Archive of Our Own

The moment Seokjin found himself at the back of the line, he knew that, in the event of an attack, he would be the first hunter to fall.

Someone had to do it, after all. Being the hunter at the back of the line, that is. But Seokjin’s place was usually somewhere else. Not first, because the role of trailblazer belonged to Seungho, their leader. Not second, because Eunseong would have fulminated Seokjin with a look for daring to get closer to Seungho than he already was – as if Seungho’s feelings were Seokjin’s fault –, and not even fourth, because if you had to be second to last, you might as well be last, even though Dohyun was so simple-minded that he never realised it.

No, Seokjin was usually in the middle of the line, far enough from the back to be relatively less at risk, far enough ahead to keep Seungho’s mind at ease. The tail light, the one in the most vulnerable spot, was always their eldest, Woobin, and Woobin… well.

Woobin was no more.

That was why the hunters were there, trudging up the snowy paths winding up toward the mountaintop like the coils of a brain. Sometimes the trails were so narrow, suspended over precipices, that they allowed for no missteps, and one had to proceed slowly and keep their legs relaxed so as not to lose their balance. The snow didn’t help, soft as it was, freshly fallen – a single rifle shot could cause an avalanche, Seokjin had argued, but that time Seungho didn’t listen to him. The cold would be bitter enough, Seungho had said, to harden the snow enough to not cause any risks. Eunseong had smiled and agreed, but who knew what they were thinking now that their footprints were left behind them as evidence of a potentially fatal miscalculation.

Their thoughts were probably not geared towards anything that would have made them stop and turn back, anyway. They were solely focused on locating the ghost’s tracks, and if not, the blood of Woobin that dripped as the animal carried away the shreds of his corpse.

They would avenge their comrade, Seungho had said before they set off, two days earlier. A life for a life.

And so Seokjin, the only one of the four of them who had hesitated, had automatically ended up at the back of the line.

“We are close,” Seungho said, crouching on the snowy ground and raising himself with a tuft of white hair between his glove-clad thumb and forefinger. “It must have taken shelter among the rocks. Get ready.”

Tension ran through the group, who took up their rifles. The weapon felt uncomfortably heavy in Seokjin’s hands as they cautiously advanced towards a crevice in the rocks, keeping an eye out for potential movement on the mountain above them and the sheer drop to their right. A poor position for an attack, Seokjin thought, hoping the mountain ghost wasn’t in its lair so they could postpone the confrontation to a more favourable location.

Entering the den was not a good idea – it would have been much better to light a fire in front of it and push the smoke inside to lure the animal out out of fear of suffocating – but Seungho decided to throw caution to the wind and ducked into the crevice with Eunseong in tow, while Seokjin and Dohyun remained outside on guard, ready to intervene if needed. If luck was on their side, however, there would be no need to engage in a firefight in a stone passageway as dark as Hell.

And indeed luck smiled on them, because as Dohyun’s eyes swept along the rocky ridge a few dozen metres above them, he made a sighting.

Greyish fur with black rosettes on a sinewy body. A long, bushy tail swaying slowly as a pair of pearl grey eyes studied the situation. Sharp teeth barely peeking out from under quivering black lips.

And a smudge of dried blood on the cheek.

“The ghost!” Dohyun shouted in alarm towards the cave, then let his rifle do the talking before Seokjin could stop him.

The shot missed, and a moment later, the unharmed snow leopard lunged at the two of them.

Frightened by the attack he had foolishly provoked, Dohyun cowered, crushing himself against the rock face, inadvertently blocking Seungho and Eunseong’s exit, and leaving Seokjin alone in the ghost’s path.

Situations like this required quick reflexes and instantaneous reactions, but in that moment, Seokjin’s survival instinct failed him.

It failed because, as time stretched from mere moments to sluggish minutes, he met the ghost’s pearly gaze and saw only hunger, and fear.

The moment Seokjin found himself at the back of the line, he knew that, in the event of an attack, he would be the first hunter to fall.

And fall he did, over the edge of the snowy slope, under crushing weight and sharp jaws closing on him, as Seungho’s voice screaming his name and the crack of a gunshot pierced his ears.

The world around Seokjin was dark and quiet, so what brought him back to full consciousness turned out to be something that felt like fur tickling his nose, paired with an annoyingly intense animal smell. For a while after opening his eyes, Seokjin just stared at the darkness above him without seeing anything, wondering why he felt so tired and hurting. Then the fog in his head cleared, and memories came back to him one by one.

The punitive expedition. The snow leopard. Dohyun’s reckless shot and the attack. The precipice that welcomed Seokjin into its deadly clutches.

How come he was still alive?

He raised his head with difficulty, fighting the wave of nausea that hit him from the change in position, and peered into the darkness for someone to ask for explanations, but there was no one. Not only that, but he wasn’t even in the village healer’s hut as it would have been logical.

A timid beam of light filtered in from a hole in the distance, illuminating pebbles, dirt, and rocks, but also white, elongated objects scattered on the ground that looked very much like animal bones, and spoke not so much of a cave, but of the lair of a predator – and everyone knew what the mountain’s prime predator was.

Seokjin would have loved to know who the idiot was who had thought to shelter him in a (still inhabited?) snow leopard’s den. And thank them for rescuing him, too, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that his saviour was an idiot.

Even though the idea of moving didn’t appeal to him – he would have much preferred to go back to sleep – it was obvious that he couldn’t stay there a moment longer at the risk of the mountain ghost returning.

He sat up with a grunt, and as he did so, the fur blanket that had been keeping him warm slipped off him. Seokjin recognised it as his sleeping bag and rejoiced at the realisation that his rescuer had also retrieved his backpack, then was distracted by the sensation of something wet moving on his shoulder.

He turned just in time to see a dark mush fall out of a wide hole in his shirt. Upon closer inspection, the mush turned out to be a crushed herbal compress, which was apparently meant to help heal the bite on his shoulder: it was still so inflamed that Seokjin turned pale and his stomach threatened to overturn and empty what little remained of its contents onto the rocky floor of the cave. Luckily, it didn’t happen, but in the case the wound was infected, he would have concerns far more serious than a grisly sight.

Putting on a brave face, Seokjin pressed the skin around the bite, and when he saw, despite the dim light, that no pus had come out, he breathed a sigh of relief – which was promptly followed by an almost indignant snort, and looking up to see who had made it, Seokjin was met with a large pinkish nose.

He had just sighed in the face of a snow leopard.

“Good Heavens,” Seokjin’s voice rasped before he brought a hand to his mouth with unprecedented speed. He must have gone crazy, attracting the leopard’s attention like that!

In truth, even if he had been silent, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference: the animal had never stopped staring at him, with eyes the kind of light blue Seokjin had only seen in the sky on clear winter days, and an expression that, if it hadn’t been absolutely impossible, he would have described as worried, or expectant.

At least it didn’t look hungry. It didn’t even look scary, slamming its butt down with a dull thud. In fact, it even seemed… cute?

Seokjin swallowed thickly, wetted his lips. The leopard’s tail swished in the darkness, sweeping the ground and curling around its paws.

And then the mountain ghost started to purr.

It sounded so much as if a heavy snorer had taken refuge to sleep in a working sawmill that Seokjin found himself smiling with endearment.

“Hi, kitty,” he cooed despite the strangeness of the situation. And even stranger, it seemed that the animal had liked it. Perhaps it was domesticated.

“Was it your master who saved me? Will they return soon?” Seokjin asked; the leopard couldn’t answer, but seemed to be listening, immobile in its place. “Did they ask you to watch over me in the meantime?”

At that, the leopard reached out a paw, and instinctively Seokjin recoiled, pulling the blanket closer as if it could protect him; he only relaxed when he saw that the animal had placed it on the herbal mush on the ground, and he blushed with embarrassment, though he certainly couldn’t be blamed for his reaction. The leopard cocked its head and looked at him expectantly, and when Seokjin blinked in confusion, it glared at the bite on his shoulder.

“It’s not healed, I know. But what do you expect me to do? I can’t apply a dirty compr— goodness!” he blurted out without finishing his sentence as he saw the leopard get up, turn around, and disappear quickly into the shadows.

It came back shortly after, pushing a wooden bowl containing more herbs with its snout until it slammed into Seokjin’s side. Then the animal slammed its butt down again and waited.

“Didn’t your master teach you to be a little less bossy?” Seokjin complained. Still, he pulled the bowl into his lap: he had no idea what was inside the poultice, but it smelled good and was warm to the touch.

He was just about to put it on when the leopard let out a low purr of disapproval and responded to Seokjin’s inquiring gaze with nods of its head that seemed to urge him to lie down so that the herbal mush wouldn’t fall to the ground again. Not without thinking of how absurd it was that he was taking orders from a predator – and not just any one, but the terror of the mountain – Seokjin complied.

“Are you happy now?” he asked the supervising leopard out of the corner of his eye.

Seemingly satisfied – at least judging by the purr which gurgled in its throat – the animal stretched its massive body and, after a terrorising display of its jaws wide open in a yawn, it curled up behind Seokjin, resting its head on the ground near the human’s injured shoulder and closing its eyes.

“Sweet dreams, kitty,” Seokjin murmured, yawning in response. He was suddenly feeling drowsy, and his eyelids started to droop. Perhaps he had underestimated the severity of the wound, because his body seemed to be using up all its remaining energy to heal, and since he hadn’t eaten anything in who knew how many days, it was now trying to compensate with sleep. The darkness of the cave, combined with the warm cocoon of the blanket and the strangely comforting presence of the leopard, induced slumber like a lullaby, one of those that, when Seokjin was little, his mother used to hum to him while she combed his unruly hair and tucked him in on the bed closest to the fireplace.

Now Seokjin had no one to sing him a lullaby.

The leopard snorted and started purring again, and a few minutes later, Seokjin followed him into the valley of dreams, a small smile playing on his lips.

Time in the cave was an almost nonexistent concept: there was only darkness, the warmth trapped between the rocks, and the distant exit from which light of varying intensities entered. Seokjin’s only certainty was that at least two days had passed, because the second time he awoke, it was still daylight, but he felt too rested for only a few hours to have passed.

He was also hungry, as his stomach took it upon itself to point out, emitting a gurgling sound that made the snow leopard raise its head.

A few moments later, the animal dropped Seokjin’s backpack next to the bed and gave the human a pointed look.

“If you expect me to feed you my supplies, I’m not sorry to inform you that you are wrong,” Seokjin stated, retrieving his backpack. He was in good enough health to move it without much discomfort from his injured shoulder, even though the bag weighed several kilos. “There is nothing you would like in here anyway,” he continued, rummaging through the bag’s contents and surreptitiously pushing the meat jerky aside. “See? These are not good for a leopard.”

As he said it, Seokjin extended a small form of goat cheese and some flat bread to the animal, which sniffed them curiously, then raised large, dreamy eyes to the human.

