Chapter Text
He went for the door, and the mountain was already there ahead of him.
The blizzard had come down out of nowhere while they climbed. When he pulled the door open, it was waiting for him. A wall of white and wind where the path should have been. The whole night gone blind with it. It was almost the same snow Jeongguk had driven down through to reach him, worse now. It came in off the dark in one long cold sheet.
And Taehyung stood there in the open door, the way out in front of him that was not a way out at all. The sunflowers gold and ruined in his arms. His breathing coming apart. He heard himself make a small broken sound he hadn't meant to let go.
He couldn't leave. The snow wouldn't let him. And under the snow, worse, neither would he.
He pushed the door shut. He turned back into the gold light and the impossible summer on the table, and he started to move, because his body needed somewhere to put all of it and there was nowhere, so it went into his feet. Three steps to the window. Three steps back. The flowers dripped down the front of his shirt.
"Nobody has ever done this," he said.
Jeongguk didn't answer. He'd stayed near the door, a careful distance, his hands loose at his sides, and he only watched him pace.
"Do you understand what I'm telling you?" Taehyung turned at the wall and came back. "Not once. In my whole life. No one has ever made me a surprise. No one has ever kept the small things I said and built them into anything. I didn't even know I'd said them out loud." His voice cracked on it. "Strawberries. In December. Who does that?"
"Tae."
"Don't." He kept walking. "Let me. If I stop I won't get it out."
Jeongguk closed his mouth. Outside, the wind gathered a long handful of snow and threw it soft against the glass, then dragged off again into the dark. He didn't take his eyes off Taehyung the whole time. He watched him the way you hold still for something that might bolt.
"I once allowed myself to dream," Taehyung confessed, his voice laced with bittersweet nostalgia. "I hoped I would be the one chosen, even if only this once, that fate would finally smile upon me. My family sacrificed everything, pouring their hearts into a pack that never truly embraced me, and I stood by, a silent witness to their devotion. Since childhood, I watched as others found their places in the community, their bonds woven with warmth and certainty, while I clung to the fragile hope that one day I would belong too.”
He paused, let out a deep breath, then continued, “Then my fated mate appeared, radiant and captivating, only to turn away and choose someone else—someone who wasn’t me. In that moment, I let go of my dreams, resigning myself to the reality I faced. I convinced myself I was okay with it. Truly okay. Do you understand what that feels like? At least I could finally grasp the rules of this cruel game."
He stopped at the window. The buried world outside. His own reflection was thin in the glass over the top of the sunflowers.
"And now you." He said it to the window. "Now this is the second time in my life I want to hope it, and it's so much worse, because it's you."
"Why worse?" Jeongguk said, low.
Taehyung turned around.
"Because how am I supposed to know you won't leave?" It came out of him hard and helpless at once. "You've done nothing but leave. Three days at a time. The morning after my heat. Your back going down a mountain while I stood at a window and watched. How do I hope this when I already know how it ends?"
Jeongguk took it with his whole body. His hand found the back of the nearest chair and closed on it, the knuckles going pale, and still he didn't reach for a defense. He let it be true.
Taehyung dragged in a breath, and it shook on the way down. On the stove, the pot of noodles held what heat it had left in the quiet, going uneaten while the two of them stood there and let it.
"Three weeks ago." Taehyung's voice dropped. "At the door. When I went at you. The drawer, the running. You don't get to ask me anything." He shook his head slowly. "I wasn't angry at you. I've never once been able to stay angry at you. I was angry at myself."
He placed the heel of his hand flat on his sternum, over the flowers.. "Because even then, even furious, I knew that if you left again, I would understand. I would find the reason for you, and I would forgive it before you'd finished walking away. That's what I couldn't stand. Not that you'd go. That I'd let you."
Jeongguk's eyes dropped to the floor and came back up. The candle nearest them guttered and steadied, and he let a slow breath out through his nose, a man keeping his hands at his sides on purpose.
"And now you're not going." He laughed, wet and disbelieving. "Now you're standing in a cabin you filled with summer, choosing me, out loud, and that is so much more frightening than being left, Jeongguk, you have no idea."
He started pacing again. Faster.
"Because if I fall, I'll fall the whole way. I know myself. I'll go so far down I'll never climb back out." Turn at the wall. Back. "And I believe you'd catch me. That's the terrible part. I do believe it. You'd catch me every single time, and then you'd leave again, and I would understand it every single time, and I would just keep falling and forgiving and falling." His breath hitched. "You saved me from the rogues, and you left. You were there for the rejection when you had no reason to be, and then you were gone. The shift. The heat. You keep being exactly there at exactly the right moment and then not there at all, and I cannot make the two of you into one person I know how to survive."
Jeongguk had come off the door somewhere in the middle of it, one step and then another, his hand rising toward the back of Taehyung's coat. He caught himself before he reached him. He held there with the want to close the distance sitting unspent in his shoulders.
Taehyung stopped in the middle of the floor. The flowers hung from his fist now, forgotten, gold spilling toward the ground.
"What if I choose you?" he said, quieter, "And then one day you meet them? Your real one. The one the moon actually picked for you. And you look at me the way mine looked at the person he chose over me, and you go. What do I do then? There's nothing left of me after that. Nothing."
That landed in Jeongguk and stuck. His jaw set hard against whatever wanted out of him, and he shook his head once, slow, at the floor, at the idea of it.
His eyes were streaming again, and he didn't wipe them.
"I have one inch of myself I've never given anyone," he said. "One. I've kept it my whole life, the little piece I don't hand over, so there's always something left when they go." He looked at Jeongguk, undone, standing in the wreck of his own composure. "And you. You just walk in and disarm me. You make me want to give you even that. And I don't know how to stop you, and I'm so afraid."
He dragged the back of his flower-filled hand across his face and left a streak of gold pollen on his cheek without feeling it. "I've never said any of this out loud. Not to a single person." His voice went almost to nothing. "I've never told anyone what I wanted, because wanting it where someone can hear you is just teaching them what to take. And I'm standing here in your summer telling you anyway. I want you to stay. I want to be the one who gets chosen, for once, and then kept." He shook his head, helpless with it. "I've never let myself say a want like that in my whole life. The first time I do, it's you. And that's why I can't breathe."
Jeongguk's hand was already moving before he told it to.
He crossed the little distance without deciding to cross it, and he didn't grab, didn't cage, only closed his fingers gently around the fistful of sunflowers so they stopped shaking, his other hand coming up slowly to rest against the side of Taehyung's wet face, and he held on.
Inside him it was chaos, everything he'd spent eight months bracing having come loose at once, the whole careful architecture down. And underneath the chaos, in a place he didn't recognize, he was calm. Because for once in his life he knew, all the way to the floor of himself, exactly what he wanted to say.
