The Bond Still Burns
Taeyang
I told myself I could outlast it.
Run far enough, bleed long enough, drown the ache in missions and noise until the bond thinned to a rumor my body stopped believing. A pretty lie, stitched from guilt and old discipline.
Bonds don’t fade. They fester.
The barracks stove ticks like a nervous heart, throwing a mean, inconsistent heat.
I sit on the floor with my back to the cot, a half-empty bottle hooked in two fingers, watching flame lick the iron door and spit shadows up the wall.
The room smells like oil and smoke and the ghost of clove on leather—hers, not mine.
I cracked the window to cut it. Winter climbs in anyway, sharp enough to polish bone.
I press my palm to the crescent under my sternum.
It answers me low, stubborn, a bruise that learned to throb to someone else’s rhythm.
I tried everything to quiet it. Spellbinders sewed cold wards along my ribs until my skin sang with static.
Rune-smiths burned iron staves through the ink to blur the edges of fate’s handwriting.
Twice I took a blade to it myself, cold steel, clean line, the way you excise rot from wood before the whole beam goes.
The mark healed brighter, like light annoyed at being told where it could not live.
It’s hers. I’m hers. Every breath a confession.
If I had stayed—if I had taken what the bond offered—she would have learned the parts of me built for ruin.
The berserker the old houses bred on purpose.
The weapon that hums in my wrists when a room goes wrong.
I could have handed her the parts I hid and asked her to call them anything but monster.
I didn’t. Cowards can lift mountains if they call it strategy.
I tip the bottle and let the last mouthful burn a path down my throat.
It doesn’t touch the real fire. Nothing does.
Not even the drill I do until my hands split and my shoulders shake.
Not perimeter watches so cold my teeth remember the shape of prayer.
Not the missions I take because they come with permission to bleed.
A knock threads the wind. Two beats, pause, two again.
“Taeyang.” Jisoo’s voice through the wood—stern, tired, that angelic patience he’s been trying to make into a habit. “Open.”
I don’t move. He opens anyway. He always could unhook a lock without insulting it.
Lamplight draws him in—wing clipped close, bandage neat, eyes taking in the bottle, the stove, the band around my chest where I wrapped myself too tight for a man who claims he isn’t running. He doesn’t sigh. He knows better than to waste breath on theatrics when I’m the audience.
“Perimeter,” he says. “North wall. Rheon wants eyes that know how to see past their own ghosts.”
“My ghosts are punctual,” I say, standing. Everything aches the way a room does after a fight, nothing obviously broken, everything aware of edges.
Jisoo sets a tin cup on the stove, adds water from the kettle like he lives here. He doesn’t look at me when he asks the thing he came to ask.
“You saw her last week.”
It isn’t a question. Angels don’t gamble with grammar when truth is the point.
I close my eyes.
Saw her is too small. Haunted me is closer.
Yuna in a black cloak that made her skin look like dawn—the wrong metaphor, too gentle—and an ache riding her mouth that should’ve belonged to me to carry with her.
The burial ground was quiet by then. No smoke.
No noise. Just wind worrying rosemary and the tin chime Rheon salvaged, singing to prove the air could still move.
She stood in the gray and let tears fall like she’d finally found a place that knew their language.
There was ash in her braid and a green bead on the ribbon at her wrist the color wind makes when it remembers how to be a river.
I gripped the eave until the wood bit back and waited for my body to decide whether it was a door or a wall.
I stayed a wall.
“I didn’t speak,” I tell Jisoo. “She doesn’t need my silence close to hear it.”
“You should,” he says, because he refuses to build a life on should-nots anymore.
“I don’t know how to touch her without…stopping.”
He pours the water when it steams, no comment, lets the tin warm his hands.
“You keep trying to quit like it’s a vice,” he says mildly. “It isn’t. It’s a vow. Either keep it or say out loud that you won’t.”
“I’m keeping it by staying away.”
He looks at me then—no wing-bright pity, just a man who has had to learn humility like a second language.
“That sounds like fear dressed as virtue.”
“I am afraid,” I snap, more honesty than I meant to hand him.
“You want the full scripture? I wake with her name in my mouth like I bit it in my sleep. When she cries, the mark under my ribs feels it like a blade turned in slow. I can smell her before I see her and I know the exact weight of that ribbon in my palm without touching it, and if I touch her again I won’t—” My throat locks. “I won’t want to stop.”
