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In winter, every surface resonates differently — wood swelling under frost, the paper walls whispering when the wind passes through their seams. Bi-Han stands barefoot on the boards, eyes closed, listening.
Each sound has its pitch. The crack of a joint settling in its socket, the slow exhale of his brother’s stance beside him, the rhythm of air displaced by a strike. The world is a score he deciphers through his body.
He strikes — and the sound is wrong. Too bright. He adjusts the angle of his wrist, corrects the tremor in his breath. Again. The note deepens, almost perfect.
Then, beneath everything, comes a foreign sound — a quick, ragged pulse of footsteps in snow, breaking patterns, running where no one should. The rhythm stumbles, catches, vanishes. A silence swells, raw and expectant, like the moment before a string snaps.
Bi-Han’s muscles lock. His hearing sharpens until every distant noise fractures into texture — the rustle of pines, a shivering inhale. Something alive is outside, close enough that he feels its presence through the air itself.
Kuai Liang moves first, turning toward the door. But Bi-Han lifts a hand, not in command but in instinct — Listen.
The next sound is a cry — half-human, half-animal — and then the thud of a body collapsing into snow.
Bi-Han moves. He crosses the threshold, drawn by the unbearable pull of that dissonance.
Outside, under the moon, a boy lies sprawled in white, his breath a broken rhythm of pain. His skin is fevered, his eyes wide and wrong — pale unlike anyone’s he has seen before. Sharp.
Bi-Han’s world tilts. The sound of that breathing cuts through him — wild, uneven. Beautiful.
The dojo hums with morning chill. Frost gathers on the beams, and the air is sharp enough to slice breath in half. Bi-Han stands still, eyes closed, letting sounds map the world around him, rooting himself to Kuai Liang’s slow, measured breathing behind. There is a faint echo of footsteps from the corridor.
It has to be Tomas training again. He always starts long before he should. Bi-Han knows the rhythm of his movements by now — imprecise, almost fragile tempo, followed by sudden bursts of wild noise when something inside him snaps free.
But this time it begins softly — the scrape of a blade against floorboards, uneven, searching. Then a sound that does not belong to Lin Kuei’s discipline: a guttural growl, rising, fractured, echoing. Loud enough for Kuai to hear. A younger boy tenses beside him, his breath catching in that barely audible way Bi-Han always hears.
“He’s having another one,” Kuai whispers.
Bi-Han opens his eyes.
Through the half-open door, Tomas moves like an animal caught by invisible ghosts. His body convulses, breath stutters uncontrolled — strikes turning chaotic, no longer forms but scratching the air. His voice catches in his throat — half-snarl, half-cry.
Bi-Han steps forward, concerned and repelled at once. The sound is unbearable in its wrongness — like a string vibrating beyond its pitch, ready to snap. Kuai Liang moves too, but reaching out with words:
“Tomas,” he says quietly, “hey—look at me.”
But the boy doesn’t hear him. He’s lost to some inner rhythm none of them can follow. The clang of his weapon against the floor sings with a strange, painful beauty.
Bi-Han’s hand closes around Kuai’s wrist. “No,” he says. “Let me.”
He crosses the room in silence, catching Tomas’s arm mid-swing, adjusting its angle and brutally pressing down.
For a moment, Tomas freezes, breathing hard. Their eyes meet. His pupils are dilated, unfocused, like an animal’s with a throat cut just cut open. There are unbearable minutes of futile fight which is not fight at all. Then, slowly, both their breathings even out.
Behind them, Kuai Liang exhales — relief and sadness woven together.
The silence that follows feels too fragile. Bi-Han hears it ringing still — that haunting, unresolved interval, the sound that Tomas always carries inside him.
Tomas’ “episodes” as they call it do not stop.
When he first had it, the healers feared it was epilepsy. The fits came without warning — in training, in sleep, in the middle of a conversation. His body would twist, his eyes roll back, his breath turn shallow, violent. But Tomas’s body was healthy. The doctors outside of the clan who looked inside the scared boy’s brains with the loud machines and probed him with needles and hammers found nothing as well.