Go on, Ian said. He wasn't frantic. That was the strange thing. The anxious animal that had spent every hard moment of the last year clawing at the inside of Jeongguk's ribs was lying quiet now, watching, still. We know this one. Say it.
"Every time you needed me," Jeongguk said, "I felt whole."
Taehyung went very still against his hand. His eyes came up and searched Jeongguk's face, moving over it, trying to catch the lie in it somewhere.
"That's the truth I've got. It's not a pretty one." His thumb moved once against Taehyung's cheekbone. "Every time you were in trouble, and I got to be the one there, the rogues, the rejection, all of it, something in me that never fit anywhere clicked into place. Being where you were, when you needed me. It's the only time I've felt like I was standing in the right spot in the world."
Taehyung's breath went out of him, unsteady. He didn't pull back. His hand had come up somewhere in there to rest against Jeongguk's wrist, holding on without seeming to know it.
"I'm tired of watching you from the edge of the yard," Jeongguk said. "Weeks of it. Months before that. I'm so tired of it I can't sleep."
"Your fated mate," Taehyung got out. "You don't know that you won't—"
"I don't know." Jeongguk didn't lie to him. "I might never meet them. I stopped looking a long time ago, before you, and I've never wanted to start."
He breathed, and the next of it came slower, dragged up from somewhere old.
"My father had a fated mate before my mother. Long before me. There was an accident, and he was told they were gone, her and their son both. He grieved them for years."
Taehyung had gone still under his hands, the fear in his face making room for something else.
"Then he met my mother. He married her. They had me, and I grew up thinking that was the whole of it." Jeongguk's thumb had stopped on his cheek. "And then I was fifteen, and they came back. Both of them. Alive. The mate the moon had picked for him standing in our doorway, and the son he thought he'd buried standing next to her."
The wind worked at the old seams of the cabin and moved through them, and Jeongguk let it pass, his eyes never leaving Taehyung's.
"I watched the bond wake up in him like it had never been asleep. I watched my mother stand in her own house beside a woman the moon had already chosen over her." His voice went low and flat. "She got quiet after that. She got smaller. She was sick by the end, and I've never once been able to find the line between the sickness and the rest of it."
Taehyung's hand tightened on his wrist.
"So somewhere in all of that I decided," Jeongguk said. "I would never let the bond get its hands on me the way it got its hands on her."
His jaw worked.
"And then I watched yours push you away." He shook his head. "And I couldn't make any of it fit. The bond arrived in my house and took my mother apart. It left yours and took you apart. Coming or going, it ruins the people I..." He didn't finish it. "I stood in the middle of that for a year and decided the safest thing I could do was want nothing."
Taehyung was watching his mouth now like the next word might save him or end him.
"I was wrong." Jeongguk's hand steadied on the side of his face. "I know one thing all the way down where nothing's confused. There is nowhere in this world I can afford to lose you again."
"Jeongguk."
"I want you." He said it plainly. There was no cushion under it, nor the way Yoongi had made him say it in the cold. "If you only knew how long. I want you so much I can't tell it apart from breathing anymore."
Taehyung made a sound, small, as the words had gone straight through him.
"And I'll be bad at this. I'll get it wrong." His voice roughened. "I'll bring you water when I should bring you words. I've been doing exactly that for three weeks and hating myself the whole time. I don't know how to show a person they matter to me. Nobody taught me." His hand tightened, gentle, at the back of Taehyung's neck. "But I need you, Taehyung. Not the way I need the pack fed. The other way. The way I didn't have a name for until I was lying on your floor in the dark."
For a moment he only breathed against him. Then he said the other thing, the one he'd never let out of his own mouth either.
"You think you're the only one who's scared." His hand had found the back of Taehyung's neck and stayed there, steady and sure. "I've watched your wrist go tight every time his name lands in a room. I know the bond didn't die when Bogum chose someone else. It just went quiet."
Taehyung's hand fisted in the front of his shirt.
"So, here's mine, since we're saying the frightening things out loud." Jeongguk's throat worked. "What if he comes back? What if the moon changes its mind and hands you to the one it picked first? And then one day I'm the one at a window watching you go down a mountain. That's what wakes me at night, Taehyung. Not mine. Yours."
He let it sit between them, undefended.
"I can't promise you the moon won't do something cruel. To either of us. I won't swear a thing I don't control." His forehead came down against Taehyung's, and they stood there breathing the same pocket of air, the flowers crushed gold between their chests. "But I can promise you me. That part I own, and I'm handing it over whole."
And that was when it reached him.
Under the strawberry and the mint, under the cold still clinging to both their coats, a scent was rising off Taehyung's skin that Jeongguk had never smelled in his life. Warm and rich and deep, with sun all the way through it. It bloomed in the narrow space between their faces and filled it, and he breathed it in and understood, with something cracking open behind his ribs, that he had never smelled it because Taehyung had never once had cause to make it. This was what Taehyung smelled like happy. This was joy, coming off him in the dark. And Jeongguk was the one who'd put it there.
There, Ian said, and there was no fear anywhere in him now, only a low ache. That. Don't ever let that stop.
"You keep saying I leave." Jeongguk's mouth was close to his skin. "Look at it again. I keep coming back. Every single time, whatever it takes, I come back. You called it leaving." His voice broke on the rest of it. "It was never leaving. It was me finding my way back to the one warm thing on this whole frozen mountain. You're the summer, Taehyung. You've been the summer in the middle of my winter since the day I walked into that tofu house. You saved me too. You just never knew you were doing it."
Taehyung made a wrecked sound and didn't try to cover it.
"So let me be yours now." Jeongguk's thumb wiped the gold from his cheek. "The strawberries, the sunflowers, all of it, in the worst winter this mountain's ever seen. Let me be that." He swallowed. "Or spring. Spring's better. That's when I met you, when I walked in, and you were there, and I was gone before I knew I'd left. Let me be your spring."
Outside the snow kept coming down, steady and endless, burying the ridge and the path they'd climbed and the whole dark shoulder of the mountain, sealing the two of them into the one warm room.
Taehyung's eyes had spilled over again, and he wasn't fighting it now, wasn't turning toward any door.
"But I'm asking for the rest of it too," Jeongguk said. "Summer and autumn and winter and back around again, every season there is, for as long as you'll have me. Because I've looked, Taehyung. I've looked as hard as I know how. And I can't see myself with anyone else. Not in any season. Not ever."
🌸
Taehyung had his face pressed into the side of Jeongguk's neck, breathing him in, cedar and sandalwood and the cold he'd carried up the whole mountain, somewhere past crying now and into the scoured-out quiet on the other side of it.
When he lifted his head to look at him, it stopped him.
