Lee Gon doesn’t really have problems with impulse control until he starts time-travelling. The one time before that that he’s let himself fly off the handle and reach out for something he shouldn’t have, is when he sees Jo Yeong jerking off in the barracks showers and thinks, mine. He knows he shouldn’t. He knows this is his best friend; someone four years younger than himself, at an age when that difference matters; a man more invested in keeping Gon yoked to this life than Gon has ever been himself. He shouldn’t; he mustn’t. But he can. So he does.
And Yeong steps up like he always has and gives Gon more than he’s asked for.
Look, Yeong isn’t just in love with one man. He has literally been in training his whole life to love him. Why wouldn’t he be the one who beds the (very much no longer) virgin king? Jo Yeong doesn’t ace travelling to another dimension in the twenty-first century, but he’d make himself at home in the fourteenth without batting an eyelid. He knows his Sacred Band of Thebes stories. Father Ji at Busan’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross may shy away from spelling it out but Yeong has eyes, and can read the David and Jonathan bits in his Bible for himself. David is the shield of Israel (as well as the secular republic of Israel & Palestine. Yeong doesn’t want to think about what he gleaned about that whole situation in the parallel universe). Yeong knows what it means to be shield-brothers. He was born for this, alright? He was born to shelter Gon in every way known to man. He was born to make Gon happy.
So yes, those rumours about the two of them? Totally smoke with fire. They’re friends with benefits and fraternising employer-employee style, or would be if Yeong ever dreamt of comparing their situation to anything as ordinary as other people’s lives. Is that bad? For ordinary people, probably. Is it bad for him? You cannot be serious. Yeong loves Gon more than he loves his own soul, but he wasn’t brought up to dream of some kind of––what, exclusive? monogamous?––romance? He’s the Jo heir. He fully expects to marry and have a household and fulfil his own social duties. The Jeong Tae-eul thing stings, sure, but there’s a whole lot going on there besides Gon’s obsession with the literal woman of his dreams, including an inter-dimensional battle and a constitutional crisis, so, Yeong will feel bad about it later, when he has the time.
A year after the whole thing is over and the doorways between the worlds have closed, he’s still too busy to think about it. He’ll admit his blowjobs have been on the absent-minded side lately, which, sorry your Majesty, I know you’re trying to heal from the devastating experience of having turned your back on your real/imagined destiny, but time travel and Corean reality has needed Yeong to do a hell of a lot of growing up in a short time. They’re both processing a lot. Yeong will level his fuckbuddy skills back up once he’s ensured that Gon will never, ever put his own life or throne at risk again.
That’s when the Tax Offices come calling.
They do it hesitantly, guiltily. The auditors have just run through their annual assessment of the royal assets and they’re very sorry, but for the first time in generations, the books aren’t adding up. A significant amount of precious metal and stone appears to missing from the personal inventory of the king. They can’t––they’re not sure––there’s been some really destabilising currency movement in the markets of late and they really don’t want to ask, but the public’s already polarised after the violence in the streets, and they’re looking for answers––no fewer than three independent journos are dedicated to tracking the king’s wealth and they’ll be waiting for the tax forms to be uploaded to the Ministry Of Commerce’s website––deeply sorry, your Majesty.
“Dear, dear, dear,” comes a voice from the poolside of the Seoul Ritz. “What have we here?”
Koo Seo-ryeong’s greased her way out of prison and back into party politics; not as PM, of course, the charges are still pending investigation, but she’s protected by parliamentary privilege and the fact that she’s still the country’s most popular politician. (You should see the froth churned up by liberal news outlets that she was ousted on corruption charges by a monarchical sovereign; what is Corea, a dictatorship?) She runs the executive offices with the help of a puppet PM, a velvet gloved-stranglehold on a significant proportion of national and international media, and a cute bartender who keeps her in whiskey cocktails by her heated deck chair as she manipulates four phones, three tablets and a small army of dedicated young women who’re going to help eonni clear her name and assume power again.
“This looks unfortunately suspicious, Majesty,” she says, on their secure call.
“The house of Lee is above suspicion,” he points out, “by law.”
“Would I dream of suggesting otherwise?” she says, sickly-sweet. “Your movements are classified to the public and protected from legal inquiry, for the good of the nation, of course. But it doesn’t look like prosecutors will be able to find those of Jo-daejang wholly accountable….”
You see, it hasn’t yet struck Jo Yeong, upstanding, incorruptible Jo Yeong, that it was fine, or at least legal for the king to sell treasury assets––the assets that, you know, actually insured Daehan Jaeguk's freedom in the twentieth century when the global economy had a gold standard? And helped the Lee family stay in power through the worst decades in modern history?––in another dimension. But Yeong sold them, too. He’s a criminal now. He, the son of decorated soldiers, bureaucrats and scholars, has defrauded the nation.
“You can’t touch him,” Lee Gon says, wild (but no longer trembling with the lightning of violence that overcame him when travelling between worlds).
“Why, are you going to riot in the streets again?” Seo-ryeong asks. “Only members of the royal family are protected from central government inquests.”
“He’s a member of the royal family,” Gon says, abruptly. “I’m marrying him.”
Seo-ryeong passed a marriage equality amendment in parliament two months after she was elected. “My congratulations,” she says, thoughtfully, in the manner of a chess player conceding a lightning attack. Four hours later, every TV station in the country is having a meltdown over the news.
It isn’t a break-up if you were never together, but Gon and Yeong break up on the day before their engagement is confirmed, a day on which Gon sees Yeong lose his temper for the first time in his adult life.
“You can’t,” Yeong says, after a long, bitter fight in which he’s locked himself down tighter and tighter as Gon advances. Gon pauses; Yeong has never said those words to him in their whole lives together. “I can’t. I refuse.” Not these, either.
“I have to say,” Gon says, flippant in the face of provocation out of habit, “internalised homophobia is a bit last century, my Yeong.”
“You,” Yeong says, and his voice has broken lower than usual, as it does in times of emotional strain, “are proposing to subvert the power of the throne. To get me off. On a technicality.”
“I’m happy to get you off any way you like,” Gon smiles, and then stops smiling when he realises things are getting probably a bit more out of hand than he enjoys. “You’re overthinking this. It is impossible for the king to debase himself.”
“The king may not be debased,” Yeong says, slowly. “But his office can.”
“Beheading,” Gon says, lightly, heart beating fast. Yeong tilts his head and looks at him in that way he has, where his expression doesn’t change at all, but the question he asks of Gon becomes ferociously clear, anyway. The expression also says, like a bolt to Gon's heart, I wish you would.
“Would you rather go to prison than marry me?” Gon asks.