Over time, it just happened less often, until finally it seemed to fade into memory. But sometimes, even now, it returns. Like the weather — sudden, merciless, impossible to prepare for.
With the days of their power being so obviously disbalanced gone, Bi-Han can only listen to the sounds of his brother’s unraveling now. The clang of a weapon dropped. The scraping of knees against wood. The hitched, pained breaths. Bi-Han knows he should move. He wants to move every time. Yet something stops him — not fear, of course. But a hollow, somehow reverent horror.
Kuai Liang is always there first, silent and sure. He kneels beside Tomas, speaking in a low voice, coaxing chaos back into rhythm.
“Tomas. Breathe. Do you hear me? You’re safe. I’m with you. Breathe.”
These words are like drumbeats, soft but insistent. Bi-Han watches from the doorway, every nerve alight with sound — the rasp of Tomas’s throat, the gentle thud of Kuai’s palm against his chest as if marking tempo for a body lost to its own storm.
When it had just begun, Bi-Han tried to search for order in the spasms — but his contact only worsened it. The tremors would deepen, body recoiling from Bi-Han’s touch, remembering powerless forced stillness. He learned, after too many attempts, that he could not bridge that distance.
That he can only watch.
Kuai Liang’s patience is a melody Bi-Han cannot reproduce. Slowly, the storm always quiets. Tomas’s hands unclench and he blinks, confused. Shame is flickering in his eyes before exhaustion smothers it. Kuai’s voice lowers to a whisper, words indistinct but kind. Tomas leans into it — not quite a touch, more a surrender of tension. A small, desperate gesture that no one seems to notice.
But Bi-Han hears everything. And because of that sometimes the world inside him collapses inward — sound folding into silence until only one vibration remains: the fading echo of voice, a fragile, uneven hum, like a damaged string trying to find its pitch again.
Bi-Han turns away, unable to bear it. That sounds too human, too raw. It unsettles the harmony he’s built.
Every time it happens, he tells himself he’ll stop feeling this way. Stop needing to fix what he can’t. Stop wanting to understand the language of that trembling, wounded body.
But each time Tomas falls, Bi-Han feels the fracture inside him deepen — a dissonance too close to beauty. Too dangerous to put into the actual melody. A wolf interval.
Bi-Han knows it because he composes when language fails him — which is often. His music is not for anyone to hear; it exists only to bleed tension from the body, to map what words and gestures cannot. In childhood, his pieces were simple — sequences of notes that matched the rhythm of his training, the cold precision of sword strikes, the calm repetition of form. But as he grows older, and the world around him becomes tangled with meanings and expectations, his compositions grow more complicated. Stranger.
There are so many things he cannot process anymore.
His father’s voice in the council room — distant and proud. The low murmur of men discussing alliances, dowries, the futures of clans. Some sentences sound like doors closing around him. He knows they speak of him too sometimes, of his position as future Grandmaster. The title feels like a blade pressed flat against his throat: not cutting, but reminding him that it could.
The training intensifies too. No longer only discipline of movement but the performance of control. Every bow, every meeting, every pause must be measured. Bi-Han studies people the way others study notes for a piece — memorizing how long one must hold eye contact, when to nod, how to disguise confusion beneath stillness. It exhausts him, drains the sound from the world until even silence feels heavy.
At night, he sits by the low table in his room, fingers hovering above the strings of his guqin. The wood is cold under his palms. He doesn’t think, doesn’t plan — he just listens for what inside him still dares to move. The first note always comes wrong, sharp and bright like a blade scraping stone. Then another follows, hesitant, shifting. The melody grows uneven, breathless, but alive.
That’s when Tomas enters his mind again — his voice, his laugh, his wild disorder of being. Tomas is a dissonance embodied: restless, impossible to tame, but exactly not aggressive. Strong, but not in a powerful way. Wrong all over, but not unattractive. He moves through the Lin Kuei compound as if no rule fully applies to him, and still, somehow, they forgive him. Kuai Liang follows him with that protective softness that Bi-Han can never imitate, and Bi-Han watches from a distance, each time Tomas stumbles and rises again, each time his voice cracks mid-laughter or his eyes glaze with fear at the edges of some memory.
