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“Master, haven’t you noticed anything different about me?”
Jeokyeon sits, silent, pensive for several moments. She sips her tea, and Biseol does the same. She sighs, and Biseol shifts in his seat.
Finally, after Biseol has taken to measuring the passage of time by the sound of blood in his ears, a warmth softens Jeokyeon’s face.
“I’m sorry, Biseol, how long have you been waiting for me to mention it?” she asks, slightly bowing forward to tilt his teacup towards herself. Only half the liquid remains.
He keeps his head down, letting white hair fall over pink cheeks.
“Look at me,” his master says, reaching a finger under his chin to tilt it gently upward, and so he does.
“You’ve always been human to me. You’ve always been more human than half the men I know—not that it’s an exacting standard—“ she hesitates. “But this was important to you. I should have congratulated you sooner.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Insecurity was lacing his voice, anxiety almost as much. He hated how weak he sounded while voicing that question but he needed to know.
“Would you have congratulated me on coming of age when I started my cycle?” she quips drily, unashamed. Then, more earnestly, “Why would I call attention to the secret you wore like too-small shoes for centuries, now that you’re able to bask in the euphoria of this change? …Had you not realized I don’t eat the pastries the court ladies bring us until at least half of them are already gone?”
Biseol closes his eyes, resting in the warmth of his own body, his master’s affection, the steam rising up from his tea.
“Do you like it, then?” Jeok-yeon’s voice breaks through his brief reverie.
“Being human?”
“The tea.”
“It’s…” he pauses, wondering how honest to be, “a bit bitter.”
Jeok-yeon’s laugh, crisp and melodic and unexpected—the one she reserves only for those who know her—dances through the air, sweeping Biseol’s breath along with it. “...Yes. Well. Let’s get you some sugar for it.”
“It’s the middle of winter—and such a luxury—“
“I’m the emperor. And you’re the second highest official in the kingdom.” She flags down a waiter and issues her request. “No one will begrudge you a small luxury. Gods know you’re owed a bit of sweetness.”
Biseol looks to Yeon’s lips, pink and chapped by the bitterly cold winds they’ve been traveling through for days. No one will begrudge you… a bit of sweetness. “Master, come closer.”
Jeokyeon’s eyebrows draw closer together at the plaintive, hesitant tone. She begins to lean over the table, then thinks better of it; she stands and comes to kneel by his side.
“There’s… something else I’d like to taste. Now that I’m… human.”
Jeok-yeon sweeps a calloused hand across his cheek. “Anything you’d like, from the furthest reaches of Yeol. You of all people know distance is hardly a hindrance. Anything you’d like—although some fruits may have to wait till spring.”
“It is… nothing like that.”
Jeok-yeon cocks her head. She’s never been quick to catch these latent messages, these hinted emotions, but Biseol cannot bring himself to say more.
That evening, Yeon sips her cheonghae tonic (she no longer needs it but has grown fond of the taste over the years). Biseol brushes his hair, 100 strokes, and 100 more, and still more after that, trying to slow his racing heart. Without looking across the room, he says, “Master, I’d like to try what I alluded to earlier.” His voice is thick and choked, but Jeokyeon doesn’t mention it.
“Most places will be closed at this hour, in a village like this.”
“We don’t need to go anywhere.”
“I didn’t suggest we shouldn’t try. I’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for, but we may not have much success until morning—“
Biseol can’t wait to hear any more. If he doesn’t move now, he never will. He’s felt her lips on his once before, a moment branded into his memory by searing shame and illicit desire, but he finds humanity makes him weak to temptation and prone to folly.
And so he moves. He crosses the room in three gliding steps and places his hands at her arms. He hesitates for a moment, hitching a breath at the question in her eyes, the slight smile, and he closes his eyes. He leans in quickly—perhaps more quickly than is considered polite—so he doesn’t have time to lose his nerve.
And he feels her chapped lips, closed tight and barely holding back a laugh. Insecurity seizes him, almost breaking the hold his piqued curiosity has over him; he pulls back just a hair’s breadth.
She reaches around him to grab the back of his head. “You could have just said this is what you meant long ago,” she whispers, “instead of leaving me to guess all this time.”
His skin prickles with embarrassment, but he refuses to let it take hold. Let the moment flow into whatever it shall be. He can handle the consequences after; he’s been handling them, after all, for almost a millennium. He realizes his lips are still close enough to feel the warmth of hers, but with her hand holding him in place, he can’t make a graceful retreat. And so he stays. He waits, less than a second, but it feels like all his thousand years at once.
“You’re clumsy. Would you like to practice?” she asks, pulling his weight onto her knee so that he’s resting in her lap like a cat. “Go ahead. Try again.”
This time, he breathes her in as he closes the fractional distance. His lips are stiff until they soften; hers are dry until they’re not. He’s entranced. He’s trapped in a riptide, an inferno, a prison too sweet to escape. And so he does what his body tells him comes next and hopes to his heavenly counterparts he’s doing it right, and he allows his lips to part. She allows hers to do the same with a warm wisp of a satisfied laugh.
When morning blooms, the fireplace still smolders with the remnants of the flame they didn’t put out last night, and winterberry eyes glisten against the snowy-white sheets. “You’re awake,” she murmurs, and her voice is gravelly, and he wants nothing more than to hear her like this forever, and he wants nothing more than to silence her with a kiss. He’s kissed her before, but until last night he’d never tasted her.
The thought happens to him more than any active consideration on his part: he may never eat again; palace delicacies are the dirt on his boots now that he knows what he’s been missing in her.
It was during these days, them basking in their shared solitude, that he learned what being human meant too. That it meant to be selfless and to be obsessed. That love had many forms and that he, who had no knowledge of it before, was allowed to get more than a taste of it. He was still struggling at times, feeling unworthy of the love his empress was giving him. But, as their eternity passed by, such feelings fell into the distant past. For it was her to teach him all there was - except being a blade. And, for all it was worth, both of them wouldn’t ever exchange what they had for anything.
As they stopped being Master and Blade, they grew into something so natural that, at times, it scared them. Because in the end, they only ever had each other, hadn’t they?