If You Die, I Die
Taeyang
I don’t feel the sword leave my hand. I only feel her leaving me.
Yuna folds forward with a soft, surprised breath and I am already there, catching her before the ground can learn her name.
Heat rips out of me in a rush—wrath blowing itself to ash—until the valley is only cold and the sound of my own heart failing to keep up.
“Yun,” I choke, lowering us to the churned earth. “No—no—stay with me. Look at me.”
Her lashes tremble. She finds my face like she’s been navigating by it all her life. There’s pain in her eyes, yes—but there’s something else I don’t deserve: relief.
“Thank goodness you’re back,” she whispers again, weaker, and the fact that she uses her breath to comfort me is the cruelest mercy I’ve ever been given.
“Pressed seal—now!” Jisoo hits the ground hard beside us, wings flaring to shatter arrow-rain. His hands are already moving, quick and clean. Seori’s shadow cleaves the air; Rheon throws night over us like a cloak; Minji’s whistle carves routes, turning chaos into a map with teeth.
I press my palm over the wound and feel the heat and the slick and the prayer of not too late. My hands won’t stop shaking. I’m afraid to speak because everything I say will just be sorry and that isn’t a tourniquet.
“Hold.” Jisoo’s voice is all blade. He slaps a warding seal against Yuna’s skin; wax flashes, catches. “Breathe for me, Princess.”
She tries. The breath stutters. The chain mark at her wrist is gone; the ribbon I tied there peeks purple under blood, stubborn and small. I cradle her head in my palm and bow my forehead to hers like I can trade my life through skin.
“Please,” I say, and the word scrapes. “Please stay. Take me instead. Take the whole of me and leave her.”
“Taeyang.” Seori’s hand lands firm on my shoulder, an anchor disguised as touch. “We’re here. Don’t go under.”
I nod, but I’m already drowning.
Yuna’s fingers climb my cheek, shaking, and I lean into them like absolution might be learned.
“It’s okay,” she breathes.
“It isn’t.” The truth breaks out of me. “I hurt you. I—”
“It isn’t you,” she says, and somehow she’s still the one making room for me in a world that doesn’t. “And even if it were… I choose you anyway.”
My vision blurs.
“Don’t say brave things when you need your breath.”
“I have enough for one more.” Her mouth tilts—small, defiant. “For the thing I should have said before the balcony, before the garden, before everything that tried to make us small.”
Jisoo presses harder; the seal hisses.
“Hold pressure—good—Minji, tincture—now.”
Yuna tips her face to mine, finds my eyes, and gives me the only crown I will ever let touch me.
“I forgive you,” she whispers.
Something in my chest cracks down the middle and light pours through.
Her thumb traces the line of my jaw, clumsy and perfect. “And, Taeyang… I love you.”
The words hit like arrows and become wings. I am not a man who cries. I am a man who was taught fire instead of water. But my eyes burn anyway, and the tears come hot and humiliating and holy, and I don’t know where to put my hands except on her, gentle, like learning.
“I—” The first answer tangles. I try again, raw. “I love you. I love you, and I will spend the rest of my life making that sentence mean safe.”
A sob gets out before I can hide it. It sounds like a boy who wasn’t allowed to need anything making up for lost time.
“Rheon, more shadow,” Jisoo snaps. “Seori—hold him steady.” Minji’s knees hit mud across from me; she slides a vial to Jisoo, eyes bright and furious. “Drink this,” he orders Yuna, lifting her carefully. She swallows, coughs, swallows again. The ward flares, flickers, holds.
Above us, the balcony erupts—guards, shouting, the King’s voice a blade thrown at a daughter who won’t be small. Kaelen’s steel sings defiance. The world keeps insisting on being a war. I only have room for a person.
“Yun,” I beg, the way a man prays after he’s seen the god and asked it to be human. “Stay. Please.”
She smiles like the sky broke just to let one star through. Her hand slips from my cheek to my mouth, hushes me without force.
“Shh,” she murmurs, lashes lowering. “It’s all right.”
Her fingers loosen.
Her hand drops.
I break.
The sound that leaves me isn’t wrath. It’s the quiet after, torn open. I fold over her, shoulder shaking, nose in her hair, tasting salt and iron and a garden that promised forgiveness and kept it anyway.
“Don’t take her,” I tell whatever listens. “Take the burn. Take the leash. Take my name. Leave her.”
Jisoo’s seal glows brighter, then steadies.
“She’s fading and fast,” he grinds out, sweat slick on his brow.
Rheon’s shadow seals the world smaller so the arrows can’t find us. Minji counts under her breath—routes, supplies, lies to tell death so it will wait its turn.
I kiss Yuna’s knuckles, one by one, and lay my cheek to her palm as if it can teach me how to be gentler than fire.
“Shatter me slowly,” I whisper to her, to me, to the old house that built my bones wrong, “as long as I can build again where you can live.”
I don’t lift my head. I don’t wipe my face. I hold. I breathe for both of us. I say I love you into her skin like it’s a ward and a weapon and a vow, and I promise the world that if it wants the rest of me it will have to learn the cost of touching what is mine.