He always composes after Tomas’s fits. The music comes out fractured — no proper measure, only the echo of what he couldn’t say — that unstable vibration between harmony and discord. It frightens him, but he cannot stop himself.
Sometimes, in the quiet of dawn, Kuai Liang hears faint notes leaking through the walls: deep, mournful to his ears, and strange. He doesn’t know what they mean. He tries to ask sometimes. But Bi-Han doesn’t either.
The talks begin quietly, as most threats do. A suggestion from his father during dinner — nothing binding, only a notion that the future Grandmaster should begin thinking of alliances. Of suitable matches.
The words are calm, practical, and they terrify Bi-Han more than any weapon ever could.
He nods as expected, expression still, eyes lowered. But inside, things break open. He cannot imagine it — a woman’s presence beside him, the expected gestures of closeness, the merging of bodies and lives. The thought feels wrong, cold, like stepping into a shape carved for someone else. Like a constant nausea. And beneath that wrongness lurks something darker still — the quiet, forbidden truth. But he cannot imagine being with a man either. Dares not to even think what that would mean, what it would destroy.
Afterward, he trains until his hands blister. He sits at his instrument when the house falls silent. The guqin becomes his voice saying “no”, the one way his defiance can exist without shame. The melody that comes is disjointed — notes chasing each other, overlapping, collapsing. He doesn’t compose consciously, he lets his body speak, his fingers tracing what his mind cannot face.
And there is Kuai Liang making that damn strange comment as they were sitting together after — how he wants to see the woman who’d be able to tame Bi-Han’s temper.. The words are meant as a harmless joke, but they strike. Bi-Han doesn’t respond.
And even now, as his fingers press the strings too hard, Tomas intrudes. The image of him, the sound of his voice, the way his laughter fractures the air like a sharp, bright chord. The wolfish energy he carries — hidden, dangerous, uncertain. The one Bi-Han catches himself watching too long, listening too closely. There’s something magnetic in Tomas’s constant unease, in the way his fear and courage coexist.
It began as fascination — or so he tells himself. A need to understand. But the more he tries to study it, to define it, the less control he has. The sound resonates under his skin like struck metal. The feeling builds, unspoken, unformed, hovering at the edge of awareness.
That night, he cannot sleep. He won’t name what he feels. He won’t. But as the notes fade, he realizes that this is the closest he has ever come to understanding the thing others call desire. Or maybe love.
It terrifies him — how only in that sound, in that trembling resonance, he finally hears himself.
Bi-Han notices the silence first — the small absences in the rhythm of their days. Kuai Liang and Tomas begin to move differently around each other, their gestures threaded with quiet understanding, their words carrying a warmth Bi-Han cannot trace to any spoken thing. When they train, they exchange glances that last too long; when they eat, they share food without thinking. None of it is loud or obvious, but Bi-Han feels it. His mind, tuned to the smallest deviation, registers every shift. Like a melody revealing the instrument being out of tune. .
At first, he explains it as Tomas’s reliance on Kuai and Kuai’s compassion in return. But soon, there are pauses in their voices when he enters the room. Sentences broken off halfway, laughter that halts too abruptly. A new note hums beneath everything, fragile and secret, and it gnaws at him because he cannot fully identify it. He wants to, needs to even, as he would need to resolve a chord that refuses to settle.
It takes time for understanding to form, and when it does, it hurts. They are in love. The realization comes not through sight or logic or experience, but through sound of course — the texture of their breathing when they are near, the soft, syncopated rhythm that no discipline teaches. Bi-Han does not confront it. He only keeps listening. And the more he listens, the more the world around him fractures.
Some nights he cannot sleep. The wind outside is thin, high-pitched, a string drawn too tight. He lies awake, hearing everything — the very heartbeat of the house. And then, through the wall beside, another sound begins.
At first, it is a whisper — two breaths intertwining, a shiver against the floor. Then the slow creak of the mat, the faintest sound of movement. He tells himself to block it out, to turn away, to be stone. But his hearing is a curse: it draws him in, forces him to bear witness to what he should not.