“Ah ah, no. Forget it. I need this food for the trip home, and I don’t even know where I am, let alone how many days it will have to last me. Just wait for your master to feed you, or go out and hunt a blue sheep,” he said firmly, refraining from booping the leopard’s nose.

The animal didn’t look too disappointed, as if it had understood exactly how important the tempting provisions were. It just lay there watching Seokjin cut the cheese with a knife and slip it into the open bread before biting into it voraciously, and settled for the crusts, but didn’t seem too impressed with them.

“Told you,” Seokjin mumbled between bites, savouring the still slightly creamy texture of the briefly matured cheese. Suddenly missing his goats, which he hoped were doing fine even in his absence, a thought struck him.

“Promise me something, kitty,” he told the leopard, who looked at him quizzically. “If you ever get hungry and decide to go down the mountain, don’t get close to the human village, and stay away from livestock. It’s dangerous for you,” he recommended earnestly. “The snow leopard that bit me took the risk, and while trying to catch a cow, it got caught by my fellow hunter, Woobin, and ate him instead. The village decided to take revenge, and you know the rest.”

The leopard looked at him so gravely that Seokjin was sure it had understood every word.

“Come to my house instead. You cannot miss it, it’s the most isolated one from the village. If you do, I’ll feed you – not cheese and bread, of course, but meat…” Seokjin trailed off, then sighed. “What am I even saying? As if it will ever— huff!” he snorted as the snow leopard pushed itself against him without warning, rubbing its big, furry head against his neck.

“Goodness, are you sure you are a predator? You are so affectionate!” Seokjin laughed, pushing the animal’s head away gently and cautiously at the same time. Having those sharp fangs close to his thin skin made him shiver. “Your master really turned you into an oversized house cat. I would be curious to see what kind of person they are, but I am not sure I’ll have the chance to meet them.”

The snow leopard frowned, meowing in confusion.

“Strange to say, but I feel almost completely healthy, which means I’ll leave soon, kitty,” Seokjin explained, standing up for the first time since he woke up in the cave as if to prove his words. His legs held him well. “Tomorrow, I think.”

The animal’s apparent pout was so cutely disapproving that Seokjin giggled as he returned the backpack to its place against the wall.

“I will miss you too,” he told the leopard with a smile and an impromptu caress on the head. Seeing that the animal didn’t protest, but just looked a bit depressed, Seokjin chanced a soothing scratch behind the ear, which multiplied after an enthusiastic reception. Perhaps, if Seokjin stayed long enough, he might even manage to make the snow leopard lie down on its back for more purr-inducing scratches.

It was a question destined to stay unanswered, for as expected, Seokjin felt ready to leave the next day. He wrapped himself in his heavy coat, pulled his hat down on his head until it covered his ears well, and put on his gloves while the sensation of the leopard’s soft, warm fur still lingered on his palm. He bid farewell to his new friend a first time with the knowledge that they would never meet each other again, and bid farewell to it a second time after the animal, noticing how disoriented Seokjin was when he exited the cave, accompanied the human to the nearby spot where the attack had occurred – the signs were still there – so that he could regain his bearings.

It was a clear November morning, and the pale sun shone coldly in the sky. It was far from warm, and snowdrifts were still piling up on the mountain slopes, but you could hear water flowing timidly under the frozen crust as the snow thawed. It would last only a short time, barely until the next snowfall, and then it would be late spring before the rock re-emerged from its white blanket. In the meantime, Seokjin had to pay attention not to step on the softer snow, lest it would give way under his weight and suck him into some crevice.

When night fell, he found shelter in some apparently abandoned caves, the same ones their group had occupied during the climb. Not many days must have passed since then, because he found the remains of the fire they had lit, which prompted Seokjin to check to see if they had left any dry wood. There was a little bit of it, and before going to sleep with the warmth of the burning embers rather than that of the snow leopard’s body lying next to him, Seokjin dined on melted cheese and a hot, invigorating bark infusion.

The trek up the mountain had taken two days; the return journey took three, but Seokjin felt like he had been away from the village his whole life. The sun had barely set when he arrived but as he finished walking down the path he saw the glow of a bonfire reflecting on the stone walls of the houses: a meeting was in progress, and suspecting he knew what the agenda was, Seokjin deviated towards the small square instead of following the edge of the town and going back to his hut in the woods.

“—been going on for too long!” Seungho was proclaiming, standing on an overturned wooden box that served as a makeshift podium while the village adults – about twenty people in all, men and women – sat on buckets and boxes, listening intently. “I remember when I was a child, we didn’t have to look over our shoulders every step of the way. My parents” – he pointed at them – “didn’t have to worry about waking up and finding nothing left in the pen. They could send me out to play in the woods, knowing I would come back. When I was a child, they – we – knew peace of mind. But not anymore!” he roared without even taking a breath. “The situation has deteriorated to the point where what happens now?”

“The forest is so fragile that the trees fall on you!” a woodcutter shouted, but a twitch of Seungho’s eyebrow told Seokjin that wasn’t the answer he wanted.

“In the winter, it gets so cold that we are suffocated by snow and ice, and as soon as the temperatures warm up, the streams swell and overflow!”

“They take away the cattle that drink and the children who play!” an old lady added.

“And these are all legitimate concerns!” Seungho agreed. “But friends! It had never happened before that a snow leopard killed two of our people!”

“That’s true!” Eunseong echoed from the group.

“Woobin-hyung was just trying to save his animals, and Seokjin-hyung was bravely fighting to avenge a friend,” Seungho continued passionately. “But the leopard did to them what it would have done to an ibex or a blue sheep. It lived up to its beastly reputation, and we can’t just stand by and watch! We must take action!”

“We must!” Dohyun repeated, raising his fist to the night sky, and with Eunseong and Seungho joining him, the words became a rousing chant. A shiver of discomfort ran down Seokjin’s spine. He had to do something before the situation escalated.

“Not in my name!” he declared loud enough to be heard above the chant. “Not in my name, Seungho,” he repeated in a lower voice as he stepped forward among the villagers, who were looking around, trying to figure out who had spoken. “There is no need to avenge a death that never occurred.”

“Seok… Seokjin-hyung?” Seungho stammered as he spotted him. “Seokjin-hyung!”

With one step, Seungho stepped off the wooden box, and with two, closed the distance to an approaching Seokjin, enveloping him in a fierce embrace. The man’s breath tickled Seokjin’s cheek as Seungho whispered, “You are alive.”

The emotion in his voice was such that Seokjin felt uncomfortable, and partly worried for his own safety as he imagined the darts Eunseong’s eyes were surely shooting at him. He moved his shoulders, which Seungho correctly interpreted as a request to release him, but instead of letting go of the elder completely, he placed his hands on Seokjin’s forearms.

“I missed you terribly. I thought I had lost you forever,” Seungho murmured, eyes dark and uncharacteristically veiled with unshed tears, and Seokjin knew that the hunter was about to kiss him just like that, in front of everyone.

It was a bad idea for several reasons, not the least of which was that Seokjin didn’t want to break a heart the first thing after returning from the afterlife. So “Ouch,” he said with a slightly exaggerated wince, putting a hand to his injured shoulder.

“Hyung, are you wounded?” Seungho immediately fretted, letting go of Seokjin for fear of hurting him. “Of course you are, you were attacked by a wild beast and fell from a mountain, after all.” His eyes examined Seokjin for visible wounds, while the villagers, after the initial moment of bewilderment, gathered to look at the man that the mountain had unexpectedly returned after taking so much from them over the past years.

It was at that moment that Seokjin realised he had no answers to the questions that would inevitably follow. He didn’t know how long he had been away, nor who had saved him, and he certainly couldn’t explain why he was coming back from a potentially fatal animal attack with only a healing bite that didn’t mind the backpack shoulder strap, and the exhaustion of the journey weighing on his otherwise healthy body.

“Yes, I… I am wounded, but I have already taken care of it. It was just a sudden twinge, so you don’t have to worry about it,” he answered an expectant Seungho.

“You should have the healer check it, though. Is Grandma Sung still here?” Seungho asked around. “It seems that she has already gone home. Come with me, I’ll accompany you to—”

“Honestly, I am feeling quite tired right now, so I would just like to go home too,” Seokjin interrupted. “It can wait until tomorrow.”

Seungho seemed displeased with it, but ultimately caved in. “If you are sure, fine. I’ll walk you home, then.”

“I don’t see why. I walked this far alone, I can go a few hundred metres more,” Seokjin objected, struggling not to let irritation show in his tone.

“Seungho, give it a rest. Can’t you see he wants to be alone?” Dohyun cut in, and for once Seokjin thanked the other’s proverbial indelicacy.

“I… Alright. Sorry, hyung,” Seungho reluctantly accepted. “Everyone, please move out of the way. Let Seokjin-hyung pass.”

“Hey, kiddo, is Seokjin-ah the only one you show respect to? You cannot tell me to ‘move out of the way’, I was already half-deaf when you both still had snot in your noses!” an elderly man protested.

“But your hearing has only improved since then, Grandpa Yeom,” Seungho replied amiably. “If only we could all age like you!”

“Tch, praise won’t take you anywhere,” Grandpa Yeom rebuked, clicking his tongue against his few remaining teeth, but still stepped aside along with everyone else, and Seokjin took advantage of it to walk away. He quickly slipped into the alley between two huts and only slowed down after reaching the edge of the village and making sure no one was following him.

He breathed a sigh of relief, but he knew that the break would be short-lived and he would soon have to answer the villagers’ questions – and if not the villagers’, Seungho’s. Goodness, how he would have liked to be left alone! Instead, he would have had to make something up, because he certainly couldn’t say that he had been cared for by a bossy snow leopard. It was so absurd that Seokjin himself was starting to wonder if he hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

There was also the question of the minor nature of his injuries: one would have guessed that Seokjin had tripped over a protruding root rather than fallen off a cliff while a snow leopard tore at his flesh. He thought it unlikely that the snow had cushioned the impact with the rocks to that extent, and in any case, it wouldn’t have explained the speed of his shoulder recovery, which was sufficiently advanced that it was already able to support the weight of the backpack again.

He couldn’t pinpoint what, but something was wrong about the whole situation, and—

Who was hovering at his windows?

Seokjin took a step to the side and hid behind a pine tree. He leaned forward a little, squinting at his chalet. The moon was waning, so it was too dark to make out anything clearly: the only certainty was that it was a person, presumably a man, perhaps a curious villager who had decided to intercept him. Seokjin picked up a fallen branch from the ground, just in case. After all, in these times, one could never be too safe.

Reassured by the weight of the branch in his hand, Seokjin approached slowly, his boots leaving fresh prints in the untouched snow: it was a rarely frequented path, since the only destination was his home. His most common visitors were the other hunters; otherwise, he kept to himself, content with just the company of his goats, so for a villager to venture onto the unknown path there must have been a rather strong reason, and mere curiosity seemed a weak one. That, coupled with how suspicious the situation was, convinced Seokjin that he was about to face a bad guy.