“Obviously,” Yeong says. “Why would you even say this, why would you––” cheat yourself like this, he wants to say. Forget about the fact that Gon shouldn’t be using the laws for personal gain; Yeong was there when they blew past that line. But Yeong was counting on drawing that line again. He wants to get a damn move on from the crisis. He’s been thinking of getting married himself, has been seeing a Mongolian lawyer for the last couple of months. She’s his type: pretty, good with her words and her work, expects to lead allied but separate lives. Gon also needs a partner, an ally, maybe even a regent: not like Jeong Tae-eul, he thinks treacherously, but like Koo Seo-ryeong. Or no. Not an ambitious woman, but a woman who can wield power to lighten burdens: Gon’s, the palace’s, the nation’s.
Gon is clever. He’s clever enough to recognise that the answer to Yeong’s unfinished question is it’s because of how I feel about you. He’s just not smart enough to say it.
“The conviction carries a twenty-five year sentence,” he tells Yeong, quietly. “The crime is compounded when it’s committed against royal assets. You’ll never be allowed on palace grounds again.” That hurts. He knows Admiral Jo will cut him out of the family register. Yeong would stoop to asking his friends in the navy to help him, shift the whole trial to a court martial and manipulate it, if he thought it would prevent Gon from this abasement. But it won’t.
It turns ugly. It becomes a royal order. Yeong accedes. He stops talking to his Majesty.
Daehan Jaeguk has had only one Prince Consort in nine hundred years; a Chinese prince of the blood who married a tragically short-lived ruling queen in the seventeenth century. Daehan Jaeguk is surprisingly okay with getting a new one. Of course it’s horrifying to the orthodox, but, you know, it’s a country that has a 34 year old king and elected a 35 year old woman to power with a solid majority. It’s a country that loves Yeong, maybe a little too much for its own good. #JoGonJoGon is already a regular trend in the press. And as Lady Noh once seriously suggested to Yeong when she was discussing the succession with him, IVF is a thing now, if you want to be fussy about bloodlines. (Lee Se-jin, Gon’s 23-year-old heir who’s a medical student in Los Angeles, begs her kingly cousin to be fussy about it. She loves her work and her healthcare activism and her non-Corean boyfriend. She is not looking forward to inheriting an office that requires her to follow “harsh and totally backwards social rules, orabeoni, it blows. Have a baby and then, like, change the laws for them.”)
An aside about Yeong's family: the Ch’angnyon Jo stopped giving brides to the ruling family in the nineteenth century. Legend has it that it’s to avoid some kind of curse, but a very private section of the family history reveals that Ha-yeon, the Lady Jo (a modern-day heroine of sorts for running away to southern China and becoming a millionaire) wasn’t a lifelong spinster, but briefly married to Lee Yeong himself; she somehow divorced him and escaped with her life and the clan honour intact.
In the end, Jo Yeong looks at her painting––the only woman to appear in the family portrait gallery before the twentieth century––and thinks of what it must have taken for a teenaged girl to say yes to a king, and then say no. Hell, he thinks bitterly, hell; and then he puts on his dress blues to go get gay-married to the king of Daehan Jaeguk.
He gives up the secondment to the Royal Guard, of course; the role is completely untenable now. He moves into the palace the day the formalities begin. He lies in his marriage bed with Gon, who imagines he has the worst wedding night of any Corean monarch in history. Brides have probably been brought to the royal bed kicking and screaming, begging and murderous, but Gon’s sure none of his forebears have found themselves awake all night at arms’ length from a stave of cold iron.
Yeong poses for all the pictures and bows to all the guests and observes all the rites he’s supposed to, over the seven days of the feast. Then he packs his bags and goes back to the navy’s special operations group.
(“That’s their equivalent of a Navy SEAL,” the aide helping President Clinton prepare for a state visit explains. “Oh, brother,” President Clinton says, looking at the picture in her file.)
If it strikes the public as weird that the royal couple spend their honeymoon separately, headlining a lecture series on Cremona transformations at CAIST (Gon) and sailing secret missions on the East Sea (Yeong), there’s little comment. It’s Jo Yeong: his whole deal is, like, unapproachable machismo. It’s probably a diplomatic move or something, so that the monarch’s new bridegroom is seen to be his own person, a man’s man, whatever. He’s hot in naval fatigues.
“Five years is good enough time for a divorce not to affect your reputation,” Yeong says to Gon, clipped, as he’s zipping up his rucksack on the morning after the ceremonies. “I’ll stay out of your Majesty’s way before then. If you could please wrap up the treasury problem.” Since you didn’t let me, he doesn’t say.
The first of the royal laterite mines is nationalised that month.
It’s typhoon season in the north-east, and Yeong’s unit’s mostly involved with high-level search-and-rescue and disaster management; not exactly murder on the high seas, but rewarding work (and good cover for unrewarding dirty work, a reality on this part of the coast, this close to Ilbon). It’s also as far from Busan as it’s possible to get. Gon doesn’t come up here, probably never has. You know who does come up, though? Miss I’ve-Changed-My-Whole-Political-Approach, I’m-Now-One-With-My-People herself, that unrelenting hellbeast, Koo Seo-ryeong.
It’s bad enough that the fisherfolk in the coastal community hit by Typhoon Jangmi swoon over themselves welcoming her when she turns up riding a relief truck, wearing Hunter wellies and an expression of insincere sympathy. It’s worse that Yeong’s on-site, bringing a tough rescue op to shore and pulling rank to expedite medical care.
Worst of all: “Daegun-mama,” she says, looking delighted to spot him. She folds her hands at the waist and bows. Yeong wants to be called royal highness about as much as he wants scurvy. He wants to be addressed by Koo Seo-ryeong about as much as he wants syphilis.
“You seem uncomfortable,” she says, over cups of coffee in a rec tent that’s been mysteriously cleared out. “I feel bad. I’ve always liked you.”
Yeong raises an eyebrow. "No you haven't," he points out.
“No, I haven’t,” she agrees. “I do feel bad that I never took the chance to tell a certain person, whose more-loyal-than-the-King airs have always annoyed me, that I think the guillotine is too good for him.” PM Koo had waged a hard and––she thought––secret battle to dilute the lèse-majeste laws that govern the dignity of the king (and heaven help him, now the prince consort). It’d been one of her costliest failures during her term.
“Sounds rough,” he tells her now. “Have you tried getting a hobby to pass the time?”
“I like making rich men sad,” she says. “That’s a hobby, right? And making my enemies regret that I’m alive.”
“So we have one thing in common,” he says, getting up. “I’ll leave first. Firing squad’s more your style, by the way. The guillotine has far too much tradition for you.”
“Merely conceding to taste,” she smiles, and bows farewell as ostentatiously as greeting.
He returns to the palace on Chuseok leave. He will not consider the words “their” or “first” as valid qualifiers, because he’s been with Gon at every visit to his ancestral shrines since they were nine and five, and he’s not about to give it up because of Gon’s dumb stunt, even if it is a life-transforming dumb stunt. He times his arrival just so he can slip into the consort’s quarters unnoticed, shave and shower and dress for the day. He doesn’t see the look on his Majesty’s face when he arrives to stand at his side during the memorial ceremonies.
