Mu-hyeok remembered the cold first, as if the mountain had been cut from ice and placed under his ribs. Wind chewed at the edges of his hood and flung grit into his mouth; each breath tasted of metal and smoke. The ambush had unfolded with the clean, terrible logic of an engineered collapse—trenches becoming traps, supply lines snipped, the north scrambling for order while the South struck like a machine. He'd been planted in their ranks for weeks, a ghost in a Northern Legion uniform with false scars and a rehearsed name. Every smile he offered was measured; every grievance he shared was practice. That night, practice had almost broken him.
He had seen her on a different kind of night — one strung across a ridge of snow and iron, when his own uniform smelled of frozen sweat and betrayal. The memory came in pieces that kept fitting together like teeth: the mission name, the false insignia stitched at the collar, the nervous hum at the base of his skull whenever he let the leopard inside him show too much. He'd been Northern Legion in appearance for months — the right haircut, the right careful answers, the right crude jokes about supply lines. Under that costume he had a South heart and a South plan. He had snuck into their formations, feeding false coordinates and listening to the cadence of their toasts so he could help Junwon's men strike at the precise moment. He had never felt so close to self-betrayal as he did during those nights.
The ambush was close enough to smell. Gunpowder sharp; blood, metallic and warm, painting the air; the thin electric tang that came when spirits — not human minds, but living, old magics — unfurled. He could still hear, in memory, the animal cries that were more hurricane than sound: Taemin's fox spirit uncoiling like flame, a sharp, high keening that cut through the commotion and turned the world into a clean line of motion and consequence. Junwon's wolf answered like a dark drum, Taek's owl made the night fall silent and precise. They moved together, synchrony molded out of training and bone memory, and for a heartbeat Mu-hyeok felt the old thrill: the leopard behind his ribs bristling, muscles twitching, every instinct a single instruction — leap, pounce, end this.
Mu-hyeok felt the leopard attempt before he intended to. It was a familiar violence that rose in his bones — the animal's hunger for the scent of fear and the geometry of attack. For a breath he imagined flinging off the ruse, letting claws and instinct answer the oath he had sworn in the south. He could have been at their side then, could have revealed himself and bought his unit the seconds they needed. He came to the brink of it, felt the air in his lungs sharpen into readiness to pounce.
And then he saw her.
Foxglove had not arrived on a battlefield in a cloak and veil like some ceremonial apparition. She moved like someone who had practiced the small mercies of violence; her cloak was work-worn, her boots powdered with feldspar dust, and when she stepped between the dead and the dying she did so with an economy that made even the chaos fall into order. There was no overt show for the soldiers in the south; she didn't shout or flay the air with wild spells. She placed runes quickly, almost perfunctorily, with palms that knew the exact pressure to steady a pulsing artery. Her hands were not delicate in the romantic sense — they were direct, efficient, the hands of someone who had learned to save a life quickly because the alternative was worse.
Mu-hyeok had been ready to blow his cover entirely. It would have been simple enough: let the leopard unfurl and join the fray on the south's side, take down a few Legion officers in the confusion, and then slide back into identity like a cloak. The plan had burned in his teeth like a fevered lie. He almost did it. The thought of exposing himself to his brothers-in-arms — of standing with Junwon and Taek with the same badge he'd been wearing for the north — felt like correcting a wrong with a flash of light. He braced, clawing at the seam between disguise and truth.
Then she saw him.
Not in the cinematic, villain-revealed sense, but with the quiet clarity of someone who had been trained to read the smallest signs on faces. Her eyes — violet, not a fairytale color but something sharpened by the cold — slid over him and she stepped forward. He flinched at first, because the leopard wanted to lunge, because months of covert lying did not dissipate when another person's gaze held you still. But the motion she made broke the rhythm he'd been building for the ambush: she drew a small sigil in the air, a line of light like a mosquito's path, and it braided into a binding that wrapped around his limbs not as punishment but as a restraint so gentle he thought at first it was his imagination. Mu-hyeok expected to be exposed. He expected that glance — the recognition only a sorceress could afford — that would read him through his uniform and unmask the man beneath.