Before he could change his mind, he gripped the stick a little tighter, covered the distance to the chalet in three long strides, and struck, but the stranger moved aside at the last moment, and the stick hit the wooden wall instead.

“You almost made me break a window, you idiot!” Seokjin yelled at his missed target.

“What the hell,” the guy replied, staring at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

“Who the hell, if anything,” Seokjin corrected, menacingly waving the stick at the other, who recoiled. “Who are you, and why were you hovering outside my house?” His eyes dropped to the guy’s inexplicably shirtless torso. “Are you a vagabond?”

“Well, from a certain point of view, you could call me that—”

“No beating around the bush or you’ll taste my stick!”

A lopsided grin appeared on the other’s face. “I would love to.”

“You—” Seokjin spluttered as he turned red as a beetroot in the uncertain light of the stars. He raised the stick and brought it down again, but it missed the target once more. Luckily, it also missed the window again.

“For someone who said he would feed me, you seem quite determined to kill me instead. Was it all a lie?” the guy asked, visibly offended.

“Excuse me, what? When did I ever say something like that? I don’t even know you!”

“You don’t—? It’s me, Jeongguk!”

“I don’t know a Jeongguk,” Seokjin declared resolutely, swinging the stick again as ‘Jeongguk’ seemed distracted. The other, however, grabbed it and tugged, pulling Seokjin against his body.

“It’s me,” Jeongguk said in a low voice, resting his forehead against Seokjin’s and staring straight into his eyes as a blue flash lit up in his irises and his body was crossed by a trail of light, which illuminated rose-like patterns on his torso.

They didn’t last long, but enough for a suspect to form in Seokjin’s mind.

“Kitty…?” he murmured in disbelief, failing to comprehend what was happening. “Is that you? How… how is this possible?”

The stick fell to the ground as Seokjin let it go to grab Jeongguk’s face instead, squishing the other’s cheeks in search of similarities with his leopard friend. “Do it again. The light trick,” he ordered, and gasped when the eyes in front of him lit up once more with that almost familiar blue.

“You finally recognised me,” Jeongguk gloated, taking advantage of the astonishment that had frozen Seokjin to nuzzle the other’s neck, even though it was covered by the coat. The gesture had the effect of bringing Seokjin back to his senses.

“We cannot stay out here,” he stated, taking out the key from under an empty flower pot, opening the lock, and hastily dragging Jeongguk inside the house.

The interior wasn’t large – just one room – but as soon as Seokjin lit a few candles, it became clear that it was cosy. To the left was a stone fireplace set into the wall, to the right the bed – by far the largest piece of furniture in the room –, and in the middle a table and three chairs atop a wool rug that Seokjin had made himself. The different shades of red and orange of the blankets on the bed and on the armchair in a corner, the copper pots, and the bunches of dried aromatic plants hanging from the ceiling beams added to the feeling of warmth.

“Ooh, I like your den,” Jeongguk said approvingly, then Seokjin felt two arms wrap around his waist from behind, and a seductive voice whispered in his ear: “Do you prefer us to mate in bed or on the rug in front of the fireplace?”

“Let me go!” Seokjin shouted after a moment of bewilderment, freeing himself and dropping the backpack on the wood flooring, ready to fight for his virtue if necessary. “Why in the name of Heavens are you doing this to me? I just got back and was looking forward to a hot bath, but instead I have to deal with you.” He let out a groan as he took off his coat. “I liked you more as a snow leopard.”

Jeongguk’s mouth fell open, his eyes growing wide in a quasi-comical expression. “You mean… I had a better chance of mating with you when we were in the cave?”

“What—? No! How did you even— That’s a completely different thing!” Seokjin protested, so overcome with exasperation that he threw his gloves and hat somewhere and dropped to the floor, moaning into his hands.

A rustling sound told him that Jeongguk had followed him, and when Seokjin opened his eyes again, he found the other crouched in front of him.

“May I know what’s going on?” Seokjin pleaded.

“Do you want me to start from something in particular?”

“Let’s start with who you are.”

Jeongguk, it turned out, was a god. Not God par excellence, but one of many lesser spirits, a guardian who took the form of a snow leopard, watching and keeping watch over what happened on the mountain – and what he had observed had become increasingly worrying as the years went by: humans had isolated themselves from nature, forsaking most of the worshipping rites from olden times, and the mountain, once a benevolent and peaceful deity, had become resentful, hostile and dangerous both to them and the animals that inhabited its slopes.

Snowfalls had become heavier, the weather more unpredictable, food scarcer. Snow leopards, which once could keep to themselves, were no longer able to find the same amount of prey as before in the wild, and to avoid starvation, were ultimately forced to cross into human territory to hunt for cattle. The previous week’s crossing had not been the first, but it had been the first in which a leopard had claimed a human victim – a villager whose name was Woobin. The balance that governed the mountain was deeply shaken by it, and the vengeful expedition of Seungho’s hunting party, which had cost the leopard its life, had finished breaking what little was left of it.

“But if your role is that of a guardian, why didn’t you take action and prevent the situation from escalating?” Seokjin asked.

“I am not allowed to interfere with the decisions of the mortals—”

“Ah, yes, free will and all that.”

“—but as a guardian, I am granted one chance in my existence to restore the balance.”

Seokjin looked at Jeongguk with suspicion. “And why haven’t you done it yet?”

“Because I cannot do it alone. To pacify the mountain and restore the truce between snow leopards and humans, an effort must be made on both sides. In practice, I need to take on a human mate.”

“Let me guess, you chose me.”

“I did.” Jeongguk accompanied his confirmation with a solemn nod of assent.

Seokjin sighed, running a hand over his face and staring at the dancing flames in the fireplace he had meanwhile lit.

“Is that my punishment?” he finally asked.

Jeongguk frowned, not understanding. “Why do you think you should be punished?”

“Because it is my fault if the village no longer celebrates the worship rites.”

Seokjin, as a matter of fact, was a son of shamans, born and raised on goat milk and offerings on the altar dedicated to the mountain deity. His parents, like many others, followed an ancient religion that firmly believed that nature worship was the key to the salvation of the soul and the prosperity of future generations, so they travelled around the country trying to convert anyone who would listen to them. Thanks to their calm rhetoric, kind spirits, and generosity toward others, they succeeded most of the time, and once they deemed their task in a village to be finished, they would move to the next one, taking their son with them even when Seokjin was but a newborn.

“I hated that life. You never had time to put down roots in a place that you were swept away, again and again. So, when they decided to move again nine years ago, I said I would stay here,” Seokjin recounted. “They didn’t protest. I think they were convinced that, as their son, I would carry on their proselytising work, turning the village into a sort of bastion of their faith. Even some of the villagers seemed to think this, judging by their confusion when I did not show up to officiate the offering rite of early spring, but I just wanted a quiet life away from the stage.” He looked at Jeongguk. “That is why I find it hard to believe that I was chosen by pure chance to be your… mate. It seems more like divine retaliation.”

“It isn’t,” Jeongguk denied vehemently, sounding close to offended. “I chose you because, when the snow leopard pounced at you, you hesitated. You could have shot it, but you didn’t, even though your life was at stake. You seemed kind and empathetic. I saved you, and I chose you, because I thought you might care about what’s happening.”

“And you are right, I care – moderately. But I am not sure I want to be the one to pay the price for everyone’s salvation,” Seokjin confessed. “Because there is a price, right? It can’t just be about becoming your mate; that would be too easy.”

Jeongguk weighed each of his next words. “There are conditions, but whether they are a price worth paying depends on your point of view. You would have to abandon the secular world to follow me to the divine one beyond the veil, but you would acquire unimaginable gifts and be almost immortal.”

“Immortality would be tempting for many,” Seokjin conceded.

“I would be too,” Jeongguk noted with a crooked smile, and Seokjin’s eyes briefly fell on the other’s bare, sculpted chest full of black roses.

“You make a good-looking man, but I don’t think that is enough,” he murmured.

Jeongguk’s voice dropped as he stated, “I can wait. I can maintain this form until the full moon, and a lot can happen in two weeks. I can make the smell of mating desire you give off be yours and not someone else’s.”

“I— What is this supposed to mean? What do I smell like?” Seokjin asked in confusion.

“He rubbed himself against you and left the scent of his lust on you, but you must not give in to his desires. You can’t mate with him, never,” Jeongguk warned, narrowing his eyes in seething disapproval.

“For Heaven’s sake— Are you talking about Seungho?! He just hugged me, not rubbed himself against me like an animal in heat!”

“You may say that, but my sense of smell doesn’t lie,” Jeongguk insisted. “You should take a bath.”

“That’s exactly what I was planning to do if someone hadn’t shown up at my house!” Seokjin pointed out. “I didn’t light the fire for nothing! I was waiting for you to finish narrating!”

“I have finished. Now wash yourself.”

“You—” Seokjin stood up abruptly, followed by the leopard, and pointed at the door with fury. “Go out! And never show up again!”

“I can do the first thing, but not the second. I have no place to stay while I am in this form,” Jeongguk said, gesturing at his human half-naked state. “And I can’t stay away from you since I must convince you to mate with me.”

“Well, I don’t want to mate with you. You would have a better chance with anyone else, honestly,” Seokjin stated, bordering on exasperation. “Or just leave us humans to our own devices. Can’t you?”

“... I can, but I don’t want to,” Jeongguk replied after a moment’s hesitation, then muttered, seemingly flustered: “That guy isn’t the only one harbouring a mating desire for you.”

Seokjin felt his face grow a little warmer than normal. He gulped. “I… I really want to take that bath now.”

“I’ll leave you at it, then,” Jeongguk stated, walking out the door before Seokjin had time to ask him if he wouldn’t be cold wearing only a pair of trousers. Oh, well. He was a snow leopard, after all. He must have been used to freezing temperatures.

Seokjin, on the other hand, wasn’t, and immersed himself in the tin tub filled with hot fuming water with sinful abandon. Bathing was a most pleasant luxury even during a normal week, but after what he had been through, it was even more enjoyable. He scrubbed himself thoroughly with the bar of soap to remove all the accumulated dirt – and the alleged smell of Seungho that Jeongguk had been talking about – and basked in the sensation of his muscles relaxing and loosening until the water was almost cold. Then he got out, dried himself thoroughly, and put on his pyjamas, so soft and warm against his skin that he let out a pleased hum.

Jeongguk chose that moment to come back.

“I heard you make a suspicious sound. That guy didn’t show up while I was gone, right?” he asked, passing Seokjin and looking around for traces of Seungho. He seemed pleased when he didn’t find any.

“I don’t even know why I let you in again,” Seokjin sighed as he locked the door, shivering at the cold current that had followed the other inside. He turned to Jeongguk. “Where did that sweater come from?”

“I borrowed it from one of the houses at the outskirts of the village. I don’t know why they left it hanging outside to freeze,” Jeongguk replied breezily, adjusting the garment. It was a little loose on his shoulders, and even though it was made of wool, it didn’t seem warm enough at all. “The trousers and boots came from there too.”