(A meme, originating in the UK, that does the rounds for a few days afterwards: Gon, in his midnight blue dragon robe, standing shoulder to shoulder with Yeong, who looks like an immaculate asshole in his dalryeongpo, the purple round-collared robe of state, and aviator shades. His Majesty is speaking to someone off-camera, appearing to gesture at Yeong, while Yeong looks off at something in the opposite direction. Meme text: Sir, that’s my emotional support husband.)
Retiring to his rooms at night would be pointless antagonism, so he goes to Gon's rooms. He's just about gotten comfortable with his pillow on the Persian carpet by the royal bedside when his Majesty arrives, peers over the bedstead and says, “Well, this is melodramatic.”
“Don’t make too much of it,” Yeong says, half-buried in his pillow already. “Bed’s too soft.”
It’s quiet for a moment, before a big silk pillow drops softly on the carpet next to Yeong. Don’t, he wants to say. But––
“Still angry?” Gon asks. Yeong lets the king put an arm over his chest, then curl in so his large, warm palm covers Yeong’s cheek. He lets the king gather him close, and kiss his hair and his cheek and his jaw. He tries, really hard, to melt the way Gon’s always been able to make him do.
“Yes,” he says, finally, when he finds that he can’t. He’s tired enough to fall asleep after Gon withdraws, and doesn’t realise that Gon stays awake, staring at him, re-assessing the gravity of what he’s done.
Listen: Gon didn’t overturn the laws of the natural world or anything when he compelled Yeong to do this. But he did wholly overturn the way Yeong’s world worked. Two problems. First: Yeong’s supposed to protect the king. He has no clue of what to do when the king turns around to protect him, even in selfishness. Second: The selfishness. Gon holds Yeong’s life in his hands and can trample it into the dust if he wants to. But Yeong gave that life into his keeping because, at age four, he found Gon worthy. (Some kings get the sword in the stone; others get the Unbreakable Sword in the stone.) Every day afterwards, he measured the king and found him worthy, even if it was by a yardstick others didn’t see or understand. He didn’t expect this. He didn’t expect to be disappointed. He didn’t expect his own well-being to be the cause of that disappointment.
A prison cell would be too good for Yeong at those times that he allows himself to think about it. He’s not a thinker, though, so he goes back and participates in submarine drills like the doer he is. His CO does him the favour of sending him out to deep sea on his birthday, so he won’t have to sit around listening to the whole country sending him official good wishes (and worse). He doesn’t get his husband’s birthday present, a quiet pair of white gold cufflinks engraved with the dragon figurehead of Admiral Yi’s ship, until two weeks afterwards.
He thinks of an antique gold bull he sold for cash on some other planet and doesn’t write back to say thanks.
Back home, Gon is trying to figure out the solution to How To Make Yeong Happy With Me and sometimes getting it out of order with the problem set for What Did I Do That Was So Wrong Anyway. He almost gets it wrong by starting from the base assumption Yeong Will Love Me No Matter What. He tracks back quickly, after Chuseok, and starts again from a different proposition: To Be The Person Yeong Wants, I Have To Be The King Yeong Wants.
This goes better. He reconstitutes the national human rights tribunal, which has been suspended since the coup and its prosecutions. He meets the heads of every national party and studies their plans for the upcoming election, and asks their opinions about freedom: individual, social, national.
He pushes for Koo Seo-ryeong’s corruption trial to be held quickly, mostly to get the whole farce over with sooner rather than later. (She gets the judiciary to hold the trial in open court and delivers a performance that’s impressive even by her standards. She walks out a free woman and ends up back in the PM’s seat less than twenty-four hours after the verdict is declared. The pool bartender at the Ritz becomes a hospitality consultant at the offices of the council of ministers.)
Yeong heads out on a recon mission that can’t quite escape a storm. They have to hunker down to ride it out on an islet off North Hamgyong, comms busted and the craft needing an engineering fix that’s just a hair beyond his capacities. Figuring it out delays them, and it’s a full 48 hours before they return to radio range. “Chongjin, this is Task Force Three, we’re ship-shape,” he starts, but the airwaves crackle and the controller relays him an abrupt, “Set course for base right the hell now, sailor,” from his CO. He takes the controls so he won’t have to ride out the rest of the journey with his heart in his mouth. It isn’t until he lands at Chongjin Naval Base and finds himself swept up in a big, familiar embrace as soon as his feet touch the ground out of the chopper that he thinks wait, and what, and oh, and right. (He never goes for his handgun when Gon hugs him.)
“Is this embarrassing you?” his Majesty asks, voice rough. His embrace is tight around Yeong’s ribs, his cheek resting on Yeong’s hair. “Are you completely mortified by how worried I’ve been?”
His heart settles slowly, slowly, back into his body. “Will the rest of Task Force Three be granted the same consideration?” he asks. He hadn’t realised that this was a thing he missed: the nearness of Gon’s scent, his aftershave and the softener the royal laundry uses on his clothes, and god, his skin.
“They will not,” Gon says firmly.
“Okay,” he says. "I'm mortified." He feels, for the first time in a long time, like leaning into Gon’s shoulder, putting an arm around his waist. It’s ridiculous. They’re making a scene. It’s completely against regulations.
“I heard that,” he says, to a passing wolf-whistle, and hugs Gon back.
He’s back home for Christmas, and Gon comes to stay with him at the Jo house and goes to midnight mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, sings the carols enthusiastically and puts a roll of banknotes in the collection plate. He is, Yeong realises, in actual fact a completely mortifying man, and also that he needs Yeong more than he’s ever needed anyone in his adult life, even Jeong Tae-eul. It kills him a little to realise it because it’s going to make the divorce harder than it needs to be.
“I don’t think your Majesty and I should meet like this again,” he says, before he bows and leaves.
Yeong’s had a hard enough time dealing with the idea that the man he protects wants to protect him back. The idea of being loved back, not in the airy, death-dealing way Gon has always loved Yeong but as a man might love another, is terrifying. It's not acceptable. He can’t be what Gon needs. He can’t. He wants to turn back the clock and go back to being the constant in Gon’s life and no more or less. He can’t be the other half of the equation, and he isn’t; he isn’t Jeong Tae-eul or any other person who can be what she is––was––to Gon.
He doesn’t want to be.
He asks to be reassigned overseas. The ministry of defence, overseen by a politician who sits in Koo Seo-ryeong’s charmeuse silk pocket, approves the move at lightning speed. He’s gone before New Year celebrations are over.