Jeongguk had shaved. His hair had been cut, neatened close at the sides, the shaggy overgrown mess of the last month gone. All week in the greenhouse he'd looked like a man coming apart at the seams, jaw shadowed, dark under the eyes, running himself down to nothing in front of everyone. And under the snow still drying in his hair, under the tiredness he couldn't scrub all the way off, he had shaved and cut his hair and made himself neat. For a night that was Taehyung's. For this.
Taehyung brought both hands up and held his face. He hadn't decided to. His thumbs found the clean line of his jaw, and he looked at him, really looked. And Jeongguk let him. He held still and let himself be looked at, his eyes open and unguarded in a way Taehyung hadn't seen once in eight months.
And that was when Jeongguk's stomach growled.
It was a long, ridiculous, mournful sound, and it rose up out of the middle of the most important thing anyone had ever said to him.
Taehyung went still. Then it broke out of him before he could stop it, a laugh, wet and startled, his hands still framing Jeongguk's face.
"Don't," Jeongguk said, and Taehyung could feel exactly how mortified he was under his palms.
"When did you last eat?" Taehyung wiped his own face with the heel of his hand, smearing pollen and salt together.
The tops of Jeongguk's ears had gone red. "There wasn't time."
"You confessed your entire soul to me on an empty stomach?"
"It seemed more urgent than lunch," Jeongguk said, and that undid Taehyung a little further, because it was so stupid and so completely him.
"Sit down." His voice came out wrecked. He cleared it and tried again. "Sit. You made me a summer. The least I can do is feed you in it."
They sat. The storm leaned on the windows and the little room held against it, gold and close, and for a while there was only the sound of two people eating who'd both forgotten they were starving. The jjajangmyeon was good even lukewarm, dark and rich.
Across the little table, Jeongguk kept dipping his head toward him between bites, chasing something in the air he didn't seem to know he was chasing. Taehyung let him. Whatever it was, it had stopped feeling like a thing to be afraid of. Taehyung got halfway down the bowl before he made himself stop and look, really look, at the table Jeongguk had built.
Sunflowers leaned out of a water jug with their heads drooping from their stems
A bowl of strawberries, vibrant and unlikely in late December
A white cake box, dented at one corner from being carried
"How did you do this?" he said.
Jeongguk looked up.
"All of it." Taehyung set his chopsticks down. "It's the end of December. We've been in the fields since before light for three weeks straight. The frost came through, and we lost two nights running to it, everyone, you and me both. I saw you out there at four in the morning packing straw over the beds with the rest of us." He shook his head. "And somewhere in the middle of that you were, what? Finding sunflowers."
The corner of Jeongguk's mouth moved. "Not finding. There's a grower two valleys over, glass houses. They keep things going all winter for the city markets. I called them two days ago. Picked them up on the salt run."
"The salt run was Seojoon's."
"Seojoon knew." Jeongguk turned his glass a slow quarter and didn't look caught in the least. If anything he looked a little pleased with himself. "He took the long road back so I'd have time in the flower place. Told the others he'd missed the turn."
Taehyung stared at him.
"The strawberries are just the winter ones; those are easy. The market has them good right now." Jeongguk was warming to it, telling it like it was nothing, like these were ordinary things a person did in the worst week of the year. "The cake I ordered two days ago, too from the place in town. The jjajangmyeon." He paused. "The jjajangmyeon I made four times before tonight. The first three were bad. Yoongi ate the evidence."
"Yoongi."
"Yoongi covered my afternoon shifts for the past two days so I could get up here and practice. He said if I told a single person he helped, he'd deny it and then break my arm." Jeongguk almost smiled. "He's also the one who took the sunflowers off me at the gate and hid them in the drying shed so you wouldn't catch the smell of them on me."
Taehyung had stopped eating entirely.
Because it wasn't only Jeongguk. That was the thing settling over him slowly and enormously. It was Seojoon who took the long road and lied about a wrong turn. It was Yoongi eating three bad batches of noodles, giving up his own rest, and hiding flowers in a shed for seven days. It was a whole quiet handful of people, in the hardest stretch of the whole year, deciding without ever saying it out loud that this should happen. That he should have it.
He had spent his entire life certain the pack had never once gotten around to choosing him.
"Why?" he said. It came out smaller than he wanted it to. "Everyone was dead on their feet. Why would they even?"
"Because I asked them." Jeongguk said it like it was the plainest thing in the world. Then, quieter, honest the whole way through in a way Taehyung had never once heard out of him before, "Oh, and of course it's the first time that I have done something for someone which these two played on the downlow, but you know, it's because they like you, Tae. That's the part you've never let yourself believe. I didn't have to talk anybody into anything. I said it was for you, and they just started helping."
Taehyung looked down at the dented white box so he wouldn't do the crying thing again.
He'd known what the strawberries were the moment Jeongguk set them down tonight, because Jeongguk had already told him, rough and halfway through, that he'd heard him say he couldn't have them when he was sad. Taehyung had said that to Sohee. Three rows back in the greenhouse, low, not meant for anyone at all. He'd forgotten he'd even said it out loud.
"You were three rows back," Taehyung said quietly. "In the greenhouse. I didn't think anyone could hear me."
"I wasn't trying to." Jeongguk turned his glass a slow quarter. "I couldn't help it. You told her they broke your heart for being a summer thing. That you could never have them when you were sad." He looked up. "It was winter. You were sad. I'm not complicated, Tae. I kept it, and then I couldn't stop myself doing something about it."
Taehyung sat there with the box still shut between them, unable to get a single word out.
The wind pushed at the glass. The candles held.
"You never answered me, by the way," Jeongguk said, gentler now, setting his chopsticks across the rim of his bowl. "I asked you for the whole year, and then my stomach interrupted, and I've been sitting here not knowing."
Taehyung looked at him. He noticed the hair still damp from the climb, the ears that unmistakably gave him away, and the man who struggled to manage any of these tasks gracefully. Yet, he had managed to recruit half the pack to help him do them all, though they did so poorly, just for him.
He wanted the answer to be something worth all of that.
It came out around the last of the strawberries instead.
"Yes," Taehyung said. "All of them. Every season you're offering. Obviously, yes."
Jeongguk's whole face changed.
"Don't." Taehyung pointed the chopsticks at him and reached for the cake box with his other hand. "Don't make it a thing. I've cried twice tonight, and I'm out of face to do it with." He worked the lid free. Strawberry tiramisu, tilted where it had shifted on the climb, the cream slid sideways. Of course it was. "We'll do the rest of it in the morning. The talking, the what-happens-now, all of it. There's going to be an entire disaster of a conversation, and I'm too tired for it tonight."
"Okay," Jeongguk said.
"Okay."
Taehyung cut the crooked little cake into two crooked halves, pushed the larger one across the table, and outside the snow kept falling and falling, sealing the two of them in for the night.
🌸
He'd meant to stay awake for it.
