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Twelve hours later, he would recall the entire evening as it returned to him—largely in piecemeal fragments, disjointed and uncooperative, like waking from a drunken stupor. Yet certain things remained with almost clinical precision: what they had done, the rough sequence of events, the singular act that had set a faint, nearly imperceptible tremor beneath the armor of his awareness.
The one thing that made him regard Kangheon with renewed unease was this: he’d shown him the truth.
The prophecy had never lied.
/
It had been something akin to a celebration, when the C Squad Leader returned to Daydream. Like the arrival of the prodigal son home, his return had been marked by a peculiar sort of fanfare: swathes of boxed-up gifts that were steadily redistributed into the hands of various Squad Leaders, even the ones from the Round-off Teams, who ordinarily existed at the periphery of such gestures; mountains of candy with bright wrappers of red and violet and electric green that piled up high atop the tables and cabinets outside the C Squad meeting room, like some sort of ill-rationed diabetic signboard.
He noticed one of his own squad members reaching for a piece as they passed.
“Maybe you ought to put that back, Agent Porcupine.” He hadn’t meant it as a reprimand. If anything, it was a mild curiosity—a question of ownership rather than indulgence—but Porcupine startled as though struck by lightning.
Grizzly laughed. “Our Squad Leader thinks you’re too greedy, man.”
That hadn’t been his intention either. He simply hadn’t assumed the candy was communal, even if it had been left out in his trademark, careless way. A few pieces had already fallen to the floor, dislodged from their precarious towers. He nudged a chocolate piece lightly with the toe of his shoe before continuing down the corridor.
“But it’s strange,” Pelican murmured, not nearly softly enough. “Every other Squad Leader got something, except ours. And Squad C’s leader is pretty handsome and chatty, isn’t he?”
“You haven’t even seen him in the flesh.”
“But his profile—hey!”
Mallard’s elbow found her forearm quickly. Pelican’s harmless appearance and loud voice had always belied a subtler instinct for survival; she collected rumors the way others collected trading cards, catalogued them, released them at carefully chosen intervals. The fact that she attempted discretion at all suggested she understood where certain lines were drawn.
It wasn’t his fault he had particularly sharp hearing, after all.
Lee Kangheon, meanwhile, seemed constitutionally incapable of existing outside the centre of attention. He was not the first, nor the youngest, to receive a wish ticket, but he was certainly the first to exchange it for something so frivolous: three months of leave.
It was a luxury he could have secured for a much smaller price. He could have relinquished his title as C Squad Leader, stepped aside temporarily, and reclaimed it upon his return if his successor chose not to yield it. It was what J would have done.
Kangheon, however, possessed the particular recklessness of someone who trusted his youth to compensate for him.
Daydream attracted all sorts of characters, but J had never cared to study them closely. The hollowed-out and the unmoored; those who had lost something, or someone, or who had discovered too late that the trajectory of their life was no longer a shape they could fit themselves into, J understood them easily. Fame, envy, pride, greed—all of it was predictable.
What was less predictable was a man who did not appear to be missing anything at all. Who seemed to have no such attachments, nor follow any obvious sort of logic.
And that, perhaps, was why Lee Kangheon fascinated him.
/
He received a message from Lee Kangheon after a week of silence. What followed was another week of intermittent banter, most of which he did not indulge. He answered only when a response was strictly necessary.
That he answered at all, he considered concession enough. He didn’t have excess time to waste. He was aiming for his third wish ticket, and there were better uses for his hours than indulging the idle curiosity of another Squad Leader.
He told himself he would not entertain it further. And yet:
We’re not allowed to go there without a reason, he sent at last.
Lee Kangheon’s reply arrived without delay.
[k.lee] Spoilsport.
[k.lee] You have one now, don’t you?
He did not answer. He pocketed his phone instead and made his way down the winding corridor.
J had never grown accustomed to the scent of that part of the building. It shifted the deeper one went, thickening into something damp and old, a mustiness that clung to the back of the throat. Usually he could ignore it. On days it rained, it intensified—seeping into the walls, rising from the floor, as though the entire structure were waterlogged. It was raining now, heavily enough that he could hear it drumming faintly against the windows, though he couldn’t see it. A dull pressure gathered behind his eyes. He pressed his fingers to his temples and rubbed, slow and methodical, until the metal door came into view at the end of the corridor.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
The same greeting as the text he’d first received, now returned in person; Lee Kangheon’s voice carried the faintest curl of amusement as he greeted him. He had been leaning against the wall near the Security Room, arms folded. Under the low, colourless lights, he appeared exactly as he always did: brown fringe, brown hair; lashes neither long nor short, straight brows, an even nose. A face assembled with careful symmetry, features placed exactly where they ought to be—save his smile, which was tugged slightly to one side, and therefore suspicious by default.