Instead she knelt.
He remembered the sound of her voice then, which was not at all like the theatrical drawl of a villain in propaganda pamphlets.
"You will not move," she said, voice low and clipped, an order rather than a question. The accent in it was northern — the one he'd practiced to mimic — but now it struck Mu-hyeok differently: not as an accusation but as a command given to someone she could not afford to lose. He tasted copper and fear; he fought that sudden, stupid panic that she had seen through his cover. Had she read the insignia? Had she heard the southern undertones in his cadence? He braced for the exposure that different men at home had paid with their lives.
Instead of dragging him before the Legion officers, she lifted him. The world went odd — gravity folded, and for a split second he felt weightless, like one of the foxes Taemin evoked when he pushed his spirit outward. She cradled him as if he were a slung child and carried him away from the slaughter toward a ring of canvas and lanterns where the wounded were grouped. There, in the serrated light of the triage, she worked. She pressed runes to his ribs and murmured at the bleeding men with a voice that had the same edge as a battlefield order but the inflection of someone slipping into a safer timbre when no one else needed to hear the hardness that lay underneath.
When a messenger burst through the infirmary's loose flap shouting that the South was sweeping the field, Mu-hyeok panicked. He didn't know whether he was more terrified of the thought of Foxglove learning his true allegiance at the cost of his friends being cut down, or of being pitifully glad that she was not the monster they had been taught to fear.
He feigned a stubbornness that made her laugh once, a short sound like snowfall on a tin roof. "You shouldn't go out there," he muttered between teeth. If she had realized he was southern in that moment, if she had pieced through the lie as easily as she traced the runes, she would have left. Instead she met his stalling with an even stranger response: she didn't go. She stayed by the bedside of the wounded comrade she thought he was, hands working, eyes scanning, pride and something like worry knotted in the crease of her brow. It was one thing to be feared; it was another to see the same hands that could sever a life be the ones that stitched it back together with patience and focus. For the first time, Mu-hyeok saw clarity in the rumor and the shadow — the legend of Foxglove was true, but it sat beside a far simpler reality: she could be gentle with the living.
He had expected to find a predator; instead he found a person who was stubbornly, insistently careful. He felt something unwinding in him then—some of the tautness that had kept his cover plausible melted away because she treated him not like a mask but like a body. He could have unmasked then—signaled his men, shed his false skin and joined the charge with his leopard's full voice— and yet, he did not. A sliver of gratitude, not allegiance, lodged against his sternum. He owed her, in that moment, for keeping him from either dying for a false cause or betraying the friends fighting beyond the flap.
That memory had followed him through months of operations like a scent you could not wash out: the smell of antiseptic and the slight iron under it, the quiet of a person who had lived long enough to be bored of spectacle, who revealed themselves in domesticities rather than war cries. He thought of how, in that tent lit by oil lamps, she had straightened a blanket and then pulled a shard of splinter from a boy's palm with the same grim concentration she used to thread a rune. He thought of how she had refused to be hurried even when the call to arms flared again beyond the triage line. She had balanced loyalty to her orders — the Legion's edicts — with a craft that respected life in its messy, sticky particulars.
That memory had lived inside him like a folded letter. He had read it in quiet moments—the way she tacked a wet cloth against a fevered brow; the way her fingers shook when she tied a knot; the way she let the silence between two breaths stretch and heal. It explained nothing about why she later fixated on Taemin, but it explained why, when she stood on his balcony with a bag of pancakes and the same violet light in her eyes, he had not reached for a weapon. There was a debt of human decency he could not easily set down, an image of a woman who stayed when she was free to go.
Years later, in a hotel room that smelled faintly of coffee and the residue of a hurried breakfast, Mu-hyeok traced that winter in his mind like a map. The pancakes Foxglove had brought him now were mundane in comparison — a small human want delivered by someone who had once moved through snow and blood — and yet their warmth pulled at the same taut string. He could not say whether that memory was gratitude, or a need to keep an image of mercy close to justify the rest of the ugly ledger. Perhaps it was both.