The rhythm changes. A low murmur, a half-stifled sounds of pain, then silence — and afterward, something softer, trembling, growing into a broken gasp that unravels into quiet ecstasy. The air seems to vibrate with it. Bi-Han feels the pulse of their bodies through the floorboards, feels the heat in his own chest rising until it burns.
He does not understand what to feel. Jealousy? Shame? Rage? The sensations overlap until they become unbearable. He wants to flee the cruel sound. His mind splits open, caught between disgust and longing, between the need to erase it and the need to keep hearing, to confirm that he himself still exists after this torture.
When the sounds fully fade, the silence that follows is suffocating. Bi-Han lies there, rigid, heart hammering against the quiet. His breathing is shallow, uneven, mirroring what he just heard. Inside him, every note he has ever played dissolves into noise. He imagines cutting the strings on his every instrument. He doesn’t want to exist.
By dawn, he is still awake. He rises without rest and sits before his instrument, hands trembling as if from fever. The melody that comes out is unlike anything he’s ever composed — discordant, aching, full of gaps where sound collapses into emptiness. Each note scrapes raw against the next, yet somehow it holds together.
He doesn’t know what the piece means — only that he’s alive, and that it hurts, echoing endlessly inside him.
Father’s voice is steady, mundane even, betraying none of the pride he must feel now. The training was nothing special — Kuai has been sparing and defeating multiple opponents dozens of times before. Yet today is the day when Grandmaster gives the order: Kuai Liang will take the upcoming mission outside of the clan territory range.
It is a small mission, supposedly nothing really challenging or dangerous, yet the words fall through Bi-Han. The quiet shift of balance, the rupture in the order of things. Another danger that he won’t be able to control or prevent – he is not assigned to come with..
Kuai Liang sits straighter beside him, trying to hide the surprise, but his fingers are twisting the edge of his sleeve nervously, and he can’t stop the quick dart of his eyes to the side, near the door, where Tomas probably stays waiting, silent.
“Father,” Kuai speaks in a careful, respectful tone, but Bi-Han hears both excitement and worry that lie beneath, “May Tomas come too?”
Their father’s brows rise. “No. Why?”
All of them understand why — but Grandmaster chooses to ignore the sudden strain in his middle son’s breathing. Or Bi-Han’s averted eyes.
Kuai Liang tries to sound rational:
“He has been training well too. It would do us both good to see the outside settlements, to learn.”
Grandmaster does not even glance up. “No. Smoke stays.”
“But Father, what if— his episodes return? There have been nights, recently—”
“That is exactly why you don't need it during your first time out there. You understand that yourself.
Kuai slips into that defensive tone that would earn at least 20 strikes anyone but him. Fifty if that would be Bi-Han. “He manages fine when I’m there.”
The air tightens. “Enough of it, Kuai Liang. You must learn to make decisions. To rise up to your brilliance. And he must learn to live as all warriors do.”
Silence folds over the table. The fire burning in the room flashes suddenly, betraying Kuai’s anger — the logs crackle, breaking like bones.
Bi-Han keeps his eyes on the flames. He focuses on the sounds around them — a soft rustle of Father’s clothing as he sways in discomfort, Kuai Liang’s breath, short and uneven. And under it all, Bi-Han’s own pulse.
When Kuai speaks again, his voice carries a stubborn bitterness. “I promise I can do both.”
“Don’t be foolish, son. I know you can. But that doesn’t mean you have to,” Garandmaster stands from his place and walks shortly, then turns suddenly with a short laugh and the angered gesture of his hand. “And when you have your own household, Kuai? Your own wife? Shall you take him into your first night too?”
The words fall like shards of glass. Bi-Han looks up — only for a moment — and sees Father’s mocking disregard. Oblivious. Content, as Kuai flinches, shame washing over his face in visible waves.
What rises in Bi-Han is too tangled: pity, anger, confusion, that unspoken ache he has been fighting for months. The idea of Kuai doing or saying something foolish right now strikes him. It brings even more tremor within – does he really want Kuai to finally find out how cruel their father can be, whatever the price? And how would he live with it if, even something like this, would be forgiven to Grandmaster’s favourite son?
“I will take care of him.”
The words come out faster than he realises. He knows they mean nothing. Every time Tomas breaks, every time his body turns against him, Bi-Han is powerless to help.