Seokjin paled. “So you stole them. Gosh, I can’t believe it.” He sighed dejectedly. “You will return them first thing tomorrow morning, before they realise they left the laundry outside and come out to pick it up. I think I have some of my old clothes that you can wear instead.”

“You are giving me scented items?” Jeongguk asked for confirmation, visibly elated. “Items that carry your scent?”

“The scent of lye, if anything,” Seokjin groused, bending down to put out the flames that still burned faintly in the fireplace. “I’ll go to sleep now, and although I’m not thrilled with the idea, I guess I have to host you for now, as long as you are in human form.” He narrowed his eyes at Jeongguk. “I am doing it only to repay you for what you did for me on the mountain, not because I want to be your mate. Don’t misunderstand, hm?”

“I would never,” the other said, placid as a lamb but flashing a toothy smile that said something else altogether.

“I warn you, though, that for tonight at least, you’ll have to make do with a sleeping bag on the carpet. Or the armchair, if you prefer. I don’t have a camp bed.”

Jeongguk widened his eyes. “But the bed is big enough for two!”

“The bed?” Seokjin turned towards the mentioned piece of furniture. “It’s just big enough for me,” he said, jumping on top of it and spreading his arms and legs to occupy the entire mattress. “See?”

Jeongguk didn’t answer, just staring at Seokjin in a silence that gradually grew heavier. Then he slowly approached, until he was touching the edge of the bed, and as Seokjin watched him, trying to understand what was happening, Jeongguk placed one knee and one hand on the mattress, hovering partially above Seokjin’s supine body as he asked in an impossibly low voice: “Are you presenting?”

Seokjin told himself that, if he had felt as if his blood was boiling in his veins, it had only been because the little light produced by the candles that were still lit had made the atmosphere more intimate than it should have been.

“You smell good now,” Jeongguk continued, “especially here.”

Seokjin’s eyes followed the other’s finger pointing directly at his groin.

“Go sleep on the carpet, right now!” Seokjin exploded, flailing his legs to chase Jeongguk away. The nerve! The audacity! “And forget the sleeping bag!”

Jeongguk only laughed, lying nonchalantly on the carpet without ever losing his grin. Knowing that trying to wipe it off his face would only be a waste of time and energy – and he had already wasted more than he had liked – Seokjin just petulantly blew out the still-lit candles, consigning the snow leopard’s amused face to the darkness where he couldn’t see it.

It was just a shame that Jeongguk, with his animal eyesight, would still be able to make out the lasting blush on Seokjin’s cheeks.

The next morning, Seokjin woke up to a full bladder and a hungry stomach. When he opened the shutters and light streamed inside the house, he noticed that Jeongguk was nowhere to be seen, but he had bigger concerns than the snow leopard’s whereabouts, like getting something to eat, so he just grabbed a bowl and, after a necessary stop at the privy, where he also shaved his few-day-old beard, he crossed the small courtyard towards the goat house right beside the well.

“Good morning, Boksung-ah,” he greeted the goat closest to the door. The animal bleated softly in response, approaching Seokjin as her friend Moran rose from the straw.

“Let’s get rid of some milk, all right?” he chanted, reaching out to scratch the goat’s black head and pull her closer to milk her, but the animal shied away and retreated into the shadows of the shelter. If it hadn’t been inexplicable, Seokjin would have said she looked scared.

“What are you doing?” a voice asked at that moment, and turning Seokjin found himself face to knees with Jeongguk. The snow leopard was peering down at him with curiosity, still in the stolen clothes from the day before and nothing else on top, making Seokjin instinctively shiver in his coat. Maybe he should have gotten a used coat for the snow leopard, too, even if just to prevent suspicious questions in case anyone saw Jeongguk walking around the village.

“I’m trying to get breakfast, but my goats don’t seem to want to get close, and now I understand why. You are scaring them,” Seokjin answered, glowering at his guest.

“Oh, apologies. I should have considered my scent even in this form,” Jeongguk said, taking two steps back. “I didn’t know you would also be bothered by animals tasting of fear. They really aren’t good to eat, are they?” he added when Seokjin only looked puzzled at his words.

“You— Yah!” the human screamed, startling both the snow leopard and the goats. “How could you say such a thing? How could you possibly think I was going to eat poor Boksung?!” He turned to the goat. “Little one, dear, I’m truly sorry for this… this lout who doesn’t have a bit of heart and— why are you laughing?!”

Jeongguk giggled louder. “You have fog all around your face.”

“What—” Seokjin squawked, exhaling another white cloud from his mouth. Damn condensation that didn’t let him express his outrage with dignity! And as if that wasn’t enough, his face must have turned red too!

“So, what were you doing if you weren’t going to kill the goat?” Jeongguk asked with a smile too wide.

Seokjin slapped his hands over Boksung’s ears, who protested. “Don’t say that word!”

“What word? Ki—?” Jeongguk trailed off, stopped by the murderous gaze directed at him.

“I was just trying to milk her!” Seokjin hissed, waving the bowl he had brought to pour the milk into. “But at this rate, who knows when I’ll be able to have breakfast.”

“Then I’ll disappear. I’ll leave you to your goats, and in the meantime, I could… no, I have already marked the territory,” Jeongguk mumbled, stopping his retreat. “Ah! I’ll return these clothes!”

“And then what, are you going to come back completely naked?” Seokjin fired back, sighing. “Just wait inside. Give me a moment, and I’ll come give you different clothes.”

Jeongguk beamed. “Alright, I will diligently wait for your scented gifts!” he declared, speeding away.

“They aren’t—” Seokjin tried to correct him, but the snow leopard had already disappeared inside the house. Abandoning a cause that was clearly lost from the start, the human turned back towards the goat house. “So, Boksung-ah… About that milk…”

One hour and two bowls of warm milk and oats later, Seokjin set off towards the village to go and see Grandma Sung as promised. Jeongguk tagged along, fully dressed in the new clothes the human had given him: finally bundled up properly in a woollen coat, though old, he looked more burly than he already was. Oddly, his imposing presence gave Seokjin a sense of safety.

“Seungho and the hunters told everyone you had been mauled in front of their eyes,” Grandma Sung said while examining his wound, “but from what I see, they exaggerated big time. The healing is very advanced.” She peered at Seokjin suspiciously from behind crooked glasses. “Are you sure you were bitten by a snow leopard a mere week ago?”

“I don’t think I could ever be wrong about that,” Seokjin replied, the memory of the animal pouncing at him replaying on the forefront of his mind, making him shiver.

“Then you must have received excellent emergency care,” Grandma Sung surmised. “Were you the one who saved Seokjin, boy?”

Jeongguk, who had his nose buried in a bunch of herbs hanging from the ceiling of the hut to dry, turned towards them with a dazed expression. “Huh? … Oh, yes, it was me!” he answered after the healer repeated the question. “He was lying unconscious in the snow at the bottom of a cliff, under the leopard’s corpse. I think his companions left him there thinking he was dead, but he was still breathing, so I took him and brought him to a borrowed den— I mean, to my hut nearby.”

Grandma Sung looked at Seokjin, impressed. “You must have been pretty lucky to have survived both a snow leopard attack and a fall into a crevice.”

“Ah ah, yeah, I suppose I have exhausted a lifetime’s worth of luck in one go,” Seokjin chuckled with feigned amusement, giving Jeongguk a warning look as if to convey, ‘Be careful what you say’.

“And what did you apply to the wound to make it heal so well?” Grandma Sung wanted to know as she proceeded to redo the dressing with the compress she had at hand.

“Oh, mmm,” Jeongguk fumbled, “some… herbs that I had collected during the year on the mountain, and… and my saliva?”

“Alright, keep your little secrets, boy,” Grandma Sung said with a shrug as Seokjin half-yelled: “You put saliva on me?!”

“It had to be done,” Jeongguk started to justify himself. “Its properties—”

“Fine, fine, I get it!” Seokjin cut in in a rush, interrupting the other before he could say something about magic or divine nature that might alarm the healer. “Whatever you used was effective, and I will never know how to thank you for it.”

“Actually, you do know what you could do to return the favour,” Jeongguk pointed out, smiling a little.

Seokjin squawked, for the allusion and because Grandma Sung simultaneously patted him on the arm while announcing, “All done.”

Sulky and (hopefully not too much) red-faced, he quickly got dressed, aware that Jeongguk was watching him and probably ogling every centimetre of skin Seokjin had to expose to have the healer check his wound – and yet, that knowledge didn’t make him feel as uncomfortable as it should have.

“Did your saliva do something to me?” Seokjin asked Jeongguk after they exited the healer’s hut, far from prying ears.

“Something like what?”

“Like making me more willing to mate, or…” he trailed off, leaving it up to Jeongguk to figure out where the sentence was going.

“My saliva has strong healing properties, but it cannot mess with your head, heart, or anything else. Furthermore, I do not aspire to impose myself on you by dishonest means,” the snow leopard explained calmly, loading every word with meaning. “I want you to make your decision autonomously. Although, of course, I hope you choose me in the end.”

“Yeah, well, don’t count on it,” Seokjin muttered, looking away with a fluster. “I have a different plan.”

Jeongguk tilted his head to the side. “What plan?”

“Follow me. I will show you.”

Seokjin walked away from the healer’s hut with Jeongguk in tow and took one of the paths through the pine forest that surrounded the village until it was forced to give way to rocks and lichens as the altitude increased. The treetops had partially shielded the ground from the snow, allowing for easy passage even along a less-travelled path like that one.

“We have arrived,” Seokjin announced a quarter of an hour later, emerging into a clearing that looked out onto the rest of the mountain range, which, like a spine, stretched as far as the eye could see. Here, on the edge of a cliff, stood a small wooden building with a hipped and gabled tile roof. Upon approaching, it became noticeable that it was abandoned and partially in ruins, with the wood rotting in several places.

“This is a temple my parents had built to worship the mountain. The rites were held here,” Seokjin explained, sliding the door made of wood and now torn paper open, but not stepping in. “As you can see, no one has been here for years, and I wouldn’t trust myself to go in. The floorboards might collapse, and there’s a precipice below.”

Jeongguk peered into the dim interior and wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Is this your plan? It smells of mould.”

“I was thinking of fixing it, so that whoever wants can return to perform the rites, and maybe then the mountain will be happy anyway,” Seokjin shared. “The shingles are in good condition. We just need to replace the wood.”

“‘We’?” Jeongguk repeated. “You want me to help?”

“Only if you want to. I thought that since you are a god, you’d know what a temple needs. I don’t remember anymore.” Seokjin paused and looked away. “I forgot it on purpose,” he added in a voice so low it was almost inaudible, but Jeongguk heard him anyway and smiled sympathetically.

“I can’t guarantee that resuming the rites will be enough to restore the balance, but I will help you as best I can,” the snow leopard said quietly.