That moment — the hands, the lullaby, the decision to stay with a stranger — had become a hinge in his life. He had not expected to admire those qualities in an enemy. Admiration, when it comes, is not a tidy thing. It finds arteries and nests. It will be patient and soft until the first time it has to choose between two loyalties.
He thought about it now, in the paler light of his hotel room, and found that tenderness had not evaporated. If anything, it had sunk deeper, braided with something that tasted like guilt. He had been a man wearing a uniform that meant one thing to the south and another to the north; he had been poised to reveal himself and then been claimed, in an odd, temporary way, by the mercy of a supposed adversary.
The memory of her staying — of the way she had not answered the call to return to the field, of how she fed and soothed rather than struck — made the present strange: pancakes on a low hotel table, the runes still warm in his mind, Taemin bound on a couch somewhere between sleep and speech.
There were contradictions enough to choke on. Foxglove had bound Taemin's tongue and left him with Rune-stitched silence; she had also handed Mu-hyeok breakfast and a brief, private truce. She had been an executioner and a nurse in one long, impossible breath. What Mu-hyeok held now was a map of those two truths laid over one another until the lines blurred.
He did not pretend to understand why she had later been ordered — or chosen — to deal with Taemin at all. Orders could make saints into soldiers, and soldiers into monsters; he knew that as well as anyone who had traded names for medals, but the night he'd been her patient had given him proof that there was something unmanufactured in her: not merely the cold talent for killing the North's enemies— but a small, fierce capacity for tenderness.
_______________________________________________________
Teleportation always left a faint, electric taste at the back of Bora's teeth — the brief afterimage of the balcony she'd left, the hush that followed until the penthouse reasserted itself: the hush of linen, polished glass, the way the plants on the windowsill smelled faintly of rain. She arrived into morning light that angled through the tall windows like an accusation of ordinary things. For a few heartbeats she let herself be ordinary.
She dressed with the same exacting care that guided her hands in less domestic tasks. Civilian mode: a blouse that flirted with the idea of neatness, sleeves rolled with casual precision; a high-waisted skirt with a soft pleat that moved like a secret when she walked. Her hair, long and usually unruly in the field, went through the motions — brushed back from her face and casually tied so that a few tendrils fell free, framing the angle of her jaw she liked best. The ornamental glasses were the last touch: filigree on the bridge, lenses just enough to catch the light and make her look studied, deliberate. She adjusted them as if adjusting a mood. Cute, she thought, picturing the small, ridiculous smile that belonged only to mornings like this. Cute, and not a sentinel.
She brushed her hair back the way she always did when she wanted to be taken as neither reckless nor unreachable: fingers through the top, a casual twist, a low tie that let some shorter strands fall around her face. She did her makeup in a few economical lines — a soft lift to the brows, a hint of rose on the lips — not to mask anything but to give the world an easier map to read. She practiced a small smile in the mirror, adjusting angle and softness until it read "approachable" and "cute" in equal measure. It was a performance she liked; it required no complicated spells, only the kind of honesty she allowed herself in daylight. There was method, always, even in her effortlessness. She checked the angle of her collar, the balance of a stray curl, the slope of a lip gloss sweep. To anyone watching—from the balcony across the street or the underside of the city's echo—she might have seemed indulgent. To Bora it was armor of a different kind: a mask that invited nothing fussy, nothing prying. Cute was safer than intimidating, than Foxglove's usual quiet violence. Cute said "Notice me as an easy thing." It was a lie she almost believed.
The final touch was the ornamental glasses, thin frames; they made her look scholarly and unassailable at once. When she set them on, Bora felt calibrated.
There was a brief, almost ceremonial moment where she checked the reflection in the elevator: the glazed doors split in a soft metallic hiss and revealed her own face — tidy, neat, a woman ready for breakfast and gossip rather than blades and orders. She adjusted the glasses one last time and stepped out.
The air down on the ground smelled of flowers and roasted beans—the florist's stand bright with lilies, the café already alive with the hiss of steam.
