Chapter Text
This was not the first time that Seokjin had considered running away, but it was the first time that something other than his own cowardice had stopped him.
It wasn't the rain pouring down so thickly that he could hardly see. It wasn't even that the river had flooded because of it. Rather, it was the shape on the riverbank—a heap of white cloth that might have been discarded attire.
Seokjin halted, his heart in his mouth. From atop his long-suffering horse, he couldn't tell for certain, but it looked as though there might be something underneath those clothes. After dismounting a little less gracefully than usual, Seokjin crept cautiously toward the figure, pressing his lips together when he realized that it was… human. A corpse, laid out in funeral attire, skin nearly as pale as the clothes it wore.
Blood running cold, Seokjin realized that he had forgotten to breathe, and tried to remember whatever his martial arts mentor had taught him about meditation. Corpses were scary, but they couldn't hurt him, and with the river moving so quickly, this one might be swept away before long. Not that Seokjin set much store by the gods, but they wouldn't be happy if he just left a dead body here. He could at least drag it farther away from the water and leave it for someone else to find…
Mustering every ounce of his willpower, Seokjin approached, took a deep breath, and took hold of the corpse's hand. But as soon as he made contact, the strength left him all at once, and he yelped, dropping the hand abruptly. The body was still warm! (Or, well, 'warm' might have been an overstatement, but it wasn't ice-cold the way Seokjin had expected of someone dead.)
After gathering what little remained of his strength, Seokjin reached out to take the wrist with shaking fingers, feeling around for a pulse. He wasn't sure whether he was relieved or even more unnerved to find one—weak, but still present. That settled it. Funeral clothing or not, Seokjin couldn't leave this person here to die for real. The problem was that the shock had made him less able to carry someone else about his size.
"Here goes nothing," said Seokjin to no one in particular, grasping the stranger by the arms and trying to get to his feet. Stumbling, he sank to one knee, grimacing at the cold squishy feeling of mud seeping into the fabric of his baji. But then again, it could be much worse. He could be soaked through and half-dead on a riverbank. "Sorry."
It took some doing even to haul the stranger closer to Seokjin's horse, let alone to try and get him on the horse without sliding off. It was easiest to have him lie facedown on the horse's back, but actually getting him into that position… "Come on, Seokjinni," he told himself breathlessly, shifting the stranger on his back. If only he were even the slightest bit conscious, it might be easier.
After another several minutes of trying and failing to arrange the stranger on his horse, Seokjin was practically winded. He didn't make a habit of giving up, but even he had no choice but to admit that this wasn't going to work. In Jeongguk's absence, he'd just have to become the horse himself. Stooping, he hauled the stranger onto his back, legs trembling under the added weight on top of his dwindling adrenaline; grasped the reins; and started back toward the palace.
Maybe it was just that Seokjin wasn't riding anymore, but time seemed to pass much more slowly on the way back to the palace than it had on the way to the river. "Aish, you're heavy," said Seokjin after what must have been several minutes, shifting the stranger on his back with a grunt. "After you wake up and get better, I'm going to have you carry me everywhere. That's a promise." Even if the stranger wasn't awake to remember it, Seokjin would remind him.
Bangtan Palace was an excellent location to defend in the event of a siege, since it left so few opportunities for sneak attacks, but that was the opposite of helpful when Seokjin was trying to be stealthy. He had barely reached the outer gardens before one of his more obnoxious attendants came sprinting forward. Seokjin knew his name, of course, but made a point of forgetting it whenever possible.
"Your Highness!" exclaimed the attendant, shielding his head and/or fancy hat from the weather, and ushered Seokjin under an overhang for a proper upbraiding. "Where have—who's this?"
Seokjin gave a smile he knew too well was awkward, bent almost double under the weight of the stranger and his sodden clothes. "I found this friend on the riverbank."
"You found…" The attendant sputtered, apparently lost for words, but at least had the decency to flag down one servant to take the horse, and call over another to carry the stranger. After breathing a sigh of relief as his burden lifted, Seokjin watched the latter retreat, but didn't dare follow in the middle of a scolding. "And you brought him here? To the palace? He could be an assassin!"
There were times when Seokjin had enough patience to engage in pointless debates—it was a hobby of his to see how far he could push someone before they realized he was joking—but now was not one of those times. "Anyone could be an assassin. You could be an assassin." Seokjin raised his voice over the attendant's indignant protests. "I'm not going to ignore someone in need just because of who they might be. If I hadn't come along, he might have died!"
"And you just happened to 'come along' by the river," said the attendant. "Unsupervised. In this weather."
"Well, it wasn't raining when I set out." That much, at least, was true.
The attendant muttered something about basic meteorology under his breath, but thankfully did not elaborate, nor did he continue reprimanding Seokjin. Instead, he said something worse: "Just… please get changed, Your Highness. We've all been worried sick about you."
The weight of his words made Seokjin feel like he was talking about more than just the servants, and his mood plummeted. He knew it was a blessing that he still had both his parents, since none of his cousins did, but that didn't make the thought of sitting through one of their lectures any more appealing. "I'm eighteen years old, hyeong," said Seokjin crossly, all the defiance he could muster in this state. "I'm not a child anymore."
"Then you would do well to stop acting like one."
To Seokjin's dismay, he had no ready retort, and had already learned the hard way multiple times that stuttering through a number of attempted comebacks only made him look more ridiculous. In situations like this, it was better to make a strategic retreat.
By the time Seokjin's father finally wrapped up his speech, it was beginning to get dark.
The sky had been far from bright already, but now the light was dimmer still, the rain relentless. It was a welcome contrast from the firelight Seokjin had been staring into half the time while his father went on and on about their stations in life, and how risking his safety was risking the safety of the kingdom, and so forth. (Sometimes, more and more often these days, Seokjin felt that his father couldn't have been more different from Uncle Sihyeok if he tried.)