This is a good place to worry about something happening: a miscalculated rescue mission, a crashing test plane, a surprise attack on a peacekeeping convoy. This isn’t that kind of story, though. Change just––happens, slowly. Yeong’s led the widest life it’s possible for a young man to lead, thanks to his money and upbringing and association with a man who’s known to the whole world. But in so many ways that life was so limited, so hermetic. Getting to go out and see deserts and green oceans and cities, not as a dilettante but as a working man, helps set right something that’s been twisted and frightened inside of him ever since he stepped through a portal to another dimension. Every part of the world is unknowable, and every person in it; he likes that, likes getting to experience the truth of it for himself. Daehan Jaeguk is unhappy that one of their precious naval commandos is straight-up ignoring the fact that he's a class-one protectee and an honest-to-goodness national treasure (at least according to his Instagram comments). But, you know, the goddamn prince consort turning up to de-escalate gnarly geopolitical situations isn't a bad thing for back-channel diplomacy. In fact, it's making a weird amount of currency for Corea's deep state.
Koo Seo-ryeong, jealous and bored, half-contemplates orchestrating an unfortunate accident in foreign waters, but she’d start to miss the new Lee Gon if something happened to upset him. This man takes his work seriously; he lives a quiet (and maybe fulfilling? She can’t tell but she hopes not) life. This Lee Gon doesn’t try to compete for her celebrity with stupid TV appearances that should be beneath a real monarch. He lets her do her job in peace, apart from throwing out the bugs she keeps planting in the royal study. He is meet, moderate and discreet, in Confucian style.
She’s never been in love herself, but she can identify one or two of its symptoms (attention-seeking, attempts at self-improvement) when she sees it. The buffoonery is thrilling. She hopes it lasts.
This is also not the story in which Gon dies or gets hurt or gets in danger. His Royal Guard is good because it was handpicked by a man good at his job (and because Gon’s getting some of the luck he’s owed after the, you know, bloody murders and attempted coups). He works on staying safe because that’s an important step towards proving that one can be the king one's extremely neglectful husband might want someday. He's never really been a monarch who thinks deeply or soulfully of his people (or The People, The Nation, Der Volksgeist, et cetera et cetera) and he’s happy to go back to not thinking about it much, just being the voice in the dark and the face on the high seat; the heartbeat that marks the passing of the country’s time.
The monarch must be loved. That, Lee Gon is, because he’s the orphaned son of the nation. But the monarch must not be resented, or he will be a bad father of the nation. Gon doesn’t quite put it that way because you need to be a Liberal Arts person to develop the habit of grasping historical perspective. But he lives in history. He is capable of getting a clue. He lives in a palace from which his birth parents have gone, and so have the people who brought him up. So, for now, has the man who held up the sky over his head. But Gon turned out well, for an orphan. Tae-eul agreed, too. He’s going to keep it up. At least, he’s going to try.
And one day Lee Gon is in Baghdad, delivering the keynote address at a science university that’s re-opened after years of ruin and heartbreak. He’s come to pay his respects to a place and mathematical tradition without which he wouldn’t have the ground beneath his feet. And Yeong, who tolerated days and nights of pre-teen wonder over al-Khwarizmi and the mathematicians of the House of Wisdom, has by some miracle of chance not forgotten every atom of it. He happens to be in the neighbourhood. He makes his way into the spanking new auditorium, filled with hundreds of shining faces, listening intently into their language translation earbuds as the king of Corea speaks of beauty and poetry. He leans against a wall and looks at Gon, who does not make public pronouncements in any language but their mother tongue, but has done his young hosts the quiet honour of appearing in the deep green robes that the scholars of Joseon once wore. He listens to Gon try to explain, hesitantly, what it means to him and to his nation and to the history of their whole terrifying and endless continent, to be here today, replanting the seeds of reason and wisdom with them.
I know you, he thinks. His body and soul melt for Gon again, the way they haven’t since they married. He slips away unnoticed. Three weeks later, Gon receives his first unsolicited communication from the prince consort. It's an old book whose alphabet he can’t read but that he can identify because its numerals are perfectly familiar. It’s Khwarizmi’s Compendium on Calculation and Balancing: a precious nineteenth-century edition from Egypt, a translator tells him, later.
Saw this. Thought of you, says a note in hanggul, in a hand he knows just a little less well than his own.
It still takes another year.
It takes another year of Yeong wandering the world, setting things right where he can as the Kingdom of Corea’s man in the UNPKO, or at least trying to stop bad situations from descending into absolute disasters. He learns to love Shahrukh Khan, and cheap Russian vodka. He consumes goraasa be dama by the potful and gets hooked onto cinnamon tea.
He starts sending pictures to Gon: a black cat with a single white patch of fur around its left eye in Istanbul, a sunset in Isfahan, the domes of Samarkand.
At first, they’re just pictures of things and places, he doesn’t add anything to them, no thinking of you or I miss you. He figures it doesn’t need saying; he’s never understood those postcards that said wish you were here. Of course you do, why else would you be sending a fucking postcard.
Gon replies with his own pictures.
Well, the first twenty are just Maximus, but the twenty-first is blurry, as though the lens were dipped in water; it comes on New Year’s Day––or New Year’s Eve, in Yeong’s time––a view of the palace from the island. It seems Busan is having a rainy start.
Gon had kept with the tradition, after all, Yeong thinks, and hesitates only for a moment, before writing back, I miss him too.
So it goes.
The first time he calls Gon, he’s been holed up in a tent in an Amazonian rainforest for twenty straight days because the rain just hasn’t stopped.
It’s April; in Corea, the azaleas must be in riotous bloom. Yeong stares up at the towering canopy of wet dark green through the flaps of his tent and calls Gon.
The crackle and hum on the line doesn’t quite hide the sleepy surprise of the first “Yeong?” and then the panicked, “Yeong? Yeong? Is everything alright? What’s wrong ?Tell me immediately!”
This was what the Titanic felt like when it hit that iceberg, Yeong thinks, as he cracks open, a cleaving that leaves him floundering, unmoored.
“I’m alright,” he says, and for the first time since he was four, "Gon hyung.”
There’s an abrupt silence on the other end; all he can hear is the static.
It lasts so long that Yeong thinks he might have lost the connection after all, and he’s just about to hang up, when Gon says, sounding breathless and annoyed, “I don’t think you appreciate the restraint I’m exercising right now not to just fly across the world and drag you home!”
Yeong wipes at his eyes, and huffs, his voice not quite in control, “I appreciate it, pyeha,” he says, “I do.”
Gon sighs.
They stay quiet for a while, just the buzz and hum of electrons between them, and Yeong thinks of patterns and fate and destiny, and he says, “It never rains like this back home. I feel like I’m turning into water, just sitting here, doing nothing."
There’s a delay before Gon’s voice comes over the line, a soft huff, “Be grateful. If it stops raining in the Amazon, we’re all irreparably screwed."
“I’m aware of that fact,” says Yeong, “unbelievable as that may sound to you."
God, what is he doing here, flirting awkwardly like the fourteen-year old he never was.
“What are you going to do about it anyway?” he asks, and that’s enough to set Gon off on a whole different tangent, the sleepiness in his voice gone as he describes the climate change initiatives that Prime Minister Koo and he are working on.