He would look handsome, J thought, if only he would stop smiling like that.
The smile slipped a fraction. Then Lee Kangheon reached behind him without looking, as if he already knew where they would be, and drew out two practice swords propped against the wall. Wooden and unadorned, their surfaces nicked and crosshatched with use. He weighed them briefly, then tossed one toward J with an easy flick of his wrist.
J caught it without ceremony; adjusting his grip, feeling for the slight warp along the handle where someone else’s thumb had worn it smooth.
“First blood?” Kangheon asked mildly.
“No. Disarm.”
The opposite corner of Kangheon’s mouth twitched into something almost genuine. “Sure. If you say so.”
/
The things most people knew about the B Squad Leader could be reduced to a neat, albeit dry, profile: handsome; somewhat lanky despite his broad stature; the one who wore the wolf mask. He always carried himself with a polite, professional smile, and despite his rank, remained unfailingly courteous. A gentleman, people said, in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
Inevitably, there were rumours. Of the number of people who fell in love with him. In Daydream, affection rarely manifested in anything as simple as longing. It became some sort of depraved indulgence borne out of proximity; sometimes spurning from an event as small as a hand held for a moment longer than necessary. Those in powerful positions, bored and capable and therefore with too much time on their hands, tended to gravitate toward him with a kind of idle curiosity.
If one looked past the mask and the curated civility, there was another story there. That he had been abandoned as an infant and taken in by someone else. That his adoptive mother, years later, had once visited a market where a fortune-teller—or a wandering shaman—had told her the child would die stripped to bone. That he'd become a monster eventually. That she had been given a talisman to ward it off, instructed to keep it close to him at all times. That he had nearly lost it once. That she had died the same night. That someone from Daydream had come soon after to collect him—and had taken the talisman, too.
J did not know how much of it was true, only that some of it must be.
Perhaps that, more than the politeness, was why people lingered around him. A man rumoured to have outlived his own curse was difficult to leave alone.
By contrast, the C Squad Leader, Lee Kangheon, was nearly his opposite in practice. He was evasive in text and elusive in person; even his own squad saw little of him. He went into missions alone and emerged from them alone, as though that were simply the most efficient configuration for him. His strength permitted that kind of autonomy. In Daydream, might was its own right of way, and Kangheon possessed it in excess.
Whatever else he seemed to be—whether the strange pictures he kept on his phone, or displayed as his profile; whether the roundabout, casual way he spoke, even to others older than him; or even how often he redirected conversations mid-sentence—mattered little, because he was strong. Capable. And to be a Squad Leader required strength and capability raised to an unforgiving degree.
That they both liked to fight to first blood, that they both understood the clarity of violence. That they were evenly matched in that arena. That at times Kangheon seemed to understand J in ways J had not yet articulated to himself. None of that mattered outside the Security Room. Only there were they aligned. Only there were they measured against each other without interference.
Beyond that, there was very little overlap between them at all.
/
Kangheon closed the distance in three long strides, reckless as ever. No testing feint, no polite circling—just a direct cut aimed high, telegraphed enough to appear almost careless.
J did not rise to it. He shifted half a step left, minimal, economical, and the blade hissed past his right shoulder, close enough that he felt the air divide around it. Then Kangheon pivoted immediately, the return stroke slashing low and diagonal. J met it with the flat of his own practice blade, though he hadn’t intended on blocking it. The impact jarred through his arm; Kangheon always struck harder than necessary.
Kangheon exhaled something like a laugh and spun away before the riposte could land, light on his feet. His sword flashed in a bright arc that forced J back a pace.
They differed most clearly here. Kangheon preferred to fight with a weapon—preferred the extension of himself, the added reach of steel or wood that could disarm as easily as it cut. J preferred his hands empty. The blade was something he accommodated, the way he accommodated most things: without affection or must resistance.
His movements were smaller, pared down. He favoured his left without conscious thought, while Kangheon moved as if he could afford to spend motion: loose pivots, long steps, a recklessness supported by the advantage of his youth.
Another way they differed: J had learned to wield a sword; Kangheon had taken to it because he enjoyed it.
When they sparred, J sometimes thought it was the closest he came to feeling alive. In that narrow exchange of force, there was no past self to regret, no future self to anticipate. There were only the points Kangheon would aim for, and the immediate necessity of not letting him reach them.