He'd had every intention of sitting up the whole night keeping watch over the impossible fact of it, and instead he'd gone under somewhere after the second slice of cake with Taehyung tucked warm against his side, and now the grey slow light of a December morning was coming up over the mountain through the frosted window, and Jeongguk woke on the narrow couch with the whole sleeping weight of him against his chest.
He didn't move. He was almost afraid to.
Taehyung had one hand fisted loose in the front of his shirt. His face was turned up into the crook of Jeongguk's neck, slack and open in a way it never was when he was awake and minding himself, and the scent banked low in the warm dark under the blanket was that same one from the night before, the deep rich warm one Jeongguk still had no name for, gone easy now, like it belonged to the sleeping.
He couldn't look away from him.
You're staring, Ian said, and there was nothing sharp in it at all. The animal sounded half-asleep and thoroughly pleased with himself. Look at him, though. He fell asleep on us. He chose us and then he fell asleep on us like it was the easiest thing in the world.
I know.
You should tell somebody. You've been holding it in all night. I think we might burst.
Then Taehyung woke.
Jeongguk felt it happen, the small shift in his breathing, the fingers flexing once against his chest. Taehyung's eyes came open slow and unfocused and found Jeongguk's face a handspan away, and for a long moment neither of them did anything at all.
They just looked at each other.
It was the exact thing Jeongguk had wanted for eight months and never once let himself picture: first light, and the person you'd given up on wanting opening his eyes in your arms and not looking away. Taehyung's face was so soft with sleep it made something in Jeongguk's chest go tight and enormous. No wall anywhere on it. No careful thank-you. Just Taehyung, warm and blinking and here, looking back at him like waking up like this was an ordinary and permitted thing.
The urge to kiss him was so strong it was nearly a sound.
You could, you know. Ian, gentler than Jeongguk had ever heard him. Not the mouth, if you're going to be a coward about it. The forehead. That's allowed. He chose you back last night, in case you slept through the part where it happened. You're allowed to kiss his forehead in the morning like a man who gets to keep him.
Jeongguk started to lean in.
Someone knocked on the cabin door.
They both went rigid. The knock came again, three brisk raps and then a fourth, and then Sohee's voice, entirely too awake for the hour.
"Taehyungah. I know you're in there. I can hear you not answering me."
Taehyung's whole face did something complicated and he pushed it back into Jeongguk's shoulder like he could hide there.
"The yard's already up," Sohee went on through the wood, sing-song and merciless. "Namjoon's at the greenhouse. Work in twenty. Unless the two of you have a very good reason, in which case I would like to hear it, in detail, right now."
"Go away, noona," Taehyung croaked.
"That is not a reason!"
They untangled slowly, shy about it now in the daylight, Taehyung pressing the heels of both hands into his eyes and Jeongguk trying to arrange his own face into something that wasn't pure helpless idiocy and failing at it completely.
They worked the rows like any other day, except nothing about it was like any other day.
It kept happening. Jeongguk would be halfway through something, elbow-deep in a tray of seedlings or walking a frost date down the bench with Namjoon, and he'd feel it before he saw it, that particular warm pull at the edge of him, and he'd look up and there Taehyung would be, three rows over, caught looking.
And Taehyung would drop his eyes back down to the soil so fast it was nearly audible, color climbing up his throat, hands fumbling at whatever they'd been doing like they'd forgotten the shape of it.
And Jeongguk would lose the thread of whatever he was saying entirely.
"Jeongguk," Namjoon said, patient, the second time it happened mid-sentence. "The rains. You were telling me about the rains."
"The rains," Jeongguk agreed, and could not for the life of him remember a single thing about the rains, because Taehyung had gone back to laughing at something Sohee said and the whole green room had reorganized itself around the sound of it.
It went both ways, was the thing. He caught Taehyung doing it too.
In the middle of a story to Sohee, hands up and animated, and then his eyes would flick across the room to find Jeongguk already watching him, and the story would just stall out in his mouth, his hands dropping, the words gone. Sohee would wave a hand in front of his face, and he wouldn't even notice.
He was beautiful today. That was a stupid, enormous thing to be standing in a greenhouse thinking, but Jeongguk thought it anyway, helplessly, on a loop. Wrecked from no sleep, shadows under his eyes to match Jeongguk's own, hair a disaster, dirt to the wrists. Beautiful. The kind that made his chest hurt.
And then, once, across the whole length of the room, Taehyung smiled at him.
Not the wide one he gave the others, the one that took his whole face and folded his eyes shut. This was a new one. A small, private, held-down thing, his lips pressed together like he was trying to keep it in and not managing, the crinkle escaping at the corners of his eyes anyway, aimed at Jeongguk and nobody else in the world. A smile with Jeongguk's name on it.
Jeongguk had to look at his own hands for a while after that. He wasn't sure his face was safe to have out in public.
Again, Ian announced, insufferable, every single time it happened. He looked again. That's four. He's keeping count whether he knows it or not. I'm keeping count too. It's four. It's five. Oh, that was the smile. That was the special one. Write it down somewhere, I never want to forget it. Five, and one smile, and it isn't even lunch.
Yoongi caught up with him at the water barrels through the morning. He looked at Jeongguk for a long, level moment. At the clean jaw. At the cut hair. At whatever was happening on his face that he couldn't seem to switch off.
"You shaved," Yoongi said flatly.
"I did."
Yoongi's eyes went wide, then narrow, then took a slow appalled trip down the whole of him and back up. "You shaved, and now you're standing in the greenhouse smiling like that where people can see you." He blew a breath out through his nose. "I ate three bowls of your terrible noodles for this. I hid flowers in a shed. And my reward is having to look at your face doing that."
"You could look somewhere else."
"I fully intend to." Yoongi bent for his bucket, then held there a second. "Did it work?"
Jeongguk didn't answer. He didn't have to. Whatever was on his face answered for him, because Yoongi made a low, disgusted sound that was, underneath, unmistakably pleased, and walked off shaking his head.
That was Yoongi being happy for us, Ian said, delighted past bearing. Did you catch it? He is thrilled. He is going to deny it and break our arm.
By three in the afternoon the last of the fast crops were in and the week's deliveries were squared, and Jeongguk straightened up in the middle of the greenhouse and called it.
"That's enough for today." He pitched his voice to carry down the rows. Faces came up out of the green. "Work's done ahead of the week, and tomorrow's New Year's Eve. Go home, all of you. Wash the dirt off."
He looked down the row and walked towards Taehyung without meaning to, and said the rest of it more quietly, though the whole room heard it anyway. He stood beside him and made sure no one else was around. "And we never finished the birthday last night. So, we finish it tonight.” Jeongguk spoke just loud enough for him to hear and then to everyone, “Dinner in the hall. Everyone. Bring something loud."