But Father nods once, dismissive. The conversation ended.
They both bow low, Kuai’s voice wavers when he wishes their father goodnight.
When they come out of the chamber, Tomas is not standing by the door. Or anywhere in sight for that matter. Kuai’s composure collapses into a thin, exhausted quiet. They walk side by side down the corridor.
“He doesn’t understand,” Kuai mutters, almost to himself. “What if it happens while I am gone? What if—”
Bi-Han interrupts before he can finish. “I will watch him.” The words come sharp. A promise he knows he cannot keep.
Kuai looks at him. “Sure, but…You tried before. You don’t know what to do when it happens,” he says softly.
Bi-Han doesn’t answer. He only nods once. His chest feels as if something has been scraped clean.
That night, alone, he cannot stop thinking about what their father said. The words echo and warp in his mind. A part of him feels relief; another part feels sick. He imagines Kuai riding away, Tomas left behind, and himself — standing somewhere between them, the useless witness.
The night before Kuai’s departure, the compound is cloaked in that dense, waiting silence that precedes every separation. Bi-Han lies awake in his room in an uninvited company of sounds. It’s their muffled voices first. Then a low sob, a choked whisper, a rhythm of breath that builds and breaks. Bi-han can’t tell which one of them cries. Some ten years ago he could, unmistakably. But also some ten years ago he wouldn’t ever imagine anything like this happening.
It’s not just the act itself that sickens him, but the intimacy of it — the tenderness he can identify even in the hushed sounds through the wall. The tenderness he has never known and cannot bear to imagine. The sound of everything he cannot have. He feels corrupted by what he’s hearing, violated by his own heart that won’t stop responding to now distinctively Tomas’s voice trembling, raising, moaning in pleasure just beyond reach.
When Bi-Han is up, Kuai is already gone. Tomas moves like a shadow of himself. Bi-Han is trying to keep his distance the best he can. But in some days he finds himself drawn toward him despite everything that writhes inside. Carefully, they share space again — first at meals, then in the training yard, then in the quiet hours when the compound empties and dusk folds over the roofs. Tomas seeks him out more often, almost as when they both were way younger. They talk, they train, they even laugh together sometimes. And somehow, instinctively, neither of them questions this. It is as good as it is tortuous.
It is exactly as if Bi-Han decided to get drunk again, knowing full well now how bad his body takes it — blissful moments of quiet poisoned with the dread of what comes afterward.
So one evening Bi-Han gives in to the tension. He retreats to the special music room his father has arranged for him years ago, when he still believed he could make his eldest son play properly – publicly.
Growing up, the future Grandmaster had not only skills acquired with surprising ease, but this bottomless eagerness to learn new instruments. He spent almost as much time in the music room as on the training grounds with the weapons. Secretly, Bi-Han enjoyed playing even more than fighting. Not because he particularly disliked violence — that only to a certain age. But because he didn’t need a partner to play. His father once said that he did, as without audience music is only half-real. But even then Bi-Han instantly felt like that was just one more unexplainable lie Father filled his childhood with. And it was always immensely easier to learn how to read notes, however complicated, than to read the opponent's moves and face. They never tricked. They never moved. Bi-Han spent truly blissful hours here. And that’s also precisely why he stopped coming.
But the truth is, today he just can’t fit it all in his strings anymore. He needs something more solid and resilient. Something that holds all the weight of the melting glaciers within him.
And this time Tomas, encouraged by all the time they spend together lately, dares to follow Bi-Han to the room that smells of dust and lacquered wood. Instruments there sit like sleeping animals in his elder brother’s private menagerie — the polished piano Father has ordered for him from the city, its legs carved with dragons; a delicate erhu; a violin, its varnish worn smooth under Bi-Han’s fingers. Tomas moves among them as if in a temple, silent and reverent, tracing the lines without touching.
“I remember,” Tomas says quietly, “How you used to play here. But you’d stop whenever someone else came close,” He smiles faintly, shy. “I always thought… It is such a beautiful thing about you. The side I never really knew. And I wanted to. I'd love to know it even now. You're still playing, right?”