"Hyeong—"
Seokjin had been in the process of taking a deep breath of fresh air, but choked at the sound of a voice just behind him. Once he recognized the speaker a split second later, he leaned against the wall to recover, clutching at his heart. "Jeongguk-a! Where did you come from?"
"Around the corner," said Jeongguk evasively. "Do you want me to make some tea?"
"That sounds like page stuff," said Seokjin, raising his eyebrows. "Aren't you a squire yet?"
Seokjin had only been teasing, but Jeongguk gave a self-conscious sort of smile and ruffled his unruly hair. It was long enough to get in his eyes, but not yet long enough to tie back effectively. "Next year."
"Oh, come on," said Seokjin, giving Jeongguk a friendly shove—partly as payback for startling him like that. "Everyone in the palace knows you can already do as much as a page and a squire combined. Carrying drinks is beneath you."
Seokjin meant it as a compliment, but Jeongguk squared up as though he had insulted him. "No, it's not. I'm just a page, hyeong."
It took Seokjin a moment before he realized what Jeongguk thought he meant. It always rubbed him the wrong way when anyone alluded to what should have been his rightful station. After all, his blood was every bit as royal as Seokjin's—he was just illegitimate, as though one human being could possibly be less legitimate than another.
But this time, Seokjin hadn't been trying to get on Jeongguk's nerves. It was important that he know that, or it'd stop being fun to antagonize him. "I know," said Seokjin, meeting Jeongguk's eyes so that he could see that he meant it. "I just meant that you can do more than make tea. That's all." Even if Seokjin did think that Jeongguk would make a better prince than him, he wasn't stupid enough to say it.
Blushing at his misinterpretation, Jeongguk cleared his throat. "So… do you want tea or not?"
"Of course I want tea," said Seokjin, sitting back again, and gestured to the rain outside. "What kind of a question is that on a day like this?"
Jeongguk smiled, maybe in relief. "Then I'll go make some."
Tea with Jeongguk was a nice break from finding a non-corpse and getting a scolding, but only after that did the real work start.
When it came to getting access to areas he wasn't supposed to enter, Seokjin's title usually came in handy. Most of the time, it almost made the crushing level of responsibility that came with his position worth it. But unfortunately, the court doctor had known Seokjin since childhood, and knew all his quirks and tendencies. Apparently, he had moved his latest patient someplace far from prying eyes, but still within the palace.
Even if this place wasn't as big as the recently constructed Grand Palace of Haibeu, it wasn't feasible to search it from top to bottom, not even with his cousins' help. The three princes of Taegong had enough of a reputation among the servants—who often remarked that they were collectively harder to manage than a litter of tiger cubs—that they couldn't get any information. Even Jeongguk, generally trusted, was still known to report to Seokjin or Taehyeong.
It was near midnight when Seokjin finally found his lead, as Beomgyu slipped into his room. He was the quietest of the princes, and obviously the smallest, so he had managed to listen in on some servants talking about bringing medicine somewhere, 'just in case'. The price for that information was the location of Seokjin's secret snack stash, but it was a price well worth paying if it meant that he could finally take a good look at the person he had rescued. (By now, it was mostly just to make a point.)
Apparently, the stranger had been brought to a little-used guest suite in an older part of the palace. Seokjin knew how to get there, at least, and the alarm on the servants' faces as he strode toward it were more than enough to confirm that he was going the right way.
"Your Highness," said the doctor, startled, as Seokjin finally reached the doorway. "To what do I owe this honor?"
There was no way the doctor didn't already know what Seokjin wanted. "I just wanted to check on the latest patient."
With a sigh of clear reluctance, the doctor gestured to the stranger's sickbed. "I confess, it astonishes me how this young man's condition can be so stable, given the state in which he was brought to me. His pulse is still a little irregular, but his temperature is normal, and I haven't noticed anything unusual in his breathing. From what I can tell, this is just ordinary sleep."
"Then there shouldn't be any danger if I stay a while," said Seokjin matter-of-factly. "I'll spend the night here if I have to. I have to tell this guy how much my back hurts from carrying him all this way, and I can't do that until he wakes up." And, more importantly, he couldn't guarantee that the palace staff wouldn't just move the stranger elsewhere if he left now. What if the staff just took care of everything and he never got to hear his story?
The doctor shook his head in clear exasperation, but did not try to stop him. In cases like this, acquiescence was good enough for Seokjin, so he sat down next to the bed and looked down at the stranger. Now that they were in a warm and dry and well-lit place, he could study him more carefully.
He appeared to be in his middle or late teenage years, not much younger than Seokjin himself, but was already almost as tall. Whether or not he was wearing anything under those covers, he was at least out of his funeral garb. His skin had regained some of its color, particularly in his full lips (but not full in the same way as Seokjin's—no one's lips were as beautiful as Seokjin's), and his nose was a little smaller and slightly upturned in a way that made Seokjin want to poke it.
Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, or maybe it had just been a while since he had really taken the time to observe a new face, but Seokjin found his thoughts wandering farther and farther. The serenity in this young man's sleeping countenance made Seokjin realize how nice it would be to rest a while. But he couldn't just lie down next to a stranger, so he tried to keep himself upright, leaning his elbow on his knee and his face on his hand.
Seokjin must have dozed off without realizing it, because he jolted awake at the sound of a crash. Flailing as he tried to arrange his body into a self-defensive stance while still seated, he realized that the sound was… a water jug breaking. Only then did he realize that the stranger was sitting up, looking just as startled, porcelain handle still in hand.
"Good morning," said Seokjin automatically, even though it was the middle of the night, and tried to calm his nerves. "Who are you?"