It goes on for twenty minutes, and Yeong mostly just listens and hums at appropriate junctures, letting Gon’s voice wash over him.
And he was wrong, he wasn’t a ship, wrecked on the rock that was Gon, he was an ice-cube slowly melting in the warm cavern of his mouth.
“That woman drives me crazy,” Gon is sighing. “It’s too bad I reconstituted the CHRC, that was probably a rash decision on my part."
And then, as though remembering that he wasn’t supposed to be that person anymore, he adds, guiltily, “Uh, not that I’m undoing that."
Yeong laughs.
It probably sounds tinny and not like himself at all on the other side.
Gon says, “Yeong.”
“Yes” he says, when his heart stops doing crazy things in his chest, “I’m here."
It escalates after that––as much as possible, given that Yeong is often in places without mobile signals or bandwidth, or whatever communication is available is heavily restricted. There are long periods when they don’t hear from each other, and when Yeong emerges from whatever dark hole he’s been in, it is to at least fifteen videos of Maximus, and like, ten million voice mails, and an inbox that’s two thousand separate single-line notes, because Gon can’t write emails like a normal person.
Gon is not a normal person, he is mortifyingly ridiculous, and Yeong sighs, and gives in and pulls strings to get his hands on a military grade CoreaTech prototype phone that has amazing battery life and a gazillion gigas of storage, because it turns out that he is also just that stupid, and he doesn’t want to delete a single memory of this time.
He calls Gon from the phone, leaning against his hotel window in Lagos.
Below him, the city glitters in neon and gold.
It’s nine pm on a Thursday in Lagos, and five am on Friday in Busan, and Yeong thinks about the unreliability of time, as a concept, and the brief flare in the dark that is one human lifetime and calls his husband.
“Yeong-ah,” says Gon, apparently still half asleep. These days, he tends to sleep in more often, instead of waking at four am like he used to.
“I was wondering if you’d reached,” Gon's mumbling. “Did you get my messages?”
“Yes” Yeong says. “All twenty-one million of them.”
“Mrrmmmph,” mutters Gon, half into his pillow, and Yeong––Yeong knows what Gon looks like, sleep-mussed and incoherent, and the ache in his chest spreads to other parts.
“Gon hyung,” he says, “Will you do something for me?”
“Mmm?”
“Gon hyung,” he whispers, “touch yourself for me.”
There’s silence and then a wide-awake, if shaky, “Yeong-ah."
“Touch yourself like I would,” Yeong instructs, and oh, he hadn’t really thought this through, words are not his strong suit, and he has never even sexted once in his life, not even sent a dirty text, security professional paranoia being what it is. But somehow, it works, it works, because Gon moans his name, and sighs in his ear, and the military-grade phone with its excellent speakers is worth every single moment of an uneasy conscience, and Yeong comes with a gasped-out plea, that is Gon hyung, that is beloved, darling, husband, mine.
Afterward, they float together on a silent cloud of shared breath across the world.
Gon doesn’t say, come home, or let me come to you, and Yeong is grateful for that.
Yeong loves him so fucking much, that he’s going to disintegrate entirely if he doesn’t see Gon in the next twenty-four hours.
He texts Gon from the airport, “See you in twenty hours,” and then switches off his phone.
When he lands, he’s not sure what he’s expecting––perhaps Gon waiting on the tarmac for him, like that one time.
But Gon’s not there, just Captain Seok Ho-pil, and he rises from his deep bow, to say, “Welcome home, Yeong-daegun,” with a wide grin, and Yeong sighs, and says, “Please tell me he’s not got the entire Royal Navy Band or something waiting for me at the palace."
“His Majesty retired to his study earlier today and hasn’t emerged since,” Captain Seok informs him, with a sidelong glance.
“Ah,” says Yeong. “Alright, thank you."
The Royal Navy Band may not be there, but it feels like the entire staff of the palace is out there to welcome him back, or at least get a glimpse of him, and Yeong performs all the necessary rituals of greeting or ignoring, as required, and tries not to run down the last corridor to the study.
He slips into the study, shutting the heavy wooden door softly behind him.
It looks much the same as he’d last seen it––three years ago, now––the floor to ceiling shelves of books, the glass covered in equations. Gon is sitting at his desk, staring at a book, rubbing a page between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
Yeong knows that Gon knows that he’s in the room. He sees him swallow hard, and the way his shoulders go just a little bit taut.
“Pyeha,” he says, softly, as he approaches, and Gon looks up at that.
Yeong goes around the desk and turns the chair toward him, before he sinks to his knees.
“Pyeha,” he says again, staring up at that beloved face.
Gon’s hazel eyes are wide and––terrified, Yeong realises.
He reaches to take the book out from Gon’s trembling hands. It’s Khwarizmi’s Compendium on Calculation and Balancing, the one that he’d sent more than a year ago, after he’d realized that he’d never stood a chance of getting away. He sets the book on the desk.
Gon’s fingers are covered in chalk.
It’s how he soothes himself, Yeong knows, furiously working out hypotheses, the numbers a music that only Gon can hear.
“I’m going to fuck it up again,” Gon says, baldly. “Someday."
Yeong raises Gon’s hands to his lips, kisses the ring on it, and then his knuckles.
“I won’t let you,” he promises. “That’s my job."
He huffs: “Besides, even if I fail, that woman you’ve got running circles around every major world leader won’t let you. You’re covered.”
Gon’s fingers tighten on his.
“Don’t divorce me,” he says.
Yeong looks at him.
“Is that an order, pyeha?”
Yeong rather enjoys the way that Gon’s mind scrambles for the answer, his eyes widening.
“Yes..?”
“Right answer,” Yeong whispers, and he’s clambering onto Gon’s lap, and tilting his face up, so he can seal their mouths together.
After some time––Yeong has no idea how much––Gon eases away an inch to whisper, “I’m going to be ridiculous now."
“Mmhmm,” says Yeong, nuzzling at his temple.
Gon stands up, lifting Yeong in his arms, with hardly an effort.
Yeong had forgotten this part (not really), how strong Gon is, how he could use that giraffe body of his to short circuit Yeong’s brain within seconds.
“I’m going to carry my husband to the royal bedchamber and ravish him despite his pleas for mercy like the despot I am,” Gon whispers, into the corner of his mouth. “I’m not going to let him leave my bed for a week."
Well, thinks Yeong, between long, lavish kisses, as he wraps his legs tighter around Gon, and lets himself be carried out of the study, past the staff that’s scrambling to get out of sight and way, and into the bedroom and pressed into the silk duvet, it was good to be with a man who kept his promises.
Afterwards:
It takes Yeong a second to disengage from the kiss, to press his head back against the covers and recognise the difference, before he looks up at Gon’s flushed face and smiles. He feels, again, like he’s melting.