Jeongguk kept quiet even during the descent, although Seokjin, who walked ahead of him, didn’t seem to notice. The human also didn’t realise that the snow leopard had fallen behind, so he was alone when he reached the beginning of the trail and bumped into Seungho – anything but a coincidence, as the hunter himself explained.

“I went to Grandma Sung to look for you, and she told me that she saw you setting out for the forest. How is your wound?”

“She said it’s healing well and that I don’t need to worry about it.”

"You have no idea how glad I am to hear it, hyung,” Seungho said with a relieved smile, adding in a lower voice: “And I’m so sorry.”

“Hm? What for?”

“I didn’t want to abandon you on the mountain, believe me, please,” he begged. “But Dohyun-hyung and Eunseong insisted that the crevasse was too deep and that… that you could not have survived. If I had known you were still alive, I would have come down without hesitation, even if it took me all night.”

He was so earnestly regretful that Seokjin couldn’t tell him it didn’t matter, and deep down, he knew that if he hadn’t fainted from the fall, he would have prayed until the very last breath for someone, anyone, to come and save him. So in the end, he just said, “I believe you.”

It seemed enough, because Seungho smiled once more. “Thank you, hyung. I avenged you, though. I shot that leopard to death.”

Seokjin felt a pang in his heart, and his stomach twisted unpleasantly, just as a low growling sound came from behind him. Seungho frowned, gaze shifting to its source.

“Who would this be?” he asked with an even deeper voice than usual.

“He… he is Jeongguk,” Seokjin fumbled, turning to the leopard and trying to somehow signal him to give it a rest without Seungho noticing. Luckily, Jeongguk got the hint and stopped growling, although his expression remained visibly annoyed. “He was the one who found me after the attack—”

“I’m his saviour,” Jeongguk stated with pettiness.

“Oh, I see,” Seungho drawled while sizing the other up. “In that case, thank you for helping our Seokjin-hyung. We wouldn’t know what to do without him.”

“This is not true at all,” Seokjin objected, but his reply fell on deaf ears while the two men continued to glare at each other.

“I don’t think I understood what exactly you are doing here,” Seungho continued.

“I didn’t say it.”

“Jeongguk just came to make sure I was alright,” Seokjin piped in. “He was, huh, helpful during the meeting with Grandma Sung as he provided me with first aid.”

“Ah! It’s kind of you to come all the way down from the mountain just for such a quick trip.”

“In fact, I think I’ll stay longer.”

“I’m afraid there are no inns here, though,” Seungho said with a crooked smile. “What a shame.”

“Not when it means that Seokjin can host me,” Jeongguk retorted mellifluously. “He has a bed big enough for two.”

Seokjin spluttered while Seungho looked about to pop a vein and Jeongguk gloated, his hand leaving a phantom touch on the small of Seokjin’s back.

“A-alright, we have to go now. Thank you for your concern, Seungho. I really appreciated it, but as you can see, everything is fine. Let’s go, Jeongguk,” Seokjin babbled, yanking the snow leopard’s hand away from his back and dragging him away. His face felt like it was on fire.

“I understand that you were angry about Seungho’s comment about killing the leopard, but what the hell was what happened next?” Seokjin scolded Jeongguk as they marched home. “You sounded like two kids competing to see who can pee the furthest!”

“I could piss further and more abundantly than that stinker,” Jeongguk snarled. “He was challenging me with his stench of mating desire.”

“That’s not a good reason to imply that we are sleeping together!”

“Why? Does it bother you that he thinks that?” Jeongguk asked, so alarmed that he stopped in his tracks, and Seokjin, who hadn’t let go of the other’s hand yet, suddenly found himself being jerked backwards. “Do you want him?”

There was anguish both in his tone and in his countenance, and standing there in the snow, Seokjin wondered what he had done to become the object of such feelings from a mountain god, feelings so intense that he didn’t feel like belittling them with a sarcastic retort.

So he stepped forward and gave Jeongguk a half-hug as he said, “Relax, I don’t want Seungho,” accompanying the words with a few soothing pats on the other’s back.

Jeongguk sniffed. “Really?”

“Really,” Seokjin confirmed, giving him a final pat, but when he tried to pull away, the leopard held him back, better intertwining their hands that had never left each other and putting his free arm around Seokjin’s waist.

A moment later, the human found himself with a nose poking through the space between the collar of his coat and his scarf, and a now-familiar purring sound in his ears.

“Yah, it’s cold!” he protested when the tip of Jeongguk’s nose managed to rub against the warm skin of his neck.

“Smells good,” Jeongguk just mumbled hoarsely, burrowing better into Seokjin’s neck. “I want you to smell of mine.”

It was meant to be seductive in the way it made his intentions and desire clear, but the effect was completely ruined by a gurgle so loud it even surpassed the purrs.

A moment passed, then:

“… I am hungry,” Jeongguk stated as if it wasn’t obvious enough.

“How… How can you be hungry already?” Seokjin asked, taking advantage of the other’s embarrassment to extricate himself from the embrace.

“I haven’t eaten since taking this form, that’s why. Was it the day before yesterday?” Jeongguk wondered pensively as Seokjin widened his eyes.

“What? I thought you disappeared this morning to go hunting for some rabbit or something.”

“No, I merely marked the territory,” Jeongguk said, pouting as he added, “You were supposed to feed me. You promised.”

“Oh, good Heavens,” Seokjin sighed, then he said the only thing he could say. “Let’s go home. I’ll cook you something.”

Jeongguk was so endearingly excited to tuck away something Seokjin had cooked that the human immediately got to work as soon as they crossed the threshold of the lodge. First he rekindled the fire, dormant among the coals, then checked what was in the pantry: he certainly had some potatoes, which had yielded a good harvest that summer, and lentils, which Eunseong’s mother had dried on the roofs during the warmer season and then distributed around the village, but those had to soak for a few hours before being cooked and Seokjin wasn’t sure whether Jeongguk could wait that long, nor whether he would appreciate them as a snow leopard. Even the little rice left over from the last visit of the Eastern merchants was out of the question, but the chestnuts, which he had put away boiled, would be fine. With some dried mushrooms, Seokjin could then prepare a stew that would be a delight. His mouth was already watering just thinking about it, even more so when he saw what was behind the potato crate.

“You are lucky, I found some sheep meat,” he announced, returning to the main room where the fire was now crackling brightly and Jeongguk was trying to strip himself shirtless.

“No food for naked people,” Seokjin tutted, grabbing at the last moment a potato that was about to roll off the table.

“But I am hot!” Jeongguk protested, an arm already free from the sweater.

“Come away from the fire, then. I’ll need it soon anyway,” Seokjin instructed him as he soaked the mushrooms and started peeling the potatoes.

Once he had stopped Jeongguk from devouring the raw meat, the rest of the preparations went smoothly, and before he knew it, Seokjin was pulling the mutton and potato stew with mushrooms and chestnuts off the fire.

“Enjoy your meal,” he wished, placing the bowl in front of Jeongguk, who looked at it with awe before raising his eyes at Seokjin and handing him the spoon with a cheerful, “Feed me!”

The human stared at him in disbelief. “You can feed yourself,” he groused, but proceeded to take Jeongguk’s spoon and dip it into the stew anyway. “How old are you exactly? … No, don’t tell me, my mind couldn’t handle the fact that I’m spoon-feeding a millennial being.”

“Hey, this stew is amazing!” Jeongguk exclaimed, spitting a little. “But I’m not thousands of years old. It’s been barely two centuries.”

“Oh. I thought you were created along with the world.”

“I wasn’t created. My mother gave birth to me.”

“You have a mother?!”

“Yes,” Jeongguk replied, placidly chewing his lunch.

“And… a father?”

An affirmative nod. “And a father.”

“Wow,” Seokjin whispered, holding the spoon in mid-air as he imagined the little family of divine snow leopards prowling the mountains, two adults and a cute kitten in tow. “Do they also guard the mountain?”

“Not anymore,” Jeongguk answered with a little shake of the head. “They reunited with God.”

Seokjin almost dropped the full spoon. “So they’re… they’re dead?” Since the other did not answer, taking the forgotten spoon in his mouth instead, he added: “I am sorry, I thought that your kind was immortal.”

“… My mother was,” Jeongguk answered softly after a while. “But when Dad passed away, she followed him. Despite having lived longer than normal, to the point one would think he was an immortal being too, my father was originally human.”

“Human…?” Seokjin whispered as Jeongguk continued to recount, the stew momentarily abandoned. 

“My mother was a snow leopard, guardian of the mountain, and passed down the task to me. My father was the human with whom she mated to restore balance with nature. As I am trying to do with you.”

“Is this why you have two forms?” Seokjin wondered, gesturing to Jeongguk’s body. “Because you were born from a god and a human?”

“No. My mother could also transform into a woman, although she needed the waxing moon to do it, while I need the waning one,” Jeongguk explained. “I would have approached you directly as a human if the moon phase had been right, but we met just a little too early. Tending to you in animal form was quite a pain.”

“Please forgive me if I didn’t plan my mauling properly,” Seokjin deadpanned, only for Jeongguk to laugh and ask for more food.

“… Have they been reunited with God for a long time?” Seokjin couldn’t help but pry after a while.

Jeongguk thought about it, chewing noisily. “Fifty years or so? I didn’t keep count, honestly. Time doesn’t mean much when your life doesn’t have a definite end.”

“I guess so,” Seokjin murmured, biting his bottom lip before asking: “So you won’t reunite with them?”

He immediately regretted the question, even before Jeongguk’s serious gaze pierced him from across the table.

“Do you want to know if I can die?”

Seokjin squirmed in his seat, feeling like he shouldn’t have asked it. “You said your life doesn’t have a definite end, so I was wondering—”

“I can.” Jeongguk’s voice was so low that Seokjin thought he had imagined it. “We become vulnerable when love comes into play, and my parents were very much in love.”

“Oh. I… I see,” Seokjin mumbled, looking down at the table. A potato soaking in stew returned his embarrassed gaze. “… We should finish eating before everything gets cold.”

This time, Jeongguk didn’t ask to be fed.

It took Seokjin and Jeongguk a few days to establish a routine. In the morning, Jeongguk was always the first to get up from the camp bed Seokjin had procured and placed for him in front of the fireplace, and he would slip out the back door and into the woods to patrol the area and do his business.

By the time he returned, Seokjin had also gotten up and finished milking the goats, so they proceeded to have breakfast together. Jeongguk wasn’t very pleased with the milk, flatbread, or fruit preserves Seokjin pulled from the pantry, but he tolerated the cheese despite the crusts in the cave not having made much of an impression on him. He preferred more flavourful food, and as expected, meat was his favourite: on his third day he brought back from the woods a rabbit that had not yet gone into hibernation, and Seokjin introduced him to the art of skinning and butchering: these were familiar gestures for the human since it was the height of hunting season, but with Jeongguk around Seokjin preferred not to wander off with the other hunters. In truth, hunting wasn’t something he felt was his own, but rather a necessity made virtue of, far from a passion like it was for Seungho, Eunseong, and Dohyun.