“Good,” he says simply. “Then don’t.”
The stove ticks. The wind shoulders the window and thinks better of it.
“What if the thing I am breaks her?” I ask, quieter now. “What if the room goes wrong and the old training chooses for me?”
“Then you say her name and let it choose with you,” he says. “Rheon taught me that. Seori made it law. Yuna will make it real. Or don’t. But stop pretending the bond is a leash you nobly refuse. It’s a line back home. If you won’t take it, say you prefer the dark.”
He pushes the cup into my hand. My fingers remember heat means alive and close around it.
“North wall,” he repeats, softer. “Rheon needs you.”
He leaves before I can decide whether gratitude would land or shatter. The door closes, and the room feels bigger and emptier in the same breath.
I unwrap the band around my chest. The skin beneath is a map—old sigils faded, Seori’s clean cut she made getting a demons claw out healed into a sign that refuses to stop being bright. I lay my palm over the bond and breathe slowly until the hurt quiets into a hum.
“Stay quiet,” I tell the mark.
It doesn’t. It warms like a mouth on the edge of my palm saying don’t lie.
Outside, the camp is awake enough to pretend it slept.
I pull on my coat and go. The night is iron-cold; frost scrawls low across the flagstones and dares boots to argue.
Sentinels nod. I answer with my chin. The north wall rises where the palace stops being story and starts being stone—old, high, mean enough to survive another war.
Rheon is a dark cut against darker sky, shadow tethered to the parapet like a steadying hand. He says nothing when I step into place. Saying nothing is my language; it’s generous when someone speaks to you in it.
“Wards held?” I ask.
“For now,” he says. “They hold better when the people behind them remember what they’re for.”
I scanned the tree line. The miasma is low tonight, hugging the ground, too tired to climb. My eyes pick out the wrong shadows on instinct. My hands rest easy on the parapet like they’ve finally found something harder than their questions.
After a while Rheon says,
“She asked about you.”
My body goes still the way prey does when it hears a hunter and can’t tell if it belongs to it.
“What did you tell her?”
“That you are learning to be aimed.” He tips his chin my direction. “That and the truth.”
“Which is?”
“That you are terrible at pretending you don’t look at the balcony before you turn in.”
I huff once. Not laughter. An admission.
“You think this ends if I stop pretending?”
“I think the ending will be what it is whether you practice for it or not,” he says dry. “Practice for the part where you live inside it.”
We stand until our breath makes a soft fog and the wards hum contentment at being watched. When Jisoo relieves me, he doesn’t speak as he passes; his wing brushes the stone like a benediction. I take the inner stairs down and cut across the moon garden because I am weak or honest or both.
The arch is bare this time of year. Wisteria sleeps with its fists closed. The bench under it remembers us whether it wants to or not. The air smells like cold water and old vows. My chest warms. No footsteps. No cloak. No ribbon.
Just the bond, saying here the way a compass points whether I deserve the way it helps.
I press my hand flat over the crescent until the heat steadies into something I can breathe around.
“I am not good enough,” I tell the garden, because sometimes you have to say the ugly thing so it stops pretending to be true just because it’s quiet. “But I can be willing.”
The under-light along the path brightens like it heard something it approved of.
Back in the barracks, I scrub the stove clean like penance and set the bottle on the shelf where it can glare at me in daylight.
I wrap my knuckles, hit the wooden man until my shoulders are glass, and stop before pain turns stupid.
I wash my hands. I run the band under warm water and knot it looser.
I open the window again, let winter in, and count the stars until numbers run out.
The bond doesn’t sleep. It never does. It isn’t a leash or a mercy. It’s a door. I keep telling myself I can survive without walking through. Truth sits in my mouth, hard and small, and cuts when I swallow:
She is in my blood. My curse. My salvation. And I walked away.
The mark under my palm burns—not punishment. Reminder. I close my eyes. I see her anyway.
Yuna.
I wake three times before dawn with her name on my lips like I bit it to keep from crying out. Each time I stare at the ceiling and listen to the bond make its slow, patient case.
It doesn’t grow quieter. It learns my language. And it keeps telling the one story I can’t drink or bleed or run out of me:
She is the one thing I can’t burn. I think she’s going to ruin me. I think I want her to.