Bi-Han doesn’t answer, because of the heaviness tightening in his throat. Tomas’s words strike too close. He wants to show him. To explain Tomas the only way he can make sense of what he feels — to truly talk to him. To say he’d love that too.
But he can’t. Because Tomas means another kind of love entirely, a brother’s love, innocent, and Bi-Han’s own heart is not innocent anymore.
He sits at the piano, fighting himself to let his fingers find the keys without chasing Tomas away. There won’t be another chance like this. He knows he won’t allow it.
It's a simple melody first, like one Tomas probably remembers him playing years before. And then it shifts, swells with a promise of more complexity, falls into the first dissonance — a trembling thread of sound that carries Bi-Han’s confusion, his fear, his desire. It’s like looking at your own broken bone piercing through the bloodied skin for a second before the pain hits.
Tomas stands behind him, listening with that open, quiet face, unaware yet of the storm he’s listening to.
Bi-Han plays and plays, tearing down his skin bare, feeling the cold air on his raw muscle — and eventually the wolf interval comes — that impossible, imperfect distance between notes. His fingers linger there, pressing just enough for the sound to ache, to breathe, to shudder. He repeats it. And once again. It’s a cry of agony finally felt, a fracture acknowledged in sound. Every unspeakable thought in him — the terror of what he is inevitably becoming — spills through those keys. Bi-Han plays harder, angrily, and yet the sound remains fragile. It feels like tearing the broken parts out of himself and laying it bare.
When the last note fades, the silence that follows does feel like a gaping wound. Tomas doesn’t speak. He stands behind him, unmoving, watching Bi-Han’s tense shoulders, the stillness of his hands hovering above the keys. Not in a thousand years Bi-Han would turn his face to his brother now. To anybody.
Only after some time, carefully, Tomas steps closer. His voice, when it comes, is quiet and full of wonder.
“I’ve always known how deep you feel, Bi-Han. You just… try to never let anyone see it. But I did. Always.” He smiles faintly, eyes looking down with tenderness. “And I know what it’s like. To feel like that. So much it hurts.” Bi-Han turns slightly, unsure if he should listen or run. But Tomas keeps talking, words spilling out of him in small, halting bursts.
"That's how I ... .That's how I feel for Kuai,” The words are trembling, but are clear enough to be impossible to dismiss. “And I can’t hide it. I don’t even want to anymore. Sometimes it’s so strong it scares me. And now — when he’s gone, I can’t think straight, I keep imagining something happening to him, and I—” He stops, breath catching. “I know it’s wrong, but… There is nothing I can do with it. You understand, don’t you? This music, it's about love too. It has to be.”
The words are stones falling into the abyss in Bi-Han’s chest. For a moment, everything inside him is just blinded with hurt. He wants to speak, to tell Tomas to stop, to please just stop! But his throat won’t open. He stares at him — at his open young face, so sincere, so trusting.
Tomas thinks he’s confiding in a brother who will understand his secret pain. And Bi-Han does. He understands it with every breath he has ever tried to hold. He feels sick, dizzy, ashamed. And when Tomas reaches out, placing a hand gently on Bi-Han’s shoulder, as if to thank him for listening, Bi-Han flinches as though struck. The warmth sears through the fabric of his robe.
“Bi-Han, please say something,” Tomas was never good with uncertainty. That Bi-Han understands too well too. He has just settled for ignoring instead of asking.
“We should not talk about these things.”
Thomas's hand lifts from Bi-Han’s shoulder and it's a relief and pain both.
“You–you don't approve…” The voice saying this belongs more with the hurt child than with a skilled warrior Tomas is. Bi-Han knows how his little brother’s lower lip twitches without looking up.
“How can I?” Bi-Han lets the truth slip at least in this. At least the anger is allowed to him.
“But, brother, please –”
“It's better you leave, Tomas.” Bi-Han looks up at him finally, his eyes radiating with blueness so cold it feels physically sharp. Like it can and will draw blood if Tomas dares to move even an inch closer.
He knows he hurts him. He is aware of being cruel, unlike most of the time with Tomas. But it feels like the only way. The only way for him to have any of his feelings reciprocated.