Opting for a change of pace, Seokjin instead slung his axe over his shoulder and went to gather wood, both for the fireplace and to fix the temple. Of course, there was always the question that it would be of no use if the rites were not resumed, and probably not even then, but it was a thought for the future. In the meantime, however, Seokjin still got a pear tree.

“Grandpa Yeom grows them in his greenhouse. They are very cold-resistant and produce small, sweet and sour pears, which are excellent for jams,” he explained to Jeongguk as he transferred the seedling from the pot to the hole in the ground in front of the temple that he had asked the snow leopard to dig.

“But if you eat them, why didn’t you plant them in your garden?” Jeongguk asked, perplexed.

“Well, pears are also a symbol of immortality, and we might have forgotten the rites of nature veneration, but we still make offerings to our ancestors,” Seokjin replied. “I was thinking of offering them to your parents. … And to you, after you are gone.”

A shadow of sadness passed through Jeongguk’s expression, which became unreadable by the time Seokjin looked up from the ground to him.

“I know you won’t be dead and that you don’t even like fruit, but—”

“I will like it. Your gift will not go to waste,” Jeongguk stated sombrely, and somehow this time it was Seokjin who felt a pang in his heart.

The pear tree was planted just in time for the next snowfall. The snow fell for only one day, but it was heavy enough that one would have thought it had lasted for days, and its weight bent and sometimes broke the branches of the trees. Seokjin took advantage of the forced confinement at home to card some sheep’s wool that he had acquired before venturing into the hunt for the killer leopard, and which he had not yet had time to prepare for spinning. Jeongguk didn’t appreciate the idea at all, and while Seokjin was washing and hanging out the wool to dry in front of the fireplace he kept complaining that it stank to high Heavens, so after yet another disgusted look he was sent outside to shovel the snow to prevent it from locking them in with a recommendation to cover up well so as not to arouse suspicion by going out without a shirt in the falling snow.

“But everyone’s locked in their houses!” he protested as Seokjin put the scarf around his neck. “And you said that no one ever passes by here.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Seokjin replied wisely, and as much as Jeongguk continued to grumble as he walked out, he had to admit that the human had been right when, as Jeongguk finished shovelling after the snowfall had stopped, the hunters appeared at the end of the road. They all glanced at Jeongguk, some indifferent, some curious, some hostile, as they went to knock on the door.

“Are you coming hunting with us for the New Moon Festival, hyung?” Seungho asked.

Standing on the threshold, Seokjin shook his head in denial. “No, I lost the rifle. It’s still somewhere on the mountain.”

“We can give you a new one if that’s the problem. I have a few spare.”

“I… Thank you, but no, thank you.” Seokjin briefly glanced at Jeongguk. “Honestly, I don’t feel like hunting anymore.”

“What? Why?” Dohyun wanted to know.

“I have never been much of a hunter, you know, and after what happened, I think it’s best for me to take a step back.”

“It seems like a good idea to me. After all, you went through a lot,” Eunseong agreed, sounding pleased.

Quite the opposite of Seungho, who frowned but didn’t comment, asking instead: “Will you at least be at the festival tomorrow night?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Maybe,” Seokjin replied vaguely, unsure of what to do.

“What festival is it?” Jeongguk inquired after the hunters had left.

“It’s a celebration of the new moon of the season. Dancing, singing, eating, and so on around the bonfire,” Seokjin summarised. “Do you want to go?”

“And see that guy drooling all over you? No, thank you,” the snow leopard replied, waving a dismissive hand. “But if you insist…”

“Honestly, I don’t want to go either,” Seokjin confessed with a sheepish expression. “I have tried to go a few times, but it’s too noisy, too crowded – which is saying something, considering there are about thirty of us,” he chuckled.

“You sound a little antisocial to me, you know?”

Seokjin shrugged. “I just value solitude.”

“I must be quite a nuisance, then,” Jeongguk commented softly.

“… Not that much,” Seokjin admitted, suddenly feeling the need to fidget on the spot. He looked down at his boots sinking into the snow. “It’s going better than I expected.”

“So let’s not go to the festival tomorrow night,” Jeongguk proposed swiftly, audibly pleased. “I’ll take you to a place.”

Seokjin’s first reaction was wondering where, since he thought he knew the area better than the other, but instead of voicing his suspicion, he somehow just answered: “Alright.”

“I don’t understand why I have to move like this,” Seokjin grumbled. “It’s terribly uncomfortable.”

It was the next evening, and they were currently venturing out of the backyard with Jeongguk behind him, his hands over Seokjin’s eyes.

“Because I want it to be a surprise,” the leopard rebuked him. “Moreover, it’s fun.”

Seokjin gasped, offended. “The possibility of me tripping and falling because I can’t see a thing amuses you?”

“I’ll catch you if you fall, and the snow is deep anyway. You wouldn’t hurt yourself that much even if you— Watch out!”

Jeongguk’s exclamation coincided with Seokjin slipping and losing his balance, but predictably, he didn’t even touch the ground. He didn’t even get close to it, because the leopard’s arms wrapped around his waist, supporting him.

“See? Everything went well,” Jeongguk breathed against the side of Seokjin’s head, his hot breath almost managing to get under the human’s earmuffs and reach reddening ears.

“Yes, well… You just saved a situation you yourself caused,” Seokjin mumbled, pouting a little.

Jeongguk ignored him, looking around and decreeing, “Here is fine. Let’s lie down.”

“In the snow? I hope you brought a blanket or something.”

“… Actually, I didn’t,” Jeongguk admitted. “A little oversight on my part. But hey, it’s so cold that the snow is dry.”

“Frozen, you mean…” Seokjin sighed, but eventually gave in and sat on the ground next to Jeongguk, who had already lain down as if he were perfectly at ease with hair full of snow, and in fact, it was just like that.

“You too, lie down,” Jeongguk urged Seokjin. “Quick, quick.”

“You really have no manners!” the human complained, but again he obeyed orders and lay down on his back.

It was strange to feel so close to the snow, as if it were ready to slide into his bones as soon as it started to melt, but Seokjin’s concentration shifted almost immediately, while Jeongguk exclaimed “Admire!” and gestured to the sky with a flourish of his arm.

On that new moon night, thanks to the total absence of moonlight and the clear sky, the Milky Way was crossing the vault like a luminous ribbon that disappeared into the distance, shining brighter than ever. It was such an extraordinary sight that Seokjin found himself holding his breath.

“Beautiful, right?” Jeongguk asked, all proud, and Seokjin, in awe, just nodded quietly.

“I thought you wanted to take me somewhere more special, not… 500 metres from home,” the human said after a while, following the trail of footprints they had left back to the cabin. He could still make out the goat house even in the dark, and a wisp of smoke was rising from the chimney.

“What?” Jeongguk gaped. “Aren’t the stars special enough? Can’t you feel the greatness of the universe all around us, just staring at them?”

“I do,” Seokjin admitted. The stars above them made him feel so small, a mere particle of dust crushed by the weight of infinity. “I just meant I thought you were going to take me to an exclusive place for snow leopards, or something like that.”

“Ah, so you are curious about me,” Jeongguk deduced with satisfaction. “This is a good starting point. Next thing you know, we will be mated.”

Seokjin spluttered a bit. “I don’t think so.”

“But if we were, I could take you to the special place you so want to see, beyond the veil.”

“So there is one. How is it?” Seokjin wanted to know, unable to keep his curiosity in check. “Tell me a little about it. I might want to go there myself.”

Jeongguk stared at him pointedly, then returned to look at the sky as he hummed in reflection. “It’s not much different from here. There’s a mountain, a den for when I’m in leopard form, where I spend most of my time, and a house to inhabit if I’m in human form. The seasons follow one another without any hitches, the air is always pure, and you can feel the divine spirit, or magic, hovering everywhere. It’s very peaceful.”

“It sounds perfect,” Seokjin said. “And also very lonely.”

“Weren’t you the one who valued loneliness?” Jeongguk pointed out.

“No. I said I value solitude,” the human corrected, casting an emphatic glance at Jeongguk. “But there is nothing worthy in loneliness.”

Jeongguk stared back at him silently, then nodded. “You are right. Loneliness sucks.” He paused. “Luckily, I haven’t felt lonely in a while now.”

Seokjin smiled softly. “I’m happy for you.”

Their gazes parted, returning to focus on the stars peeking at them from above.

“Anyway, the Milky Way is not always so clearly visible,” Seokjin stated after a while. “Tonight is brighter.”

“It’s thanks to the new moon. The absence of moonlight makes other celestial bodies stand out, which would otherwise be obscured by it. My powers benefit from it, too.”

“Really? Shouldn’t you be in leopard form, then?”

Jeongguk chuckled. “No. It may seem odd, but when my powers peak at the new moon, I can’t shift back.”

“Oh,” Seokjin said, taken aback. “What about the full moon, then?”

“When it’s the full moon, the opposite happens: I am but a snow leopard at its weakest.”

Seokjin thought about it for a while. In his opinion, it would have made more sense for Jeongguk to be stronger in leopard form, but who was he to question the divine rules?

“It’s best if you’re not around during the full moon, then. The villagers might see you and, well…” Seokjin trailed off. “But when the moon starts waning again, you may resume human form and come visit me again from time to time, if you like. If it’s permitted.”

Jeongguk turned to look at the human with a soft, yet sad, expression. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.” And even if I could, I shouldn’t. “I could leave the divine world, but I can assume human form only every twenty-one years, for only two weeks.”

Seokjin was rendered speechless. “Really?”

Jeongguk nodded, smiling cheekily a second later. “I could transform whenever I wanted if I had a human mate, though. Because, you know, there are certain needs to satisfy. Unless my mate preferred my leopard form. In that case, I would oblige—”

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t put images in my mind!” Seokjin cut him off.

“Why, are you imagining it?” Jeongguk teased, snickering. He rolled onto his side, propping himself up on his arm to take a better look at Seokjin. “Hmm, yes, you are. I can see you are flushed even in the dark.”

“I am not— Yah! Get your nose off my neck!”

In response, Jeongguk just inhaled deeply and loudly. “I cannot, I need to check if you are starting to smell of mating desire.”

“Rest assured, then, because I am not,” Seokjin stated firmly, pushing him away and getting up. “I’m going back home.”

Jeongguk’s laugh followed him to the door. How insolent! Seokjin should have made him spend a night out in the cold for this, and he would have done so if he hadn’t been sure that Jeongguk wouldn’t take it as punishment at all. Snow leopards thrived in sub-zero temperatures.

Quite the opposite of Seokjin, who instead suffered from it. It hadn’t been a good idea to lie still in the snow: dry as it was, it was still frozen, and its chill had seeped into his bones, slowing his movements so much that he struggled to relight the fireplace, even though it had been turned off only a short while before, when they had left: knowing they wouldn’t be far away, Seokjin would have just left it on.