The café was warm with the smell of roasted beans and steamed milk. She ordered two drinks without hesitation: one iced americano, sharp and bitter, and one iced tea, her own choice—cool, clear, untouched by the bitterness of coffee. The barista set them carefully on the counter, condensation gathering in rings that Bora wiped away before carrying them out.
The city beyond was awake but not yet frantic. Light spilled between buildings, trees in the park stirred faintly, and the air still had that crisp, early hush. The park was waiting—green and crisp, benches scattered beneath trees like punctuation in a calm sentence. Bora chose her spot with care, arranging herself in the kind of posture that looked accidental: one leg crossed, shoulders relaxed, cardigan sleeves adjusted just so. She set the drinks down and made a soft pspspsps sound toward the stray cat eyeing her from the edge of the path.
The animal twitched its tail but resisted, more interested in the shuffle of passersby. Bora's lips curved with the smallest sigh of defeat. But before she could try again, a shadow fell across her bench. Someone bent, scooped the cat up with practiced ease, and straightened into the morning sun.
Bora's eyes lifted, and her voice carried the name before anything else.
"Always a go-getter, aren't you, Nari?"
The woman who approached was a flare against the ordinary day. Sung Nari, all color and confidence, her citrus-bright jacket catching light like stained glass, a scarf patterned in flowers spilling loose around her neck. The cat nestled against her with the satisfied certainty of a creature that had found the only rightful arms to belong in. Her smile was quick, crooked, too alive to be rehearsed; a smear of berry-colored gloss glimmered faintly at the corner of her mouth.
Nari crossed the remaining space like it belonged to her, dropping onto the bench with unapologetic ease. She slid close, laid her head against Bora's shoulder as if the place had been reserved for her long ago, and cradled the cat as though she had arrived to present a gift.
"You came prepared," Nari giggled, tapping the iced americano against her knee. "I knew you'd never let me go without my caffeine."
Bora glanced at the drink, then at her. "Of course. You'd wither before noon otherwise." Her voice was cool, but the corner of her mouth betrayed a small smile.
Nari tilted her head more fully into Bora's shoulder, eyes half-closed in mock dramatics. "I'd perish, dramatically, on the grass. And then you'd have to explain to strangers why your beautiful friend was felled by caffeine deprivation."
"Beautiful?" Bora asked, arching a brow.
"Exceedingly." The girl grinned, stroking the cat's ears. "Though you, styled like this… are you sure you didn't wake up inside a magazine? Look at you. Cardigan, glasses, the whole casual elegance thing. It's devastating." Nari teased, her voice a warm beam slipping into the cracks of the day. "What's the occasion, Bora? Job interview? Secret date? Don't tell me you got dressed up just for me."
The morning lingered pleasantly, but Bora was not a woman who ever let herself sit still for too long. After a quiet sip of her iced tea and another glance at Nari with the cat still nestled against her scarf, she smoothed her skirt and stood.
"Come on," she said, brushing a stray hair back into place. "I'll walk you to your hotel. You'll need to check in before the day gets away from us." Her voice was light, practical, though underneath it lived a note of protectiveness she didn't entirely try to hide.
Nari tipped her chin up, eyes dancing. "Hotel?" She let the word roll out like it was some kind of scandal. "Bora, you make me sound like a tourist."
Bora blinked at her, one brow lifting. "You are staying at a hotel, aren't you?"
Instead of answering immediately, Nari grinned wide enough that the cat blinked in confusion at the sudden movement. "Nope." She rose to her feet in one smooth bounce, balancing the americano in one hand and the cat in the other. "I got an apartment."
"An apartment?" Bora repeated, her voice caught somewhere between surprise and suspicion.
"In your building," Nari clarified, and her grin turned into something triumphant. "Penthouse tower, same place you live. Former Legion perks, apparently. They called it my retirement package from special ops." She made air quotes with her fingers, nearly sloshing her drink in the process. "Now that there's peace, apparently they don't need special ops agents anymore. So I get to live a normal life. Or as normal as I can manage."
Bora's lips twitched despite herself. "You could have warned me."