Somebody cheered, Hyungsik almost certainly, and Sohee whooped from the far end, and Taehyung stood frozen among the seedlings with soil on his hands and his mouth just barely open, being looked at by his entire pack on his own birthday, being celebrated on purpose and out loud, and Jeongguk watched the precise second he understood it was real and had to turn away and press his wrist hard to his mouth.
That warm, rich scent rolled down the whole green length of the room like a season turning over.
Eight months, Ian sighed, luxuriating in it, unbearable and glowing. Eight months of you doing absolutely nothing, and it took one shave and a plate of noodles. We are so good at this. I can't believe we waited.
🌸
Jeongguk walked him back himself.
He didn't make a thing of it. He just fell into step beside Taehyung when the greenhouse emptied out, hands in his pockets, matching his pace down the path where the snow had been trodden to a grey ribbon between the buildings, and Taehyung spent the whole short walk trying to think of something to say and coming up with absolutely nothing, because his heart was doing something ridiculous and loud and he was fairly sure his face had been smiling on its own for an hour without his permission.
"Two hours," Jeongguk said when they reached the cabin door. "Get warm. Sleep if you want, you barely got any." He tipped his head back toward the hall. "I'll come get you at six."
"I can walk myself to dinner, Jeongguk. It's a hundred meters."
"I know." He said it like that had nothing to do with anything. "I'm coming to get you anyway."
Taehyung opened his mouth to argue the point on principle, and Jeongguk leaned in and kissed him on the forehead.
It was such a small thing.
He barely paused to do it, a hand coming up light to the side of Taehyung's jaw, a press of his mouth warm against Taehyung's hairline, gone almost before it landed.
The kind of thing a person did without thinking, on their way somewhere, to someone they got to keep. Three weeks ago this was a man who couldn't finish a sentence in the same room as him. Now he kissed Taehyung's forehead like it was just a thing he did, like it was the most ordinary punctuation in the world, and stepped back.
Taehyung had closed his eyes.
He didn't decide to.
They just fell shut, and everything in him went warm and slow and stupid, the whole afternoon collapsing down to the small burning place on his forehead where Jeongguk's mouth had been, and when he opened them again Jeongguk was looking at him with something so pleased and soft it was almost unbearable to be on the receiving end of.
"Six," Jeongguk said again, quieter.
"Six," Taehyung managed.
And then Jeongguk turned and walked back up the path toward the packhouse, hands in his pockets, and after a few steps, faint and unmistakable in the cold, he started to whistle.
Taehyung stood at his doorway, watching Jeongguk walk away, far beyond what was typical, until he became a small dark figure against the snow, with the whistling fading into the wind.
Then he went inside, shut the door, and put his back against it.
The cabin was quiet. His own small space, the wet-stone-and-earth smell of it, the bed, the window going blue with the early dark coming. Everything exactly where it had been that morning, and none of it the same, because at some point in the last day the entire shape of his life had changed and the room hadn't been told yet.
He got as far as the middle of the floor before it caught up with him.
He crossed to the bed, and picked up his pillow, and pressed his whole face into it, and screamed.
It came out muffled and enormous and undignified, everything he'd been holding since the greenhouse, since the cake, since a mouth pressed warm to his forehead like a promise with a time attached to it. He screamed into the pillow until his lungs gave out, and then he stood there hugging it to his chest, breathless, grinning like an idiot at nobody, his forehead still warm, two hours on the clock and a whole life cracked open in front of him.
Six, he thought, giddy, hopeless. He's coming at six.
🌸
The hall was loud and warm and full of people, and all of it was for him.
That was the thing Taehyung couldn't get his mind around, all night, no matter how many times it happened. Someone would press a cup into his hand or pull him into a chair or start a song, and underneath every bit of it was the same impossible fact: that the noise and the warmth and the crowded table had been arranged around him on purpose, because it was his birthday and they wanted him to have one.
The gifts were small, but that was what broke him.
Nobody here was well-off, so Hyungsik gave him a pair of gloves with carefully stitched, uneven fingers, warmer than his old ones. One of the older omegas pressed a folded piece of paper into his hand, holding seeds from the summer squash he admired but never knew anyone had noticed. Minjun, shy, handed him a drawing of a white wolf with too-long legs and refused to meet his gaze while doing so.
Each gift might seem insignificant, yet they all signified the same profound thing: someone thought of him when he wasn't there.
He'd spent his entire life convinced that never happened. But then there was the other thing—a faint, elusive feeling he kept catching at the edges of, almost not believing.
Namjoon leaned in over the noise to ask his opinion about delaying the second planting by a week due to the frost, waiting for his response as if it genuinely mattered.
When Taehyung suggested the far beds be planted first, Seojoon tilted his head and, to the table, said, "He's right," and that settled it.
Taehyung wasn’t serving food, refilling cups, or just standing by.
For the first time, his opinion mattered as he looked at the other people who ran this place. He felt that finally he belonged, that he was already one of them. He felt heard and valued, which was a first. It felt humbling yet fulfilling.
And the whole time, across the table, Jeongguk was watching him.
Not politely. Chin propped in his hand, not even pretending to look at anything else, his eyes on Taehyung's mouth while Taehyung talked, planting dates with Namjoon like the words coming out of it were the most interesting thing in the room.
Taehyung would feel that warm weight land gently on him, and he would glance up mid-sentence, his eyes meeting theirs across all the noise and holding there for a moment. Despite everything, he'd keep talking to Namjoon, answer Seojoon, and nod along to what was being said. Throughout it all, his eyes would be smiling at Jeongguk over the top of the conversation, giving him a special, private look—the held-down one—while his mouth was busy with something else.
And Jeongguk would drop his gaze back to that mouth. And swallow. And Taehyung would lose his own train of thought so completely that Namjoon had to say his name twice.
It was the two things at once that undid him.
Being taken seriously and being wanted, in the same breath, across the same table, both of them brand new, neither of them anything he had ever once let himself expect.
He didn't know where to put it. It kept spilling up his throat as heat, and he kept having to look down at his cup to get his face back.
Seojoon and Hyungsik had been at it all night, that low practiced bickering of people who did it constantly, except it wasn't quite the same as it used to be and Taehyung couldn't stop noticing why.
It had gotten louder since he'd come back from the greenhouse.
More of it. Hyungsik talking even more than usual and Seojoon answering slower than his words let on, and threaded all through it, the glances, quick and shy and dropped the second they caught, one of them looking while the other wasn't and then trading it back.
Taehyung knew those symptoms now. He knew them from the inside, because he'd spent weeks living inside them, that walking-on-eggshells thing, that being unbearably aware of exactly where the other person was in a room. He'd know it anywhere now.
The difference was that Seojoon and Hyungsik were braver than he and Jeongguk had ever managed. Where he and Jeongguk had gone silent and careful and miserable around each other for months, these two just bickered, actually bickered, out loud and in front of everyone, all that wanting pouring straight into an argument about nothing. Once, when Hyungsik laughed at something, Seojoon looked at him a beat too long and got caught at it by Sohee, who said nothing and grinned into her cup like she'd won a bet with herself.