It lit up anyway, and after shaking off his coat, Seokjin sat in front of the fireplace, soaking up the heat while massaging and rolling his stiff shoulders. They had never been so rigid before, prompting him to groan in discomfort.

“Hey, is everything fine?” Jeongguk investigated, closing the door behind his back. “You didn’t make a nice sound.”

“My shoulders are giving me a hard time. Especially the injured one,” Seokjin answered, massaging a little more vigorously, but without great results. “I can barely move it. It’s like it’s stuck, and I don’t understand why. It seemed to be healing well until this afternoon.”

“May I look at it?” Jeongguk asked, sitting next to Seokjin on the carpet.

The human hesitated only a moment before taking off his sweater, which took longer than expected and caused a sharp pain to run down his arm and back as he untangled himself from the garment; Seokjin noticed with surprise that a sheen of sweat had formed along his moustache line.

“It looks good,” Jeongguk stated after examining Seokjin’s shoulder, gently touching the bite wound with the pad of his fingers. “The scar feels quite hard, though, as well as the underlying tissues. They are probably struggling to stretch because of the cold, hence the pain,” he deduced, sheepishly adding: “I think I shouldn’t have had you lie in the snow.”

“Yeah, I think so too,” Seokjin agreed, albeit not reproaching. After all, Jeongguk hadn’t forced him to lie down; it was Seokjin’s own choice. “So what now? Should I avoid catching cold for the rest of my life if I don’t want to end up with a useless arm? It’s not very feasible, living in the mountains.”

“You could move elsewhere where the weather is warmer,” Jeongguk replied, and the sentence hung between them for a moment before dissolving, as if sucked up the chimney. “Or…”

“Or?”

“I could make the scar disappear.”

Seokjin’s eyes widened in surprise and interest. “Really?”

“Yeah. I told you that my powers are at their peak tonight thanks to the new moon.”

“Then you should lay your hands on it before your magic wanes. Here,” Seokjin urged him, offering Jeongguk his injured shoulder.

Even though he was the first to suggest it, the leopard hesitated, tonguing the inside of his cheek as his eyes darted from Seokjin’s face to the human’s shoulder. “It’s not really a laying on of hands,” he finally said, “but rather, a laying on of saliva.”

The human blinked.

“I need to lick you.”

“O-oh!” Seokjin exclaimed on a delayed start, his brain lagging as it tried to process that Jeongguk’s tongue would soon be on him, but the idea didn’t disgust him as much as the discovery that the medicinal plaster the snow leopard had applied to his shoulder contained saliva.

It was a lot to unpack, so Seokjin just pushed it to a corner of his mind for later and replied, “All right. Do it.”

If Jeongguk was surprised by the concession, he didn’t show it. Instead, he moved just enough to sit behind Seokjin, and after yet another hesitation, lowered his head to the human’s shoulder.

The first lick was so small that Seokjin barely felt it; the second one lasted just enough to feel strange, albeit not unpleasant, but the third was long, so long it made him tremble, because the texture of Jeongguk’s tongue… Although moist, it wasn’t smooth at all. It was rough like sandpaper, much like a cat’s tongue, and although gentle on the skin, its scratching was a constant stimulation that reached all of Seokjin’s nerves, muscles, and bones.

It was as if erasing the superficial scar memory of their first meeting meant for Jeongguk to burn himself deep into Seokjin’s body. The leopard’s licking was a warm sensation, made incandescent by the proximity of the burning fireplace, and Seokjin began to feel himself melting so much that he leaned back against Jeongguk’s chest with a sigh.

Jeongguk wasted no time in putting an arm around Seokjin’s waist to support him, all the while his tongue alternated long and short strokes over the surface of the bite, covering it with healing saliva, encouraging the skin to absorb it and benefit from it. It was so nice and relaxing that Seokjin felt his eyes droop, and to avoid the risk of falling asleep, he changed the position of his legs. It was then that he became aware of the torturous tingling that was pervading him, just as Jeongguk moved his lips up his neck and whispered: “Your scent is changing.”

Unable to formulate a coherent reply in his fuzzy state, Seokjin just mumbled, “Is, is it?”

Jeongguk hummed against his neck. “We should stop. I should stop. Otherwise… you know what I would do.”

Of course, Seokjin wasn’t oblivious – he knew it. And yet, for some reason, wanting to confirm it, he countered, “Do I?”

Jeongguk didn’t say a word. He remained as he was, his head buried in the human’s neck, until his low voice exhaled against Seokjin’s skin: “I want to make love to you.”

His words were so full of emotion that they took Seokjin’s breath away. The human fumbled, swallowed several times as he became more and more aware of the extreme closeness of their bodies, of how they adhered to each other in every possible way, and finally murmured: “I’m flattered.”

“But?”

“But I don’t feel the same, whatever my scent is saying,” Seokjin answered softly, apologetically. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lead you on.”

“I know,” Jeongguk replied with a sigh, releasing the embrace and moving away. “Well, your loss. It would have been amazing.” He said it with a chuckle, but didn’t sound amused in the slightest.

Seokjin gnawed at his bottom lip. “I think you should consider finding another human mate to save the mountain. Someone more willing than me.”

Jeongguk stared quietly at the flames for so long that Seokjin turned to check if he was still there.

“It’s not about that,” the snow leopard finally said.

Seokjin didn’t understand. “What is it about, then?”

“I can’t search for another mate,” Jeongguk stated, looking at him with an almost pained expression. “It has to be you, or no one else.”

‘Why?’ sat heavy on Seokjin’s tongue, waiting to be expressed out loud, to fill the silence that had fallen between them, but since Seokjin feared the answer, he ultimately swallowed, silencing the question in his bowels.

The waning moon set and passed, and as one day followed another, Jeongguk began to feel like he was truly going to lose Seokjin.

It wasn’t pessimism, but a fact: despite the time spent together – almost every minute since Jeongguk’s arrival – he hadn’t yet managed to win the human’s heart, whereas it was with exceptional ease that Seokjin had conquered his. Jeongguk had wondered if it was some divine design of fate that orchestrated their meeting and the circumstances that brought it about, perhaps a way for the mountain to subtly ask to save its inhabitants by putting a highly compatible human mate in Jeongguk’s path, but he realised that the answer no longer mattered: Seokjin already had Jeongguk’s heart, fragile as it was, resting in the palm of his hand, beating only for him until the end of times. The thought of being separated from his mate in a matter of days tore Jeongguk apart from the inside, and every morning, as he watched Seokjin sleep peacefully in the large bed he hadn’t wanted and still didn’t want to share, the leopard wondered if he would end up like his mother, killed by heartbreak.

Unaware of the dilemmas plaguing Jeongguk, Seokjin continued to sleep curled up under layers and layers of blankets, and the leopard wished he could be the one keeping Seokjin warm instead, like when the two of them were alone in the cave, and the weight of what was happening on the mountain hadn’t yet become their burden to carry. He wondered if Seokjin would remember those times now that the scar was gone, or if, as he grew older, and with Jeongguk gone, what they had been through together would be reduced to a snowflake in a lit fireplace.

It was such a depressing thought that Jeongguk lay his head on the mattress and sighed – a sigh that was perhaps too loud, because Seokjin stirred and squinted, looking around the dim room as if he could see something when the only light he could rely on was that from the early morning sun filtering in through the closed shutters. In fact, he gave up almost immediately and sat up to light the lantern on the bedside table, finally spotting Jeongguk next to him.

“Kitty?” Seokjin blinked at the feline muzzle that returned his gaze. “What are you doing here? How…”

His fingers automatically reached into the fur on Jeongguk’s head as he spoke. Seokjin had wonderful hands, gnarled but soft and gentle, and the snow leopard responded to the caresses by starting to purr.

“Oh, you like it, don’t you?” the human asked with fondness, and yes, Jeongguk not only liked it, he loved it. Warmth flooded his chest, and he pushed himself a little further on the bed until he was headbutting Seokjin to make him add his other hand to the mix.

“Ah, always the same bossy cat,” Seokjin pretended to complain, shaking his head. “Always the same cute kitty.”

As he said this, he cupped Jeongguk’s head in his palms and brought it gently to his face, rubbing their noses together as he cooed, giggling to himself a moment later.

It was a perfect start to the morning, but sadly, it was to last only until their eyes met, and the realisation of what he was doing dawned on Seokjin. He flushed and let Jeongguk’s head go. The warmth went away with him.

“I… I am sorry, I shouldn’t have,” the human apologised. “It’s unfair of me to act so affectionately with you when I know what you feel, while I…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, hiding his face in his hands and grunting. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“It’s all right. I know you meant well.”

Seokjin startled, turning to Jeongguk and finding the human in the leopard’s place. He was visibly naked, but remained crouched beside the bed, and all that could be seen of him were his tattooed arms resting on the bed, his shoulders, and his sympathetic face.

Jeongguk grinned. “At least I heard you calling me ‘cute’.”

“Well, that’s the truth. You are very cute as a snow leopard,” Seokjin admitted. “By the way, how come you were transformed? Wait, is it the moon?”

Jeongguk hummed in confirmation. “Now that it is waxing, I can slip from one form to another, but when the full moon rises, I will remain a leopard,” he explained. “My time as a human is coming to an end.”

“You’ll have to leave before the time comes, then. That way you won’t risk the villagers noticing you,” Seokjin said, his voice soft with a hint of sadness, and hope stirred Jeongguk’s chest, that the human would eventually ask him to stay.

The little temple on the mountain was not yet completely repaired, but the situation had improved exponentially compared to less than two weeks earlier. Although the rotten roof had been removed before the recent snowfall, the interior had held up well, and after clearing it of the snow that still accumulated along the walls, Jeongguk moved on to nailing in the beams that would support the new roof. That day, he was alone with the task: Seokjin had stayed home to make cheese, and Jeongguk had practically run away as soon as the first whiff of milk hit his nose. The goats themselves had an appetising scent, but the product of their mammary glands would never stop being an insult to his sense of smell.

Jeongguk was thinking of how, if he could, he would have gotten Seokjin some leopard milk – more nutritious and definitely not smelling of chewed grass – when his senses detected someone approaching from the surrounding forest. It was a human, a man he didn’t know well, nor did he want to grow familiar with.

“Ah, there’s only you,” Seungho grumbled when, minutes later, he reached the temple.

“Apologies for the disappointment,” Jeongguk deadpanned, giving a hammer blow so hard that the nail cracked the wood.

He expected Seungho to leave, but instead the hunter didn’t move and just stared at Jeongguk pensively for a while before asking: “Is your move here permanent?”

Jeongguk remained with the hammer suspended in mid-air, then slowly turned towards the human. “What if it was?”

“In that case, I would kindly ask you to stop keeping Seokjin-hyung all to yourself,” Seungho replied, clasping his hands behind his back. “I haven’t seen him for a few days. He didn’t come to the New Moon Festival, and he seems to be showing up in the village as little as possible.”

“I’m not the one dictating where he can go. Seokjin thinks for himself, makes his own decisions, and does whatever he wants.”