“Don’t,” Gon says, seeking his mouth again. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“Of you?” Yeong murmurs, against the kiss. “I feel like the princess on the pea here.” Gon changed his bedding while Yeong was away. Under the satin duvet and the Dhaka muslin bed-covers, the royal mattress is thin and hard: no longer silk and down, but a square of the fire-resistant foam used in standard-issue naval bedding.
“So sure of me,” Yeong says, drawing an arm around Gon to pull him close, closer, to bear his weight down on Yeong.
“Getting surer,” Gon says against his cheek, “of myself.”
Yeong kisses him deeper. He offers himself up without words, the way he’s done since they first started doing this. It’s a demand, he knows now. He’s been making demands of his Majesty all along, ever since he first clambered into this bed and closed his mouth around Gon, turning Gon’s fooling around into something serious. He doesn’t have the words, but it’s alright: Gon knows what he likes, and tonight is their wedding night, so Yeong gets to have it. He gets to have Gon strip him out of his uniform and grind down on him, the wool and velvet of Gon's clothes brushing over Yeong’s bare body like a fever. He gets to spill over Gon’s trousers and hear Gon laughing, fond, in his ear; he gets Gon to push him down and take Gon’s cock into his mouth, to suck him off while Gon scratches his scalp and clutches Yeong’s hair in his fist (or tries––it’s shorter than it used to be). He hears the hitch in his breath before Gon comes, and he gets Gon to pull him up into his lap and maul and bite him and mark him up before he fingers Yeong into another orgasm. Yeong turns helpless and out of breath and messy as Gon works him over, pulling over his cock with long, firm strokes in time with the rhythm of his other hand, two fingers inside him.
He falls back into bed after that, and is asleep before Gon comes back with a washcloth. He sleeps through being cleaned and covered up; sleeps through being cradled in Gon’s arms, sleeps through the hours that Gon browses through the Moscow Journal of Mathematics on his tablet fitfully, too distracted by the sight of Yeong’s head on his chest to restrict his joy to an argument about fundamental cubic form. He sleeps––
“––through breakfast, and very nearly lunch,” Gon says, when he stirs and asks what time it is. His Majesty drops a kiss on his hair. “I have lost feeling in my right arm, and have never been kept waiting this long in my life for a shower, not even when I missed the waking bell at the academy.” Yeong stretches, scrubs his face against Gon’s shirt, then looks up at him, eyes still cloudy. They’ve slept together before, but never woken together: Yeong’s never been in bed with him, or with anyone, like this before. He blinks, slowly, at the sight of Gon’s face.
“I’m dreaming,” he says, and puts his head back down again. His hand steals down to the waistband of Gon’s pajamas; finds his cock, stirring, and wraps his hand around it.
“Drink some water,” Gon says, on an exhale. “Eat some fruit. The kitchens sent a tray up.”
“Aye, aye,” Yeong says. “Can it be after you’ve fucked me?”
“No,” Gon says, voice strangled as Yeong’s blunt, clever hand nudges his balls, caresses softly at the thin skin there.
Yeong looks up at him again, sleep gone from his eyes.
Gon swallows. "Alright," he says.
He gets to take off his clothes this time so that he’s naked when he gets behind Yeong, who’s up on his hands and knees; naked when he opens him up and enters him, naked as he hauls Yeong upright to wind his arms around his chest as they move together. He remembers that Yeong likes having his nipples twisted and his throat kissed and his voice muffled in his own palm when he comes from being taken like this. Gon––Gon loves it, perhaps to a degree he hadn’t realised before he lost it. He’s trembling a little as he comes down from the high, trying not to shake as he lowers Yeong to the sheets, to free him from the tight clasp of Gon’s embrace.
They’ve changed, Gon thinks, nerves sparking and raw from the sex in a way he hadn’t known to notice before. Yeong’s body is different now, darker from the sun, beaten broad and ropy by the hammer of physical labour. His skin’s rougher than it was when his job was to ambulate, buttoned-up, in the orbit of a king and his palace. There’s a shallow and ugly scar on his lower arm, some sort of accidental slash; there's the fading rash of a rope-burn above a hip-bone. And there, under his right shoulder, is the dark, webbed mark of a bullet that didn’t pierce his skin. Gon’s seen that before. He didn’t know how to feel about it. He does now: it’s not I’ll kill the people who did this to you, the way he felt when Tae-eul was hurt. It’s someone shot at you and it’s pierced me.
He’s unprepared to meet Yeong’s eyes, looks away when a hand reaches up to brush the hair falling over Gon’s brow.
“I like this length,” Yeong murmurs. Gon’s four days away from his monthly haircut. Yeong’s never said, before. He lets Yeong pull him down, buries his face in his neck and accepts the kisses he gets, to ear and jaw and temple.
“Get up,” he says, muffled, when he can trust his voice. “It’s late.”
“It’s not late,” Yeong says, and his voice is soft, as it always is when he’s trying not to compete with Gon’s thoughts. He doesn’t know, Gon remembers, disoriented by the largeness of what he’s feeling. He doesn't know what Gon's thinking about.
“It’s not late,” Yeong says again. “It’s my honeymoon, and I’ve been told I’m not allowed out of bed.” When Gon looks up, Yeong stretches, yawning, and then, incredibly, turns over and hugs a pillow again.
“The order has exemptions for essential functions,” Gon says. He knows the tiredness of the first twenty-four hours of shore leave, and Yeong’s been on duty for so long. Still––
“Bye, hyung,” he yawns, and Gon accepts that he’s being dismissed, and gets out of bed to go neglect all the things he means to do with his waking hours.
It takes sixteen hours after he was carried there for Yeong to roll out of bed. He wanders into the shower to wake up properly, then wanders back out in a shirt and running shorts from the backpack someone relocated to Gon’s suite while they were preoccupied. He’s damp, his hair soft from the humidity of the bath. He looks, as always, like he could stand between Gon and death.
“How much time do I get with you?” Gon asks, when he comes around to where Gon’s been pretending to read by the window. Yeong picks up his hand and kisses its knuckles, the way he did when they met this morning (was it just this morning?). Then he plants another kiss on the back of his palm. Not long, then. Gon could just call the whole schedule to a halt. He would like to command an honourable discharge, cancel all of this so they can be as close, wrapped around each other as they used to be when Yeong was Gon’s sword and his shield, and Gon’s alone.
But he knows, now, the price to be paid for winding back time.
“What would you like to do with the time we have?” Yeong asks him, looking at him with his clear, beautiful expression, as honest as the dawn.
“Shall I make you something to eat?” Gon asks him. Yeong raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t care for Gon’s steak and rice, told him it was too fussy all the way back when he was seventeen and Gon tried to do something nice and date-like for the hot guy he’d gotten to go to bed with. Yeong eats like a teenager; he has ever since he became an athlete and compartmentalised food into fuel, fibre and fat. There’s some leeway for fad dieting, mostly so he gets to gloat to himself over his skin and hair. (Gon has not, in his life, met a vainer man, and he once spent a whole week at Cambridge with U-23 rowing crews from around the world.)