Taehyung filed it away to think about later, warm and amused and a little tender about it, another thing he got to be on the inside of now.
It was late when Minjun tugged Sohee's sleeve.
Taehyung only half saw it, the small boy leaning up to say something quiet against her ear, his face doing the worried thing it had been doing all night under the smile. Then Sohee's eyes went wide.
"He thinks his mom isn't feeling well," she said, already standing.
"She's early," Hyungsik said, and then, catching up to it, "or she's not. She might be having it."
Taehyung was on his feet before he'd decided to be, and so was Jeongguk, the both of them turning toward the door on the same old reflex, the one that sent them at every emergency the mountain ever produced.
"No." Sohee put a hand flat on Taehyung's chest. Hyungsik had already stepped in front of Jeongguk. "No, you don't. We've got this."
"Sohee, I can help, I can carry hot water, I can watch the other kids, I can do something."
“It's your birthday!” She said softly, yet with a little firmness. "Taehyung, it's your very first birthday celebration. You shouldn't be spending it boiling water. Let us do that, for you."
"And you." Hyungsik jabbed a finger up at Jeongguk. "Alpha. When did you last sleep? I need a real answer."
Jeongguk didn't have one.
"That's what I thought. You've run yourself into the ground for weeks, and you gave the whole pack tomorrow off so you could go door to door checking on everyone anyway, don't think we didn't notice." Hyungsik softened, the way he always eventually did. "Let us have this one. We can deliver a baby without the two of you hovering. Go. Both of you. That's practically an order, and I've got Sohee to back me, so it counts."
And that was how the pack, on Taehyung's birthday, quietly and firmly handed the night back to the two of them.
Jeongguk walked him home.
There were still people out, even this late, small knots of them crossing between the buildings with lanterns, voices carrying, because tomorrow was a holiday and nobody had to be anywhere. It made the walk feel warm instead of secret, lived-in, the whole mountain awake and easy around them. And somewhere in the first few steps Jeongguk's hand found Taehyung's and just held it, folded their fingers together like it was nothing, and Taehyung's giddiness went straight up into his eyes and stayed there, blurring the lanterns into soft gold smears.
He leaned into Jeongguk's side as they walked. He couldn't help it and didn't want to. Jeongguk shifted to take his weight without a word.
At the cabin door, Taehyung didn't want it to end.
"Do you want tea?" he said, too fast. "It's late, but I have tea, and it's freezing, and you could have it before you go. If you want."
"I want," Jeongguk said.
But before they went in, Taehyung braced himself, pushed up onto the balls of his feet, and pressed a kiss to Jeongguk's cheek. "Thank you," he said, against his skin. "For today. For all of it."
And then he couldn't step back.
They were too close, and neither of them moved, caught there at the threshold with the cold at their backs and the dark cabin in front of them, and the air between them had gone thick and uneven with both of them breathing wrong.
Taehyung could feel it, the pull of it, the thing that had been building all night and all day and for eight months before that, drawn now to a single fine point in the six inches between their faces.
Jeongguk's eyes moved over him, slowly. His hand came up, smoothed Taehyung's hair back from his forehead carefully, and stayed cupped at the side of his head.
Taehyung's eyes dropped to his mouth.
He didn't mean to.
It just happened, the same way it had happened to Jeongguk across the table all night, his gaze falling to Jeongguk's lips and catching there, and when he looked back up Jeongguk was watching him do it.
It happened so slowly that it barely counted as moving. Taehyung was drifting in, and Jeongguk was too. They were drawing closer and closer as the last of the distance closed between them by fractions, both of them leaning into the same impossible gravity.
There’s this feeling that came up through him he didn’t know the name yet.
It just felt too big, too bright, too much.
It rose and rose in his chest and he just wanted to drown in it, wanted it to swallow him whole and keep him. He wanted to stay suspended in this exact half-inch of warm air forever, because this was the first day of his whole life that he had been held like something precious. And here in front of him was the Alpha who cradled the side of his head so gently, this man who had driven through a storm and turned his winter into summer and laid the whole world down at his feet.
It was too much.
It was more than he had ever let himself want.
And somehow, impossibly, it was perfect.
"Can I?" Jeongguk said, low, wrecked. "May I kiss you?"
Taehyung couldn't speak. That was the thing that got him, in the half second before he answered, the sheer impossibility of it, that he was standing in his own doorway being asked, being wanted, given even this to choose. He nodded. He got out a "yes" that barely had any sound in it.
And Jeongguk kissed him.
It was soft.
That was what took the ground out from under him, that after everything, the storm and the confession and the whole aching climb of the day, the kiss when it came was gentle, unhurried, careful with him, Jeongguk's mouth warm and slow against his like they had every hour in the world.
Taehyung made a small sound he'd have been embarrassed by any other time as Jeongguk's hand tightened at the back of his head. He felt himself pulled in closer, the softness tipping into something brighter. It was an indescribable feeling, as if he were lifted through his whole chest, which just burst there. These feelings were giddy and enormous, and everything else disappeared, leaving only this, only Jeongguk, only the fact that he was being kissed and kissed back, and it was real.
He fisted both hands in front of Jeongguk's coat and held on and did not let go.
They never did have the tea.
They went inside eventually, only because the cold finally reached them, and they did not stop, could not seem to stop, standing just past the shut door with their arms around each other and their mouths meeting again and again, soft and then not, laughing once against each other when their noses bumped, going quiet again.
Every time Taehyung pulled back to look at him, to check that it was true, Jeongguk was already looking, that pleased and helpless look, and Taehyung would go warm all over and lean back in.
There was no anger left anywhere in the room. That was what he kept noticing, in the pauses.
No spite, no bracing, no wall going up.
All of it gone, spent, put down at last. Just the two of them, and the small warm dark, and the certainty of the other one right there.
They were so tired.
Both of them, days of it, the bone-deep kind that no single night could fix, and once the frantic edge of the kissing had worn itself soft it turned into something even better, into leaning, into being held up, into Taehyung's face tucked into Jeongguk's neck and Jeongguk's arms locked warm around him and the long slow exhale of two people who had finally, finally stopped running at each other and simply arrived.
They ended up tangled together on the narrow bed, still in their clothes, too spent to care. Taehyung's last clear thought, sinking, was that he wasn't afraid, not of the morning, not of being left, not of any of it. Jeongguk was here, and staying, and his heartbeat was steady under Taehyung's ear, and there was nothing left to be afraid of.
He fell asleep smiling, warm all the way through, held.
🌸
He woke to gold light and Jeongguk's face on the pillow beside his.