"Where's the fun in that?" Nari's eyes sparkled, and then she pressed a hand dramatically against her heart. "Besides, I only need one thing now: a strong, beautiful heroine to help me haul my ridiculous number of boxes upstairs." She gave Bora an exaggerated once-over, as if appraising her suitability for the job. "You fit the bill nicely."
Bora turned away as if to hide the faintest flush of color in her cheeks. "I have appointments today. I don't have time to carry your things."
"Appointments," Nari echoed, her tone dripping with mischief. "Mysterious ones, I'm sure. But you can't possibly be too busy to lend a hand to your dear friend who has just retired from the exhausting life of special ops." She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead like a tragic actress. "Cast adrift, stripped of duty, with nothing but a fragile spine and weak arms to carry her burdens—"
Bora cut her off with a sharp look, but the corner of her mouth betrayed her. "You don't have a fragile spine. You once carried wounded soldiers across a marshland."
Nari grinned, unabashed. "Ah, so you *were* paying attention. Good to know my feats of strength are remembered. But that was then. Now? I'm a delicate civilian. I require assistance."
Bora sighed, adjusting the strap of her bag as they began walking together toward the street. "You're incorrigible."
"Mm-hm," Nari hummed, clearly delighted at the victory. "But you'll help anyway."
The city hummed gently around them as they crossed the avenue, the air warm with bakery scents and the distant hiss of buses pulling to stops. Bora walked a little slower than usual, her tea swinging lightly at her side, and she found herself oddly aware of how natural this felt—Nari's chatter filling the space, the cat purring between them, the idea of coming home to a building where someone familiar waited.
"You really took the apartment," Bora murmured, still half in disbelief.
"Yup." Nari slanted a grin at her. "And don't worry, I'll be a good neighbor. Quiet most of the time, only knock on your door for sugar or emergency wine. Maybe the occasional late-night rooftop stargazing."
Bora gave her a sidelong look. "You're impossible."
"Lucky for you, you've got me now as your impossible neighbor." Nari bumped her shoulder against Bora's again, unbothered by the iced americano splashing perilously close to its lid. "So what do you say, heroine? Help me haul my life upstairs later? I'll pay you in dinner."
Bora let out a quiet laugh, shaking her head. "Dinner and no backtalk."
"Dinner and unlimited backtalk," Nari corrected, grinning as she tipped her head back to let the morning sun kiss her face.
And for the first time in a long while, Bora didn't feel the need to argue. The idea of walking into the same building with Nari—of having her laughter not just in the park, but echoing down the hallways of home—didn't sound like an inconvenience at all. It sounded like something dangerously close to comfort.
Boxes leaned like weary soldiers against the wall of Nari's new apartment, their taped edges marked in bold black scrawl: clothes, dishes, books, more books. The space itself was clean and generous—high ceilings, tall windows that admitted the slanting afternoon sun, polished floors that still echoed with that untouched, slightly hollow resonance of a place not yet lived in.
They dropped Nari's things in the bedroom—bedframe already assembled by the building staff, mattress still wrapped in plastic at one corner. The two women worked side by side for a while: pulling the sheets over the bed, fluffing a pillow that refused to look inviting, pushing a dresser against the wall so it caught the sunlight from the window. By the time they stood back, the room had the barest suggestion of home.
Nari flopped down across the mattress with a theatrical groan. "That's it. I'm done. No more unpacking today. If I open another box, I'll collapse and die dramatically right here." She sprawled across the bed, one arm hanging off the side, eyes half-closed in mock despair.
"You've barely touched half of it," Bora pointed out, adjusting her glasses as she nudged one of the unopened cartons further into the corner.
"Exactly," Nari replied without shame. "That's tomorrow-Nari's problem. Tonight-Nari is tired, and she wants comfort. Which means…" She tilted her head, fixing Bora with the full weight of her mischievous smile. "You should let me crash at your place. It'll be like old times."
Bora folded her arms, unimpressed. "Absolutely not."
Nari sat up, clutching a pillow to her chest. "Not even a maybe?"
"No."
"But I'm charming!"
"Still no."
The rejection only made Nari pout harder, widening her eyes until she looked almost cartoonish. "Not even for me? Your dearest partner, your sunshine, the person who has carried a stray cat all day without complaint?"