Kangheon swung at him again, subtler this time. A false parry of his blade that drew the eye high, then a real thrust angled toward the ribs. J turned at the last possible moment, letting the tip skim the seam of his jacket. He stepped into the blade’s reach and brought his wrist down sharply against Kangheon’s.
The sword slipped free, clattered, and scuttled across the floor.
J drove his shoulder into Kangheon’s chest.
They went down together. Kangheon twisted mid-fall, turning what should have been a clean pin into something unstable, his weight shifting deliberately to compromise J’s balance.
J adjusted his movement without thinking. He released his shoulder and reached instead for Kangheon’s wrist, fingers closing around bone in a hard grip. If he could not secure the fall, he would at least secure that.
A last, stubborn assertion of rank.
/
The impact rattled through his spine.
Lee Kangheon put his fist into the space just beneath J’s collarbone, pressing down hard enough that J could feel the subtle shift of tendon under knuckle. They were both breathing heavily now, no longer sterile; their sweat already cooling against the metal floor.
J’s hair had fallen into his eyes. It was scratchy. He disliked that, the disarray, the dust ground into fabric. It felt indecent, somehow, as if losing felt more than that.
Over him, Kangheon straddled him with brisk, unceremonious efficiency; one leg swinging across J’s thigh, then the other, until his weight fully settled onto J’s abdomen. His thumb found the hollow at the base of J’s throat and pressed upward into the divot of his Adam’s apple.
J waited for the pressure to increase.
It did not.
Instead, he realised that Kangheon was waiting for him instead. For the tap against his arm, some sort of agreed-upon concession.
Something in him recoiled in answer.
He was sick with it, and sick of it too: that endless cycle of restraint and performance. Wanting to win. Waiting to die. Always suspended between the two, as if both outcomes required his consent. Beneath it all something softer had begun to rear up, wounded and strangely docile, an animal that wanted nothing more than to lie still and do nothing. To close its eyes and allow whatever came next to happen.
He had always wondered this: if the prophecy were true, if he were meant to die a monster, stripped to bone—what exactly, would that require?
If he lay still now—if he did nothing, said nothing—would the world still rearrange itself around that choice? Would the future loosen its grip? Or tighten?
When J smiled at him, Kangheon’s hands dropped immediately, as though burned.
It was always like that. When J went strangely blank—whenever his expression emptied of irritation or amusement—Kangheon reacted more sharply than he ever did to a strike. His eyes would darken, the plain brown deepening into something flatter and denser, like a plank of polished wood. Now they were glossy with exhaustion, and rimmed faintly red from sweat.
He leaned forward.
J let his eyes fall shut this time, expecting the rough familiarity of another grapple—forearms around his shoulders, crushing down roughly. Instead, Kangheon planted his palms flat against the floor on either side of J’s head and bent down.
Their mouths met without finesse.
For someone who attracted so much fascination, Kangheon was startlingly unskilled at this particular exchange, which made it almost clinical. Here, J only needed to focus on angling their faces so their teeth wouldn’t knock together. It was an easy enough fix with his experience, though he wasn’t particularly skilled either. In this line of work, he’d learned it was easier to keep his distance.
When he opened his eyes, Kangheon was trembling. He did not need to touch his shoulder blades to know it; he could see it in the tightness of his jaw, the tension along his arms. Kangheon wiped his mouth with his sleeve and shifted back onto his knees, but did not move away entirely.
“That was my first kiss,” Kangheon said.
There was a faint red sheen across his face that might have been misconstrued as embarrassment, if it had not already been there from exertion. Within that context, it read more as a marker of exhaustion than any real confession.
Still, there was something unguarded in it that made it almost endearing.
J suspected that made him somewhat cruel.
“I thought if I had to give it to someone, it should be you,” Kangheon continued. His tone was teasing, light. “But you didn’t miss me at all, did you? I should kill you for that.”
Red marks were already blooming along Kangheon’s forearms where his sleeves had been shoved up and gripped. They looked harsher than J had meant them to; he knew they would darken by morning.
Almost without thinking, he lifted his hand and touched the hair at the back of Kangheon’s neck, as if to smooth something down. His hair had grown longer over the past three months, though it was softer than he remembered. The strands curled once around his finger before slipping free.
J's hand followed the line of his neck and met the cool press of metal beneath Kangheon’s collar, and froze.
/
When he looked back up into Kangheon’s eyes, he saw only his own face reflected there.