For a while neither of them did anything about it. They just lay there in the narrow bed, tangled up in yesterday's clothes and each other, and looked, the morning coming soft through the frosted window, the whole mountain quiet with the holiday. Jeongguk's eyes were half open and warm and fixed on him, and his hand was a heavy, comfortable weight low on Taehyung's back, and there was a crease from the pillow pressed into his cheek that Taehyung wanted to put his thumb against.
He wanted to kiss him. The pull was right there, easy now, permitted, the most natural thing in the world to just close the small gap between them and
Taehyung turned his face away and clapped a hand over his mouth.
Morning breath. Absolutely not. Not on the first real morning, not for their second-ever kiss, not like this.
Really.
He froze with his hand still over his mouth.
You kissed that man until you fell asleep sitting up. All night. And now, suddenly, we're worried about Monster Breath.
Taehyung's eyes widened in the dark.
Wait a minute.
He lay very still for a second and let the thought just hang there.
He felt the voice was too clear and too pleased with itself, and something about it snagged wrong, like a stair that isn't where your foot expects it.
He shook his head slightly. That wasn't. That hadn't sounded like.
He replayed it, and it was worse the second time, because it had a tone. In fact, the voice sounded extremely pleased with him. It had said Monster Breath like it was capitalizing it on purpose.
Am I hallucinating?
Am I so tired and so happy I've started narrating myself in the third person like a lunatic?
"Where are you going?" Jeongguk mumbled, because Taehyung was already scrambling upright and off the end of the bed.
"Nowhere. Bathroom. One second."
He shut himself in and ran the water and brushed his teeth like the building was on fire, and he did not think about it, the thing, the voice, whatever it was; he pushed it flat and sat on it. He was exhausted. That was all. People's brains did strange things on three hours of sleep and the best night of their life. He rinsed, splashed cold water on his face, looked at himself in the small, clouded mirror, ordinary and rumpled and stupidly happy, and told himself firmly that he was fine.
When he came back out, Jeongguk had propped himself up against the wall, hair everywhere, watching the bathroom door like he'd missed him in the ninety seconds he'd been gone.
Taehyung's heart did the ridiculous thing again.
He climbed back onto the bed and folded down next to him, close, shoulder to shoulder, and Jeongguk turned his head and pressed his mouth to Taehyung's temple, and everything in Taehyung went warm and settled.
"So," Jeongguk said, low, into his hair. "What do you want to do today? We've got the whole day. Nobody's expecting either of us anywhere."
And there it was, immediate, loud, unmistakably arriving from somewhere that felt like the middle of his own head and somehow not:
Stay in this bed. Stay wrapped up in him, exactly here, and let the whole world go hang. Or. A weighing sort of pause, unhurried. Or you finally sit up and talk about the several million enormous things the two of you still have not said a word about.
Taehyung stopped.
He actually stopped, halfway to answering Jeongguk, his mouth open and nothing coming out, because that was the second time. That was twice now. And it hadn't felt like deciding between two options the way he decided things, turning them over himself. It had felt like being handed them. Laid out. By someone standing just off to the side of his own thoughts, patient, waiting to see which one he'd pick.
Wait, he thought, and this time the thought was entirely, definitely his own. What was that?
"Tae?" Jeongguk's brow had gone up. "You okay? You went somewhere."
"Yeah." Taehyung shook it off, physically, a small shake of his head, and made himself smile, and mostly meant it. "Yeah, sorry. I'm here." He leaned back into Jeongguk's side and let the warmth of him crowd the strange thing back down into wherever it had come from. "Both, honestly. Bed first. The million things can wait an hour."
"An hour," Jeongguk agreed, and pulled him in, and didn't argue.
And Taehyung tucked his face into the warm curve of Jeongguk's neck and shut his eyes and chose, deliberately, not to notice how it had felt like the voice was pleased with him for staying.
🌸
They fell asleep again.
Neither of them meant to. The hour they'd bargained for came and went and nobody moved to end it, and somewhere in the warm tangle of the late morning they went back under, and when Taehyung surfaced the second time the light had climbed the wall and Jeongguk was awake beside him, tracing something idle and absent along Taehyung's spine, watching him sleep like it was a thing worth doing with a morning.
After that they just stayed. There was nowhere to be. The whole mountain had the day off, and outside the window it was New Year's, cold and bright and slow, and inside the small warm room the two of them lay around talking about nothing, which turned out to be everything.
It came out in pieces, the way it does when you finally have time. That Jeongguk loved banana milk with a devotion he was not remotely embarrassed about, that he'd drink it standing at the cold shelf in the shop if Yoongi didn't stop him. That Yoongi had been there the whole way, since Jeongguk was small, the closest thing to a constant he'd had, gruff and immovable and always, somehow, exactly where Jeongguk needed him to be standing.
"And Sinhee, Imo," Jeongguk said, quieter, his fingers going still on Taehyung's back. "Seojoon's mother. She half raised me, after. She'd feed me whether I wanted feeding or not. Still does. I stopped being able to tell the difference a long time ago between her and family. She's just, she's mine. The way you'd fight for the ones who are yours."
"Like my Imo," Taehyung said.
"Yeah?"
"She isn't my mother. But she's the one who took me in and fed me and shouted at me for not eating and gave me a home when I didn't have one." He smiled at the ceiling. "I'd walk through fire for that woman. She'd walk through it faster to get to me first and yell at me for being in the fire."
Jeongguk laughed, low, and pulled him in, and they lay there a while longer in the easy quiet of two people discovering they were built out of the same few things.
Eventually the day made its claims. Jeongguk sat on the edge of the bed and waited, unhurried, while Taehyung washed and changed and made himself decent, and then they walked down to the packhouse together into the smell of the New Year, the whole place awake and loud with it.
Taehyung called Imo first thing.
He stepped into the quiet stairwell with the phone pressed to his ear and she picked up on the second ring the way she always did, and he wished her a happy New Year and heard Samchon shouting something in the background about the side dishes, and his throat went tight and full for a second, the good kind, the far-away-but-held kind. He told her he was well. He told her he was happy, and meant it so plainly it surprised them both. She told him to eat. He promised he would.
When he came back out Jeongguk had changed into clean clothes and was moving through the hall wishing everyone a good year, and the pack folded Taehyung into the same, hands on his shoulders, happy new years thrown across the room, and he gave them back easily now, one of them, no longer standing at the edge of anything.
Then the two of them went to meet Yuri.
Minjun's mother had come through the night before, hard but whole, and when they crowded quiet into the small warm room Jaein was propped up exhausted and luminous with the baby in the crook of her arm, and Sung-min sat beside them both with his big warrior's hands looking useless and reverent, unwilling to be more than an arm's length from either of them. Minjun leaned into his father's side, wide-eyed, a big brother by a day.
"Yuri," Jaein said, when Taehyung asked, and turned the small bundle so he could see. "Her name's Yuri."