Bora's answer didn't waver. "You have your own apartment now. Use it." But her expression softened enough that Nari caught the shift. "However…" Bora added, tilting her head, "you're welcome to come up for dinner. Just dinner. At my place."
The elevator ride back up to the penthouse was quiet but companionable, the hum of the machinery filling the space between them. When the doors opened, Bora's home greeted them with its clean, minimal elegance: wide windows, neat lines, books stacked in careful rows, and a faint trace of sandalwood lingering in the air.
Nari stepped inside like she belonged there, toeing off her shoes at the entryway and padding over to the sofa. "Feels weirdly nostalgic," she mused, dropping into the cushions and stretching her arms behind her head. "Remember the south? That safehouse they stuffed us into? You and me, playing roommates."
Bora set the groceries on the counter and glanced over, her lips twitching. "I remember you stealing all the blanket space."
"And I remember you struggling to eat literally anything we were served." Nari sat up, laughter bubbling out. "The look on your face when they brought out that pepper stew—priceless. I thought you were going to pass out right there at the table."
Bora chuckled under her breath, pulling a pan from the cupboard. "It was inedible. Who cooks with that much chili?"
"Everyone down there, apparently. Meanwhile, you were surviving on plain rice like a bird."
"I adapted." Bora adjusted the flame on the stove, a smile playing at the edge of her lips. "But tonight? No spice. None. You'll just have to settle for food you don't need a fire extinguisher for."
Nari leaned her chin into her palm, watching her with unabashed affection. "Honestly, that sounds perfect. No missions, no disguises, no burning tongue; Just dinner with you."
For once, Bora didn't deflect. She let the quiet of the apartment and the promise of a simple meal speak for her, the weight of the past softened into memory and the present grounded in something steady—two people who had shared battlefields and safehouses, now sharing a kitchen and the kind of laughter that felt like home.
The kitchen came alive in soft, deliberate motions. Bora moved with the same precision she once reserved for disarming wards or setting traps, only now her hands dealt with pans and knives instead of charms and steel. The package of beef samgyeopsal sizzled faintly as it hit the warmed grill pan, fat beginning to melt and gloss the surface. Steam rose in quiet ribbons, catching the golden wash of evening light spilling through the wide windows.
"Go out to the balcony," Bora said without looking over her shoulder. Her tone carried an authority softened by familiarity. "Pick some lettuce from the pots. I know you, Nari—I'm not risking you sneaking in chili peppers the second I turn my back."
Behind her, Nari laughed, the sound bright and unrepentant. "You wound me with your lack of trust, Bora."
"Mm." Bora adjusted the flame, lips pressed in something between amusement and restraint. "The lettuce."
Nari muttered something dramatic under her breath as she shuffled toward the glass doors, slipping outside into the twilight air of the balcony. The soft scrape of the door closing left Bora in the hush of her own domain.
She exhaled slowly and leaned into the rhythm of cooking. The rice cooker ticked faintly on the counter, a steady heartbeat filling the silence. She sliced garlic cloves into thin coins, scattering them across the pan where they snapped and sang in oil, their fragrance wrapping around her like an embrace.
The kitchen wasn't too grand—sleek lines, pale countertops, cabinets in understated shades of grey—but in moments like this, it became something more. Domestic. Anchoring. A place where her hands could create nourishment rather than undo enemies. The polished surface of the counter reflected her movements back at her: the tilt of her wrist as she arranged meat slices, the careful way she laid out small dishes for banchan, the slow ritual of preparing not for survival, but for comfort.
Sunlight slanted low, stretching through the windows and brushing across her shoulders, painting her in amber. Her glasses caught the glow, glimmering briefly as she bent to stir. A lock of hair had fallen loose from the neat tie at the nape of her neck, and she brushed it back absently, smearing a faint trace of garlic across her sleeve without noticing.
There was something almost poetic in her solitude—Foxglove, the sharp-edged phantom of missions past, reduced to a woman at her stove, coaxing flavor from flame. The sizzle of meat, the perfume of garlic and sesame, the quiet simmer of rice: together they composed a hymn far gentler than the war songs she once carried in her chest.
