist, cold, exhaustion, a difficult shift—any of it could have pushed her into fever. All of it together certainly would.”
“And Y/N’s immune system is worse,” Jin added. “So we treat it seriously.”
Shiloh glanced toward him.
There was gratitude in the look, though she would sooner have swallowed a pinecone than named it aloud.
“She was restless,” Shiloh whispered. “She said she felt strange. I should have stopped her.”
Yoongi’s eyes flicked to the owl. “How?”
Shiloh said nothing.
“Truly,” he said. “How would you have stopped her?”
“I could have—”
“Scolded her?”
“That is often effective.”
“With Y/N?”
Shiloh’s feathers sank.
Yoongi’s voice gentled further. “Even if you had tried, she wouldn’t have listened.”
It was the truth, and therefore more terrible than comfort.
Cordelia tucked the blankets more securely around Y/N. She did it with an ease that turned the act into a kind of spell: blanket to shoulder, edge beneath chin, warmth held in, cold kept out. She laid one hand briefly over Y/N’s sternum and another near her brow. A faint misty glow gathered between her palms, sea-pale and quiet, and the fever in Y/N’s face softened another degree.
“She’ll recover,” Cordelia said. “Give her two days of steady warmth and proper rest. No work, no flying, no shifting unless absolutely necessary. I’ll leave a tonic to break the fever by morning.”
“You’re sure?” Shiloh asked.
Cordelia looked at her with a patient smile. “She is Aldara’s blood. Her stubbornness is thicker than iron and twice as enduring. She’ll be all right.”
Jin snorted softly. “Truest thing said all morning.”
Shiloh fluffed herself into a tired little ball. “You’re all calmer than I am.”
“Because panicking won’t help her,” Yoongi said.
His tone was even, unhurried, and infuriatingly solid. He wiped his hands on a cloth, then began arranging his vials on the bedside table in an order that made sense to him and probably no one else. “Rest will. Warmth will. Medicine will. Someone watching her breathing will. She’ll wake when her body is ready.”
Shiloh knew that tone.
It ended arguments. Not by force. Yoongi almost never needed force. It ended them by being immovable in a way that made arguing feel like throwing pebbles at fog.
Still, she flew to the headboard and looked down at Y/N’s pale face.
“You’re certain?” she whispered again.
Yoongi met her gaze.
“Yes. I’m certain.”
“Then stay,” she blurted. “Until she wakes.”
Yoongi stilled.
“Please,” Shiloh added.
That word hung strangely between them.
Jin looked away, politely enough. Cordelia lowered her eyes to the tonic she was preparing, though the corner of her mouth softened. Yoongi remained crouched beside the bed, his hand resting lightly on the edge of the blanket.
Shiloh used many words freely: fool, idiot, menace, sunflower, vain peacock, walking chandelier. Please was not one of them.
Yoongi hesitated.
His eyes flicked toward Cordelia.
“She’ll rest easier with you here,” Cordelia said. “You’ve always been her closest friend. And frankly, you have become more of a hermit than Thelma this past year.”
Jin lifted his brows. “More than Thelma? That’s a grave diagnosis.”
Yoongi ignored him and looked back at Y/N.
She lay still and fever-warmed, breathing in small, fragile pulls of air. One hand had slipped from beneath the blanket, palm half-open as though she had been reaching for something in sleep and forgotten what it was. Yoongi’s gaze rested on that hand for a moment longer than it needed to.
Something passed over his face, quiet and unreadable, like the moment before a tide turns.
“All right,” he said.
Shiloh’s shoulders sank with relief.
Jin leaned one shoulder against the doorway and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll send word to Wendy, though she’s still trapped in Clarcton.”
Cordelia’s mouth twitched. “I received a letter yesterday. Nessa has apparently terrified three suitors already and turned a fourth into a tree.”
Jin groaned. “That sounds about right.”
“A shrub, technically,” Cordelia added. “But a very unhappy one.”
“That family should not be allowed near courtship rituals.”
“She is growing fond of a human boy, though,” Cordelia said. “Says he finds her ditsy.”
