The first time you met Park Sunghoon, you had dirt on your face and someone else’s blood drying beneath your armor.

The battlefield was chaos — screaming steel, smoke clinging to your throat like fear. You were trying not to limp when he appeared beside you, sword in one hand, eyes dark and unreadable beneath his helm. He didn’t say a word, just covered your left side when you faltered. Didn’t ask why you stumbled. Just moved like he knew you’d get back up.

And you did.

You were careful, always — your hair hidden, your chest bound, your voice kept low and clipped. It had taken you years to build this illusion, longer still to believe it was the only way you’d survive. No one could know who you really were — not in a world where girls didn’t wear swords unless they were burying their brothers.

But Sunghoon… he watched. Quietly. Intently. Not like someone trying to catch you in a lie — more like someone who already saw through it and was simply waiting for you to trust him.

You trained together by chance one morning, after a soldier twisted his ankle and your sparring pair was reassigned. He moved like water — fast and deliberate, his sword a part of him. He didn’t go easy on you, but his strikes tested you, not punished you.

“Your stance,” he murmured mid-spar. “You favor your left. Old injury?”

You nodded stiffly. “Arrow wound.”

He just hummed and adjusted his footing. Didn’t press.

Later, as you sat sharpening your blade under a withering tree, he approached again. Sat down beside you without invitation, unwrapping a cloth bundle of bread and dried meat.

He held it out.

You didn’t reach for it.

He set it gently on the stone between you.

“I know,” he said softly.

The world paused. Every instinct screamed to deny it, run, lie.

But he didn’t look at you like you were a secret unraveled. He looked at you like someone who had always known.

And chosen not to speak.

“I won’t tell,” he added, voice low enough for only you to hear. “Not unless you want me to.”

You stared at him. “Why?”

His mouth twitched — not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one.

“Because you fight better than half the men in this camp,” he said. “And because it’s not my secret to tell.”

After that, something shifted.

He didn’t treat you differently — not in front of others. But when it was just the two of you — when the fires burned low and the world was soft with quiet — he let his guard down. He became... something else. Still calm. Still steady. But gentler, more open.

He told you things he hadn’t told anyone. About his older brother who died in the first siege. About the day he realized he hated war, but kept fighting anyway. About how the silence after battle was worse than the battle itself.

You told him things, too.

Little by little.

Like how you’d learned swordplay by stealing glances at your uncle’s lessons through a crack in the barn. How you used to dress as a boy to sneak into the city markets, and how once, someone saw through you and let you go anyway.

“That someone,” Sunghoon said one night, “was probably in love with you.”

You’d laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

But he hadn’t laughed with you. Just looked at you for a long moment, head tilted slightly.

“Not ridiculous,” he murmured. “Just human.”

And you didn’t know what to say to that.

Now, months into this war and deeper still into the lie that kept you breathing, you find yourself next to him again — this time riding into a snow-cloaked valley, shoulder to shoulder.

The wind cuts through your cloak. Your fingers ache from cold and battle fatigue.

Sunghoon rides beside you in silence for a while, the reins loose in his hands. His breath clouds in the air.

Then he speaks.

“We’ll pass an old keep by dusk,” he says. “Abandoned, but still standing. We can shelter there for the night.”

You nod. “Sounds good.”

A beat.

Then: “We could talk, if you want.”

You glance at him. “About what?”

His eyes flick to yours, warm and unreadable.

“About anything,” he says. “Or nothing. Just… maybe this time, we don’t have to keep pretending.”