She paused, her gaze drifting toward the balcony door where Nari's figure moved faintly among the greenery. Pots lined the railing, sprouting lettuce in vibrant shades, their leaves trembling under the evening breeze. Nari's laughter filtered faintly through the glass as she fussed with the plants, humming a tune Bora half-recognized.
Bora turned back to the stove, lips curving into a small, unguarded smile. The pan hissed as she pressed the meat flatter with the spatula, its scent growing deeper, richer. Her kitchen filled with warmth that was more than just heat—something lived-in, something hers.
The kitchen sang softly with sound and scent. The grill pan sizzled as fat rendered from the samgyeopsal, pooling and snapping, a rhythm that seemed to measure time in its own language. Bora leaned slightly over the counter, tongs in hand, turning each strip with an almost reverent precision. She pressed the meat down, listened for the change in pitch that told her the browning had reached its peak, then laid the cooked slices neatly on a warmed plate.
She worked like this without hurry. The rice cooker clicked softly, releasing another breath of steam, and she moved to fluff the grains with the back of a wooden paddle. White clouds rose and enveloped her, fogging her glasses again, and she slipped them off with one practiced motion. A quick wipe against the hem of her blouse, then back onto her face. The little interruption didn't frustrate her; it slowed her down in a way she found oddly grounding.
On the cutting board, she arranged garlic cloves, their pale skins splitting under the gentle pressure of her knife. The slices fell into a dish with crisp, deliberate sounds, each motion measured, no wasted effort. She lined up small bowls in an arc, adjusting their positions until the arrangement pleased her eye: radish here, cucumbers there, a pinch dish of sesame seeds close to the grill. Even in this domestic act, the precision of her nature revealed itself.
The air thickened with warmth. The vent above the stove hummed, pulling away smoke, but the scents clung: roasted beef, nutty sesame oil, the faint earthiness of rice. The flavors gathered into something almost ceremonial. Cooking, for Bora, was not an idle task—it was a way of arranging the chaos of the day into something that could be held, tasted, shared.
She wiped the counter with the side of her hand, brushed the crumbs into her palm, and tipped them into the sink.
The gesture was small, habitual, but it made her pause for a moment. The shine of the countertop reflected her face back at her, hair tied loosely, ornamental glasses sliding a little down her nose, lips curved in a quiet expression she didn't often wear. Contentment, she realized.
The thought unsettled her, and she turned back to the stove.
Another batch of meat went down onto the grill, hissing as it met the heat. She drizzled a thin stream of sesame oil into a small dish, watching the golden sheen spread across the bottom like liquid sunlight. Her hands lingered in the movement, almost artistic, as though painting with flavor.
A faint breeze slipped in through the open balcony door, cool against her warm skin, carrying the green scent of soil and leaves. It stirred the hem of her cardigan and tugged at the loose strands of her hair. For a moment, she imagined the lettuce already in her hands, washed and laid beside the beef, the table set complete. She imagined the clatter of chopsticks, the sound of Nari's laugh bright in the dining room, the kind of noise that could make this apartment feel less like a fortress and more like a home.
Bora reached for a dish towel, folded it precisely, and laid it on the counter beside the plates. She moved to the sink and rinsed the knife, water glinting as it rushed over steel, droplets catching light like fragments of glass before sliding away. She dried the blade carefully, set it back in its stand, and allowed herself another slow breath.
It had been a long time since she had stood in a kitchen like this, with no clock ticking down to an operation, no report waiting to be filed. Just food, warmth, and the anticipation of company. It was so ordinary it felt fragile, as though acknowledging it too openly might cause it to dissolve.
Her eyes drifted once more to the balcony door, the curtain shifting faintly with the air. She expected to hear Nari's voice, some teasing remark, or the rustle of footsteps returning with a handful of lettuce leaves. But the minutes stretched, and the doorway remained quiet.
Bora set the tongs down, the kitchen suddenly too still, and realized that Nari was taking longer than she should.