They head down to the kitchen, pull out woks and bowls and produce as Yeong sees off the kitchen staff, as polite and wholly unembarrassed as they’ve always known him to be. Gon makes him a salad and fries up eggs, subversively making them silken with butter, while Yeong cuts up fruit (“Did you know we’ve been opening up pomegranates wrong our whole lives? See here, this is how Iranians do it.”) and unearths the ninety percent dark chocolate someone’s put in the dessert pantry, though Yeong’s been gone so long even Gon forgot that he liked that stuff. Gon wants to sit next to him and feed him by hand, but he has no practice in asking for an honour. He sits instead, across the island from him and watches him shovel up his food.
“What?” Yeong says, looking up at him over a lull in their talk.
“I am preparing,” Gon says, like he has any practice in concealing his feelings, and any skill at all in concealing them from Yeong, “to tolerate the sight of you drinking a protein shake for breakfast tomorrow.”
“Do you know how hard my life has been away from home,” Yeong asks with a straight face. “Are you aware that there are parts of the world where they consider bread a fit breakfast.”
Breakfast: their last meal together, two Christmases ago. A formal and celebratory affair in the company of Admiral Jo and Yeong’s grandparents, and Yeong down the table from Gon, cold and untouchable. Gon suddenly remembers the meal they ate together before that. It was at Chongjin Naval Base, after Yeong flew back from a failed mission. They’d had cold buckwheat noodles for lunch at the canteen, the kind that aren’t eaten often in the south. Yeong had put two servings on a tray, tasted one before he put bowl and spoon in front of Gon. They’d sat amidst the rest of Yeong’s hard-bitten little crew and Gon had answered their easy, unaffected questions about himself, deflected their teasing about Jo-daejang. He’d listened to them talk to each other and to Yeong, while Gon dared to touch his knee to Yeong’s and wished he could hold his hand instead.
“I’m going to make you naengmyeon tomorrow,” he tells Yeong, who looks up, then tilts his head slightly. He doesn’t make Gon answer any questions, though. He stretches his hand across the table, palm outwards, and lets Gon take it. He only lets go to wash and put away the dishes after he’s finished, then leads him back up to the bedroom, and curls up in Gon’s arms and kisses him to sleep.
On the second morning, Gon wakes up to birdsong and a body looming over his.
“We are well into daylight,” Yeong’s saying, with a smile on his face, “and I’ve been for a run, shielded your delicate sensibilities from my breakfast, and put the staff on a skeleton schedule.”
“Oh,” Gon breathes. “Why?” He reaches up to be kissed and held, to feel the heat trapped in Yeong’s clothes and the coolness of his sweat, and then feels a rush of blood to his skin as he thinks about what it means to be alone, or more alone than usual. Every human thing Gon has ever done in his life has been to someone else’s knowledge of it, everything from illness and grief to masturbation and sex (with Yeong). But it’s their honeymoon. Yeong said so; and Yeong can give him the gift of being private, if Gon wants that.
“To do as you like,” Yeong says, sure enough, and Gon draws a breath and musters up the courage to say, for the first time in his life, “What about as you like?”
Yeong pauses, then puts a knee on the bed and clambers over him. His scent is sharp, tangy and a little grassy from what must have been a long run around the paddock. He hasn’t smelled like this since they were in the navy––not to Gon, at least. Captain Jo of the royal guard smelled of aftershave, if you got very close to him; of the hollow mineral scent of his hair product and semen and the latex of a condom, if you got a half-hour out of your day to have sex with him; of nothing, most of the time, all personal affect muted or erased in order that the monarch find his surroundings as inoffensive as possible.
“Do you mean it?” Yeong says.
“Yes,” Gon says, burying his nose deep in the newness of this. “Yes, please, Yeong.”
“Touch yourself, then,” Yeong says, in his ear, and it's even better than hearing it over the phone, Gon realises, as his body turns on, hard, at the voice and the words and the breath in his ear.
“I got jealous,” Yeong continues, “that I wasn’t here to see you. Will you show me?” He licks a stripe over Gon’s mouth, flickers his tongue inside when Gon opens for him.
“You said,” Gon says, overcome, “you said to do it like you were touching me,” and so he does; he shoves his pants down and tries to copy that no-nonsense way Yeong’s always had, first the firm grasp, then the slow, interrogatory stroking, then the steady and inflexible rhythm, to which every fibre of his body responds. This time he has Yeong’s chest against his back, too, and Yeong’s foot, running up and down over Gon’s calf, and Yeong looking at him with that unbearable gaze of his as Gon brings himself off.
“Won’t you come for me, hyung?” Yeong asks, kissing his cheek. “Show me you like me?”
“I––” Gon says, but he comes before he can finish his answer, and Yeong’s hand is on his, stroking him through the climax and the quake of its aftermath, holding him like they’ll never fall.
“I don’t like you,” Gon says, sweat cooling off his own body now. It makes him light-headed that sex, that coupling, can smell like this. “At all. God, hold me closer, please.”
Yeong takes him to shower, after a while, and picks out his clothes, and tolerates him as Gon walks around the palace, aimless, trying to get his bearings. He isn’t hungry, but they eat. He reads the paper someone’s left at the breakfast table even though he doesn’t understand the words; runs his toes over Yeong’s bare leg as he waits to make a decent approximation of having differentiated today from the day before. He finds himself thankful when they can get up again and go back to bed, pull the hangings shut, and be alone, this new kind of alone, again.
There’s an Utamaro in the palace collection: not pornographic, but a painting of two people having sex, or about to: their unseen faces pressed close, fully-clad bodies anchored in each other. He didn’t really know what it meant, before.
Heart full, he makes Yeong talk; asks for stories about the places he’s seen, the name of the cat in Istanbul (Yeong didn’t inquire) and the warlord buried under the domes of Samarqand (Timur), what he was doing in Isfahan when the sun was setting.
“I was on holiday,” Yeong says, and then, softly, like a gift, “With my mother.” Gon has a faint memory of her, a beautiful woman whose face Yeong wears, torn out of their lives by a divorce in which the Jo family won full custody. Those were the years in which Yeong stopped smiling. But he endured, Gon knows. He went uncomplainingly to be brought up by his grandparents, fulfilled every one of Admiral Jo’s expectations, became the man he decided to be when he was four or five years old. And then, when he came of age, left home, crossed the country to get to his mother, and found her, and guarded her from every other part of his life, as he has ever since. She lives quietly in Sokcho, a dance historian, maybe also a teacher; Yeong never talks about her.
“What does she think?” Gon asks, now, hoping to be shielded from whatever the answer is. “Of us?”
“She knows what you are to me,” Yeong says, simply. Share her with me, Gon wants to say. But he’s not twenty any more. He knows not to ask Yeong for things he’s going to get anyway. That’s what he chose in this universe: the chance to live a life in which things come to him in time. A life like Yeong’s, in which it means nothing and everything to wait for love.