Bi-Han stares at the piano, understanding clearly how he can never play without bleeding again.
“Please, don’t do that. How would I live with— How can the most beautiful thing in me repel the people I love?” Tomas says suddenly. His voice is carrying that painful blend of awe and fear that always unsettled Bi-Han. The words strike. He can’t meet Tomas’s eyes — those bright, animal eyes, full of reckless warmth.
“You don’t understand,” Bi-Han whispers. “I can’t—” He stops, searching for air but there’s nothing left, only that unbearable dissonance still swelling inside him. “I can’t hear you say things like that, I can’t— because it's you.”
Tomas blinks. “What do you mean?”
Bi-Han looks at him then — and it’s like the world tilts. “I mean I—” His voice fractures. “This music is about you. I wish I wasn't.”
The confession is a knife dragged from a wound, opening the bleeding that comes out in enormous wave and drowns Bi-Han, Tomas, piano, the room, the compound, the whole world.
Tomas stares at him, lips silently parting. “Bi-Han…” He takes a small step forward, uncertain, the fear in his face is raw and obvious. “You don’t mean—”
But Bi-Han’s eyes tell him everything.
Tomas opens his mouth to speak, maybe to comfort, maybe to protest, but before a sound escapes, something shifts. His body stiffens, his pupils flicker, and the color drains from his face.
At first Bi-Han thinks it's a shock — that the confession struck him too deeply. But then Tomas’s breath catches, jerks, and he stumbles, his hand clutching the edge of the piano. His body begins to tremble, violently, uncontrollably, as if something invisible has seized him from within.
Bi-Han freezes. For a second, terror holds him still, cold and absolute. Then he lunges forward, catching Tomas before he collapses completely.
His hands lower him to the floor, trying to hold him still, but Tomas’s body convulses with a terrible rhythm, his limbs jerking, his eyes go fully unfocused.
“No, no—” Bi-Han’s voice breaks. “Don’t do this. No. Breathe. Breathe!”
He doesn’t know what to do. He’s trained to fight, to kill, to command — not this. The sound Tomas makes — a small, wet gasp, halfway between a sob and a choke — tears through him, bringing Bi-Han back into his scared 12-year-old self.
“Tomas,” he tries again, desperate. “Listen. You’re safe.” He tries to hold his head steady, to keep him from hitting the floor. “I’m here. I’m here.”
But Tomas doesn’t hear him.
Bi-Han feels the pulse beneath his fingers and for a moment it feels unreal, as if he’s holding not a person but a pure vibration, a note that cannot settle into pitch. Every spasm sends a shudder through Bi-Han’s arms; he can feel each convulsion deep in his chest, as if Tomas’s pain were pulsing through his own blood.
“Tomas… Tomas… please…” His voice sounds strange, distant, as if coming from someone else. He doesn’t know what he’s saying anymore — only that he needs Tomas to come back, to breathe, to be there again. But Tomas’s eyes roll back, his lips parting in small gasps, the tremor spreading like a storm. The body in Bi-Han’s hands, slack and convulsing, feels at once fragile and immense. It's like he sees Tomas for the first time: the soft hollow of his neck, the trembling vein beneath pale skin, the faint tremor in his jaw — and a thought flickers through him like lightning, painful, violent and shameful: he is like an instrument now, completely in my hands.
The realization terrifies him. He could do anything. Move him. Touch him. Kiss that gaping mouth. And there would be no resistance.
His fingers, still clutching Tomas’s shoulders, twitch with the horror of it. His mind turns traitor — it conjures the image of his lips pressed against Tomas’s body, his breath brushing against his skin.
He feels sick with it. The image burns in his mind.
“Tomas,” he whispers again, shaking his head, his voice cracking. “I didn’t mean—” but he doesn’t even know what he didn’t mean. His whole body feels locked, stripped of air too.
Tomas shudders in a violent, twisting motion that brings Bi-Han back. He’s been crying without realizing it — tears mixing with the sweat on Tomas’s skin.
Then, suddenly, the rhythm shifts. The wild, arrhythmic gasps of his breathing even out into something faintly steadier. In that strange irregularity — the fading spasms, Tomas’s weak but persistent breath — Bi-Han hears it: the sound that has haunted him for months.