Yoongi pulled a chair to Y/N’s bedside and sat down. The chair gave a small wooden complaint beneath him.
“Ditsy is certainly one word for it.”
He tried not to think too long about Nessa.
The ache that accompanied her name nudged at him, quiet and unwelcome. It was not a sharp pain. Those were easier, in some ways. Sharp pain announced itself honestly. This was the duller sort, the kind that had lived too long inside him to be a wound and not long enough to become memory.
Only Y/N knew the whole of it.
Only Y/N knew about the old relationship, the years hidden beneath ordinary conversation, the glances swallowed before others could see them, the meetings made to look accidental, the care taken with letters, names, and silences. Only Y/N knew how some love did not end so much as sink below the surface, where no one else could see it but where it still moved with the tide.
Ten years was a long time to keep a secret.
But he and Nessa had both feared the same thing: that truth, once spoken, would wound Wendy. Wendy, who had loved easily and brightly when they were young. Wendy, who had once looked at Yoongi as though he were a locked door she might someday find the key to. Wendy, who deserved tenderness even in disappointment.
So the secret had remained buried.
Silent as silt at the bottom of the sea.
Now Y/N lay before him, feverish and still, the keeper of that secret and so many others. She had carried it without judgment, as she carried most things: not lightly, exactly, but faithfully. She had never pressed him to speak before he was ready. She had never made his fear seem cowardly. She had only sat beside him on certain evenings, when the cottage windows were dark and the kettle had gone quiet, and let silence be a place where he could breathe.
Yoongi’s hand tightened once on the arm of the chair.
Then he let it loosen.
The cottage settled into a softer quiet.
It was no longer the dreadful silence of a house waiting for bad news. It was the quieter peace that comes after worry has done all the useful things it can and must now sit down by the bed. Cordelia hummed under her breath as she stirred herbs into Y/N’s water, a tune that sounded older than words and smelled faintly, somehow, of salt and rain. Jin stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his head bowed, sunlight still faint along his fingers. For once he did not try to fill the room with speech. His silence was awkward at first, then kind.
Shiloh finally tucked her head beneath one wing, though she did not sleep. Her vigil merely changed shape. It became stillness instead of motion, listening instead of pacing, a small feathered trust placed unwillingly in the hands of others.
Yoongi remained beside the bed.
Every so often he checked Y/N’s pulse. Once he adjusted the blanket. Once he lifted the cup Cordelia had prepared and coaxed a little water past Y/N’s lips when she stirred enough to swallow. He spoke to her each time, low and steady, not with the grand soothing phrases people use when they are frightened by their own helplessness, but as though she were merely very tired and would be annoyed later if everyone made too much of it.
“That’s it,” he murmured once. “Just a little.”
Y/N’s brow tightened faintly.
“I know,” he said. “You can be angry with me when you wake up.”
Shiloh opened one eye from beneath her wing. “She will be.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Cordelia’s mouth curved.
Jin glanced at Yoongi then, and something small and old passed between them. Not forgiveness. Not yet. Forgiveness, when it is real, does not usually come prancing in with trumpets and garlands. It arrives more like a thaw: first one drop from an icicle, then another, then the surprising sound of running water where everything had been frozen the day before.
But it was a beginning.
Outside, the forest brightened with the slow, pale unfolding of a winter morning. Sunlight slid between the snow-heavy evergreens in cold ribbons, catching on frost and ice until the world shone white and gold. The mist lifted by degrees, revealing buried paths, dark trunks, and the long stillness of a forest not yet ready for spring. Somewhere high in the pines, a bird called once and then thought better of it. The river muttered under its ice. Snow fell in soft clumps from burdened branches, leaving little puffs of white powder in the air.
Winter still held Bangtan in both hands.
But inside the cottage, winter had been pushed back from the bed.
There was warmth at the hearth. There was medicine on the table. There were herbs steeping, blankets tucked, hands ready, and three kinds of magic keeping quiet watch around a sleeping girl whose body had been asked to carry too much.
Y/N slept on.
Her fever eased by degrees.
Her breath steadied.
And though the cold pressed its pale hands against the windows and peered in with all the patience of February, it could not come any farther.