Gon doesn’t want him to wait.
“I have something to tell you,” he says.
They go outside. Maybe the staff rollback was for Yeong, after all, Gon thinks, as he looks at his less-than-perfect hair, the softness of his big, holey sweater. In the gallery by the lily pond, Gon stops him and says, without meeting his eyes, “There’s another door.”
In an instant, he feels Yeong’s body turn to iron next to his. Yeong knows what he means. He knows the door lies between their world and that other one. He counts the seconds in his head, as Yeong wills himself to back down from battle, muscle by muscle.
“What’s to be done?” Yeong says, evenly.
“Nothing,” Gon says. “If we close it, I’ll find another. If we close that, I’ll find another. Nothing is impossible––in time.”
“I know the flute’s gone,” Yeong remarks, still in his low, even voice.
“You know, I think, about the conservation of energy,” Gon says. “I’m not telling you because it’s a problem to solve.”
When he looks up, Yeong’s looking at him, with an unspoken question on his face. It isn’t why are you telling me? It’s––
“I’m never going to solve it,” Gon says. “I’ll never go back. I’ll never see her again,” because the question Yeong’s asking him is what are you choosing? “It’ll cost too much, to the universe. To her. And––” and this is what he has to tell Yeong, about what he’s learned, and what he’s been taught, in the years that Yeong’s been away. It's the thing that he could afford to ignore because people like his uncle and Lady Noh and Yeong gave up their whole lives to protect him from it. “And Yeong, it’ll cost me myself. I won’t pay that price.”
Yeong lets his eyes close for a minute, so Gon doesn’t have to look at the relief in them.
Then he opens them again.
“I can guess at what she means to you,” he says, and has the courage to meet Gon's eyes when he says it. “I’m sorry.”
Gon blinks. There’s a terror threatening at the edges of his mind, a fear full of what-ifs and why-nots and how-dares. But he’s with Yeong now, and Yeong holds his fears at bay.
“She gave me my freedom,” Gon says. “This life is mine now: and yours, if you want it.”
“No,” Yeong’s shaking his head. “No, pyeha.” He doesn’t say I can’t, though. He doesn’t say I refuse.
Yes, Gon thinks. I will give you what I can, in time. “I told you about the door because I need you to keep the secret,” he says. “I need you to carry it for me sometimes.” And Yeong looks up at him and smiles, like burdens are easy things to carry.
They go walking in the princes’ garden, over a damp earth, cooling with the evening breeze. There’s not much to say. Yeong lets Gon take his hand and lead him on another aimless walk, step by step through their unknowable and fragile home. There’s air here, and light, and water. The seeds of wisdom must be tended in a world like this, without rest and without resentment.
“What do you want?” he asks Yeong in bed again, that night. He’s tired, senses a little dulled; still sparking, though, still raw from what he’s doing with Yeong. He changes his mind and asks another question. “Don’t you want me?”
“What does it seem like?” Yeong says, though he understands, Gon thinks; he’s going to make Gon say it.
“Don’t you want,” Gon says, and soldiers on off the gangplank, “to fuck me?”
“Sure,” Yeong says. “Is that what you want?” They’ve done it before: they’ve been young and horny and Gon’s insisted on every iteration of sex it’s possible for two bodies such as theirs to have, for the sake of repeatable experience. They’ve never done it when they’re like this, before, though: drifting this close to each other from their allied but separate personhood.
“Is that what you want,” Gon repeats, as Yeong tangles their limbs together, tussles with him briefly and holds his wrists above his head. “I’m going to ask you that all the time,” he tells Yeong, who leans in to press their mouths together, and starts laughing before he arrives at Gon’s lips.
“Yes,” Yeong says, and gets his kiss.
“You have to answer truthfully,” Gon says. He lets Yeong press him back on their awful bunk-bed mattress, folds his legs around Yeong’s hips, in invitation.
“I’m a truthful man,” Yeong says.
On the fifth morning:
“I heard the Prime Minister’s office communicated through the secretariat these days,” Yeong says, coming up on the figure waiting before the doors of the study. He has to admit she’s some kind of good: not a lot of people would startle so quietly, even daintily, if he sneaked up on them.
“Not about emergencies related to the climate cell that I do not have the authority to resolve,” Koo Seo-ryeong says, turning to him and bowing deeply, before following him, uninvited, as he pushes open the doors to Gon’s study. “Your Royal Highness, what a relief to see you looking well.”
“Hoping I’d die in a tanker accident, were you?” he says.
“I grew up selling fish, oil spills aren’t really my preferred fantasy,” she lies glibly, putting her files down on Gon’s desk. He picks them up and starts flipping through them, looking for electromagnetic devices. “The chief of military staff was concerned about your health when you made an emergency request for furlough.”
“The chief of military staff is my father’s junior from the academy,” Yeong says, knowing it’ll set her teeth on edge. “He’s avuncular.”
“How charming,” she says, “for everyone except the people you cancelled on, presumably.”
“It was a lecture at the Nigerian Army College, not a hostage rescue,” he says, amused. “It’s rescheduled for next week.”
“And to what,” she asks, “do we owe Yeong-daegun the pleasure of his return to home soil for six days?”
It’s a rainy morning, and they’d been planning to sleep in, to make love, to finally eat naengmyeon for lunch. They: a strange word he hasn’t really started to use yet, except to himself. Gon’s returning to the land of the living from a problem he’s been thinking about in the Moscow Journal of Mathematics. It pleases Yeong to be able to void a demand on his time, however small it may be. It pleases him, before that, to have been the distraction from the problem, the journal flung off the bed as Yeong covered Gon’s body with his, driving into him with a force they’re both shocked to discover they like. It’d been long, and loud, and Yeong’s going to have to think about hazard bonuses for the staff on roster when he’s home from furlough like this.
He looks out of the window at the pouring rain, across the courtyard to an as-yet unused set of rooms: the offices of the prince consort. He turns, and sees the prime minister awaiting the answer to her importunate question. He realises he’s smiling.
“Some of us,” he says, “marry husbands we actually like.” He went to school with the KU group chairman’s younger brother: everyone knows the story of how Koo Seo-ryeong sent her husband to jail without doing him the courtesy of––what do they call it in court? Conjugal bliss.
“Is that why you married his Majesty?” she asks him, coolly.
He narrows his eyes. Then he remembers the role she played in the whole fiasco, three years ago.
“We had a good matchmaker,” he says, as the doors open. Gon enters, flanked by Captain Seok and Agent Myeong Seung-ah, who breaks protocol to wiggle her fingers at him in greeting. He frowns, then bows. “Your Majesty,” he says.
Gon, undeterred, takes his hand as he walks past, squeezes it before he lets go. Mortifying. He’s a mortifying man. “Soon,” he says to Yeong.
“Soon,” Yeong finds himself able to say.