She was red and furious and impossibly tiny, one fist escaped from the blanket and thrown up beside her head like she was already arguing with the world about something. Taehyung looked down at her and felt the whole day settle into something almost too big to hold, the warmth of the room, the exhausted joy in it, the ordinary miracle of a family that had grown by one in the night and let him stand here inside the circle of it.
Beside him Jeongguk was looking at the baby, and then, when Taehyung glanced over, at Taehyung, with the same soft helpless thing on his face he'd worn all through the party.
It was, Taehyung thought, the best New Year of his life. It wasn't close.
🌸
The day after the New Year, the mountain went back to being the mountain, and the council met in the back room of the packhouse with the maps out and the Wolf Games two months off.
Jeongguk sat at the head of the table with Namjoon on his right and the paperwork he'd been dreading spread in front of him. Yoongi leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. Seojoon and Hyungsik took the bench, Hyungsik already talking, Seojoon already only half answering.
"Roster," Namjoon said, and tapped the sheet. "As it stands. You, Seojoon, Sohee, Mina, and Sung-min."
"As it stood," Seojoon said.
Jeongguk looked up.
"He caught me this morning." Seojoon's face was doing something careful. "Sung-min. He's asking to be taken off. Jaein had a hard time of it, and there's the baby now, and Minjun. He doesn't want to be two months in training and away at the Games while she's still finding her feet." He spread his hands. "I couldn't tell him no. You'd have told him the same thing."
"I'd have told him the same thing," Jeongguk agreed, and meant it, and felt the problem land on the table anyway, heavy and immediate.
Because that was four. Four, two months out, against packs that would come in with full lines. And the Wolf Games did not care that a good man had a new daughter. You brought a full team, or you handed the other packs the advantage before the first day opened.
"So we're a body short," Hyungsik said, unhelpfully.
"We're a body short," Namjoon said.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Jeongguk ran the whole mountain through his head, every name, every pair of hands that could hold a line, and kept coming up against the same wall. The ones with the training were spoken for. The ones who were free didn't have it. Two months was not enough time to make a warrior out of someone who had never been one.
Which was when Yoongi, from the wall, said the thing Jeongguk had been not-letting-himself-think.
"Taehyung."
The room went quiet in a different way.
"Think about it before you say no," Yoongi went on, unbothered. "I've watched him since he came up here half-starved and flinching at his own shadow. You've all watched him. That's not who's down there anymore." He tipped his head toward the window, the fields. "He rebuilt the greenhouse out of a shoebox and his own savings. He held the frost line at four in the morning next to the rest of us and didn't fold. He shifts clean now. He's fast, he's steady, and the whole pack would go through a wall for him, which is half of what makes a line hold." A shrug. "He's developed. More than any of you want to say out loud because you still see the boy at the door with the bruises."
"He's an omega," Hyungsik said, not unkindly, just laying it down.
"So's Sohee," Mina would have said, if she'd been in the room. Yoongi said it for her. "Sohee's on the roster and nobody blinked. Don't insult me."
Jeongguk sat very still.
He was thinking about a hundred things at once. About Taehyung fast and clean in the trees. About Taehyung's face at the party, being handed a place among the men who ran this mountain and not knowing where to put it. About how much the pack loved him, and how a line that loves the body beside it holds when a colder line breaks. Yoongi was right. On every count that went on the paper, Yoongi was right.
And under all of it, quiet and cold, was the other thing. The thing Jeongguk did not say into that room because it wasn't the council's to hear yet. The Wolf Games meant the other packs. All of them. Gathered in one place for the first time in a year.
Which meant it meant Bogum.
"Bring him in," Jeongguk heard himself say. "He should hear it and decide for himself. It's his to say yes to or not."
Seojoon went to get him.
🌸
Taehyung had been out back splitting kindling, sleeves shoved up despite the cold, still warm all the way through from a morning that had started with Jeongguk's mouth at his temple and a promise about tonight. He was, he thought, absurdly happy. He kept catching himself smiling at the wood.
So when Seojoon leaned out the back door and said the council wanted him, he came in easy, unconcerned, wiping his hands on his thighs, expecting some small question about the fields or the seed order.
The back room went quiet when he stepped into it. Namjoon, Yoongi, Seojoon, Hyungsik. Jeongguk at the head of the table, looking at him with something Taehyung couldn't read, something braced.
"Sit," Namjoon said, kind. "We want to ask you something."
Taehyung sat. He looked around the ring of them, these men, this council, all of it turned toward him and waiting, and a small bright disbelieving warmth started up in his chest, because he knew this shape now. He'd felt it at the party. Being turned toward. Being about to be let into something.
"Sung-min's had to step off the Wolf Games roster," Namjoon said. "His family needs him. That leaves us a place short, two months out." He paused. "We've talked it through. All of us. And we want to put you forward. To train, and to compete, as one of ours."
The warmth crested over the top of him, enormous, ridiculous, a whole life's worth of never-being-chosen turning over in a single sentence. Him. They wanted him. On the line, with them, as one of theirs. He opened his mouth, and he didn't even know yet what he was going to say, only that the whole of him was one bright rising yes.
And then a voice went off in the middle of his head.
Loud. Clear. Nothing like a thought, nothing he had reached for, a voice that arrived from somewhere just off the center of him, fully formed and appalled, and it said one thing, sharp as a struck bell.
No. Absolutely not.
Taehyung froze, his mouth still open, the yes dying in his throat.
The Wolf Games. Do you understand what that is? Every pack in one valley. The voice was rising, urgent, wide awake in a way it had never been that morning in the bathroom, in a way he could no longer pretend was his own. That's your old pack. That's your mother. That's Seokjin. That's Hoseok.
Then the voice paused, which surprised Taehyung all the more. That's Bogum.
No way. No. Way.
Taehyung's eyes went around the ring of them, Jeongguk, Namjoon, Yoongi, Hyungsik, Seojoon, and then turned helplessly inward, toward the voice, which had not stopped.
You will not. You are walking straight into a disaster. Taehyung, I am telling you, right now, you will not.
Five pairs of eyes rested on him, patient, waiting, and Taehyung sat marooned in the middle of them, torn clean down the center, the offer in front of him and the voice behind his teeth and no idea what was happening in either place.
"And so." Jeongguk's voice came gentle, pitched like they were the only two in the room. He was looking at Taehyung as if he could talk him into it with his eyes alone, into the yes, into being close, into weeks side by side where neither of them would have to be far from the other. Because that was the part he hadn't said out loud in the meeting. The Wolf Games ran a full two weeks. "What do you think, Tae. Do you say yes?"
But the voice was scratching now, incessant, insistent.
Have you lost your mind? You are actually thinking of saying yes, when I am telling you no?
Taehyung started to open his mouth. "Ummm..."