That unresolved, discordant space between notes — it’s here. Only this time, tension collapses, the harsh vibration softens, and the sound finds its end. Not harmony, no, but a resolution. The wolf tamed.
The realization is a strange, luminous pain. Bi-Han presses his forehead to Tomas’s shoulder.
“I hear it,” he murmurs, “I hear it now.”
Bi-Han feels closer to Tomas than he has ever been — a heartbeat against his own, his warmth seeping into his Bi-Han’s chest — and yet he knows they are impossibly far. That this closeness, born of panic and pain, can not be love, only something darker and more sacred to him, something that will destroy them both if he lets it.
There is no way to tell how long they stay on the floor beside that piano. Bi-Han holds Tomas through every last tremor, until the fit finally passes and silence returns — a silence that hums faintly with the ghost of the resolved interval, with the knowledge that nothing between them will ever be the same again.
When Bi-Han carries Tomas to his futon, he lays Tomas down gently, adjusting the blankets around him, smoothing the hair from his face. The faintest ticks remain in his limbs, but Bi-Han says nothing, does nothing beyond what is necessary. Then, quietly, almost without a sound, he leaves.
It feels impossibly empty afterward. Tomas lies there, body exhausted beyond comprehension, every muscle screaming, every nerve raw from the storm of his own body and the terror he has just lived through in Bi-Han’s hands. The fit, the closeness, confessions — it lingers in him like fire under skin. He knows he needs to speak to Bi-Han. He wants to speak. He wants to name what happened, to ask what it meant, to confirm that all of it even was real.
But when he finally finds the courage to approach his brother’s room, hours later, trembling with fatigue and lingering fear, Bi-Han acts as if nothing occurred. He speaks with calm detachment, precise tones that cut the room into order. “Maybe training tomorrow is not a good idea,” he says, and then something equally mundane, but the blood is too loud in Tomas’s ears to fully make it out. And as Bi-Han stands to go out, passing him by like nothing happened, it is so easy to believe that everything that hovers at the edge of Tomas’s reality, was a mere hallucination.
From that day forward, they are never the same. Tomas only dares to ask with his eyes. Bi-Han pretends to notice nothing.
Even though Tomas carries every second of it in his body.
They meet again in training, in conversation, in the quiet spaces of the compound, but the tension doesn’t disappear. Bi-Han never acknowledges it; Tomas never really forgets. Every glance, every pause, every touch is filtered through that night.
Kuai returns under the bright sun, his armor gleaming. He carries himself with the calm satisfaction of a journey completed, unaware of the quiet chaos that has unfolded in his absence. He speaks of distant villages, negotiations, and spying. He laughs lightly at minor mishaps along the way, recounts encounters with merchants and soldiers alike. And Tomas listens, carefully, as though each word is a thread in a tapestry he is only allowed to observe, not to touch yet. He is proud and relieved. Warm. Eager to touch and be touched. Just a bit more silent sometimes.
Neither he nor Bi-Han says a word about the fit. It stays a secret sewn into the shadows of the house. Tomas, unable to really control it, moves cautiously around Bi-Han, as if proximity itself could unravel something he gets less and less sure has ever happened. Bi-Han meets his eyes, holds them for the briefest fraction of a second, and drops it like nothing worthy of him.
And he never plays again. Not the piano, not the violin, not the strings of the guqin. He sits before them sometimes, hands hovering above strings, but he cannot summon the courage to pierce the silence with music.
But he knows, deep down, that creature that sleeps in his only true brother’s room cannot be tamed in the same way his music was. The wolf there is alive, untamable. Bi-Han cannot force it into order. He cannot command it or bend it to reason. He can only do one of two things: destroy it, or let it be.
And he lets it be.
The decision haunts him, a quiet, constant ache. In the rare hours when the compound is empty and the lanterns burn low, he feels it echo in the spaces between his ribs — that wild, untamed force residing so close, in the body of the boy he cannot claim, cannot fully understand, and cannot turn away from. He carries it forever like a weight, a forced acknowledgement of what has passed, and of what will never pass.