Jeongguk’s tone bordered on ill-mannered, and Seungho’s eyebrow twitched, but he didn’t comment.

“Still, hyung has changed since you arrived,” he noted. “It’s not just his evasiveness, it’s all this.” He marked the last word with a gesture of the arm that encompassed their surroundings. “He never gave a damn about the temple, and now he’s set about repairing it. Why? And when he is finished, what will happen? Has he regained his faith, and will he celebrate the rites, or will we have to make do for ourselves again?”

Jeongguk perked up. “You are a believer?”

“What does it matter if I am?”

“It matters because, so I ask you, why are you complaining about the temple being fixed? Why did you let it fall into this state in the first place?” Jeongguk fired back, growing vexed by the second. “Why didn’t you perform the rites if Seokjin wasn’t doing it?”

Seungho looked taken aback by the barrage of questions and coughed embarrassedly. “I was not complaining. Of course, I appreciate what hyung is doing, even though I don’t understand what drives him to do it.”

“He is doing it for you all, and that’s everything you need to know,” Jeongguk retorted. “Now go away, if you are done bothering me. I have a lot to do and little time.”

“As if I could ever want to stay in your company,” Seungho muttered, turning on his heel and leaving the clearing.

When he got home, Jeongguk wasn’t surprised to feel Seungho’s scent slightly tickling his nose, a sign that the hunter had predictably been there. What surprised him instead was detecting a pungent note in Seokjin’s scent under that of the soap he had used after a whole day in close contact with the goats.

“Did something happen?” Jeongguk investigated while putting the tools away. “You smell troubled.”

Seokjin looked up from the sweet potatoes he was about to peel and stared at him in surprise, then huffed resignedly. “Nothing can be hidden from you, huh?”

“Why, what do you want to hide?” Jeongguk fretted.

“… Seungho was here this morning.”

“I know. I smelled him around the house.” A hefty pause. “Has he done something that I should be worried about? But I didn’t smell anything on you…”

“Goodness gracious, nothing happened between us!”

“Then I don’t understand what the problem is!”

“The problem is… Well, maybe it’s nothing, and you’ll tell me I am overreacting, but he came to ask me if I wanted to join the hunters on an expedition.”

“Doesn’t he know when to give up, for fuc—”

“Let me finish,” Seokjin interrupted him. “This is no ordinary hunting trip. They intend to return to the scene of the attack to recover the body of the snow leopard that attacked me. They left right after lunch.”

Jeongguk frowned. “Why would they do that?”

“Grandma Sung asked them. She wants to use the bones, the organs and who knows what else to prepare medicinal compounds and perhaps even amulets,” Seokjin explained, his voice dropping to a whisper by the end of the sentence.

Jeongguk gasped for air before he could speak, and his voice was still terribly low when he managed to ask, “They want to slaughter it?”

Seokjin looked at the ground, saddened. “I am sorry.”

“It’s a violation of a corpse, a disturbance of eternal rest! They cannot do that!”

“I know! I tried to dissuade Seungho, but he just wouldn’t listen to me. It’s not a big deal to them.”

“Ah! If a scavenger were to desecrate one of your graves, I would like to see how they would react,” Jeongguk seethed. “But if it’s a mere snow leopard, it’s fine, right? After all, it’s just an evil beast that enjoys drinking the blood of its prey to get drunk on it.”

With a curse, he sank into the nearest chair and put his head in his hands. Moved to pity, Seokjin squeezed Jeongguk’s shoulder and muttered again, “I am sorry.”

“Thank you,” Jeongguk whispered, covering Seokjin’s hand with his own and snuggling against the human’s stomach in search of comfort that never came.

In hindsight, Seokjin wondered what would have happened if he had slept until morning, if he hadn’t woken up that night to find Jeongguk gone. His place on the rug before the hearth, where he now slept in his leopard form, was empty and cold. He had not left it recently.

Seokjin pulled his dressing gown tighter around himself, grabbed the lantern, and, with his heart in his throat, went out the back door: as he had feared, a line of feline tracks was leading away from the house toward the mountain.

Jeongguk had followed the hunters.

“Damn it,” Seokjin cursed, coming back into the house and starting to change in a hurry. There was no time to waste: he had to reach Jeongguk and stop him. The other might be a god, but he wasn’t invulnerable,  especially not that close to the full moon, and Seokjin was terrified that the hunters might kill him – because sadly, he was certain that would be the only possible outcome if they met the leopard.

To his great disappointment, he wasted nearly an hour changing clothes, packing his backpack, and checking that Boksung and Moran had enough food and water to survive his absence, then he finally set off, even though it was still night: the hunters had half a day’s advantage and Jeongguk a few hours, and if he waited until dawn, Seokjin would never be able to reach them.

If he reached them at all.

Being able to avoid the paths and cut through the forest, Jeongguk reached the place where Seokjin and the snow leopard had fallen before Seungho and his hunters, even though he left later. Nonetheless, he still moved cautiously among the shadows, as their scent still reached his nose in wafts: they might not be there yet, but they were dangerously close, and the crescent moon partially negated the camouflage effect of his rosette-patterned cloak.

It wasn’t difficult to locate the leopard’s corpse, because as Jeongguk had imagined, the cold had preserved it intact, so it formed a lump on the otherwise flat snowy expanse. Unfortunately, this meant that it was also frozen under a layer of snow, and Jeongguk had to repeatedly headbutt it to even dislodge it. At that point, partly by pushing and partly by dragging it by the legs, he managed to bring it closer to the edge of the crevasse that would welcome it even deeper into the bowels of the mountain, making it inaccessible to anyone.

It was less than two metres away when Jeongguk heard the voices, and he reflexively crouched, sniffing the air and darting his eyes along the ridges above him in search of the hunters. He didn’t sense them yet and breathed a sigh of relief, which lasted just long enough to cover the remaining distance: the corpse had just fallen over the edge when a clear ringing voice from above exclaimed, “It should be here!”

Jeongguk leapt, his heart beating erratically in his chest as he crashed into the bushes. Peeking out from his hiding place, he spotted Seungho, Eunseong, and Dohyun chattering among themselves and looking down, luckily not in his direction.

Snow leopards were known as ‘mountain ghosts’ thanks to their ability to blend in almost perfectly with their surroundings, but Jeongguk wasn’t sure he could move without being noticed, so he stayed put while the hunters lowered themselves into the crevasse. It was strange that they would do such a risky thing in the dark, and Jeongguk feared that they had some ulterior motive, but he relaxed when he saw that, once they landed, they began to set up the tent: clearly, there was not enough space above the escarpment, and they were just in a hurry to rest.

While Eunseong and Dohyun set up the tent, Seungho wandered off to explore the surroundings, searching for the leopard’s corpse. Jeongguk closely followed his movements, smirking to himself at the thought of having taken the prize right from under the hunter’s nose, when suddenly Seungho froze, looked at the ground and then, in one fluid motion, raised the rifle he was carrying on his shoulder and fired almost without even aiming.

The bullet lodged in the trunk of a tree two steps to the right of where Jeongguk was hiding, and the leopard realised – he had left his footprints everywhere.

Eunseong and Dohyun were immediately at their leader’s side, rifles at the ready.

“What? What’s wrong?” Jeongguk heard them asking as Seungho’s hawk eyes moved from the flock of birds that had taken flight at the sound of the shot to the dark forest.

“The corpse disappeared, and another leopard was here. There are tracks in the snow – and very fresh at that. It must still be nearby,” Seungho explained in a calm tone which contrasted with the agitated one of his companions. “Maybe it’s watching us to see how we take its little prank.” He snorted. “Beastly bastard.”

“You don’t want to look for it right now, do you?” Dohyun asked, motioning to the night around them.

Seungho seemed conflicted, torn between the euphoria of the hunt and the need to rest, then he recovered. “I just want to make sure it is not ambushing us, waiting to find us vulnerable.”

“We could take turns patrolling—” Eunseong started suggesting reluctantly, but Seungho had already set off.

Heading straight towards Jeongguk.

The leopard quickly reviewed his options, but there was no other choice: he had to move before the hunter was on him.

Since he would have been discovered anyway, he didn’t bother with silence, preferring speed and surprise instead, so he quickly turned and leapt into the depths of the forest, continuing his advance without stopping to check on the hunters, who had started screaming as soon as he appeared from behind the bushes.

Shouts and rustling noises followed Jeongguk. A shot rang out, then a second, then the rifles fell silent: perhaps the hunters had realised it was best to conserve their ammunition for when their target was in sight.

Even though, as a leopard, he had an advantage over the human hunters on that terrain, Jeongguk did not slow down: it felt like he was running for hours through the trees, the undergrowth scratching his snout and sides, but at least unable to remember his tracks since the pine branches had prevented the snow from reaching the ground. He had only one goal: to return home.

To return to Seokjin.

Just the thought of his mate was enough to evoke the human’s heavenly scent, and Jeongguk supposed it was plausible that tiredness was starting to cause some olfactory hallucinations: after all, he had been running from the hunters for a whole day now, and he had rested little although it was unlikely that Seungho and his men were even close to catching up with him.

But then, as he emerged into a clearing, Seokjin was before him in the morning light like a summoned apparition, and Jeongguk had to stop his descent abruptly to avoid running him over. The snow dislodged by his slowdown flew everywhere, some of it even landing on Seokjin, who let out a yelp of surprise.

“Good Heavens! Jeongguk, is that you?” the human fretted, then he answered himself: “Of course it’s you. No real snow leopard would have made all this mess.”

Jeongguk meowed in protest, only for Seokjin to shush him.

“We will deal with what you did later, but for now, it’s better if we go home before we accidentally meet Seungho and the others. Let’s go,” he stated, climbing onto Jeongguk’s back without much ceremony.

And without wasting any more time, they set off.

Now that Seokjin was with him, Jeongguk had to slow down and take longer breaks to allow the human to stretch his legs and eat – moments during which Jeongguk understood that Seokjin was angry: he was quiet and withdrawn, barely spoke in monosyllabic and his gestures were hasty, belonging to someone who wanted to reach their destination quickly, but due to the delays they had to stop for the night and did not come in sight of the village until first light of dawn the next day.

Jeongguk made a wide detour to get to the back of the cabin without being noticed. The inside was dark and cold, but the only thing Seokjin did after taking off his backpack and outdoor clothes was light the lantern with shaking hands, ignoring the fireplace. When the wick caught fire, the light from the burning oil illuminated Jeongguk and the dark circles under Seokjin’s eyes as the human stared at the leopard, who had meanwhile transformed and dressed again.

“Have you gone crazy?” Seokjin murmured. “What did you think you were doing, huh?”

His voice was frighteningly low, but Jeongguk was close enough to hear it anyway and be able to answer: “I had to secure the dead leopard’s body. I couldn’t let the hunters dismember it.”

Seokjin shook his head disapprovingly. “You really risked everything for something like that, huh?”

“So it seems,” Jeongguk retorted acidly, getting annoyed at being treated like a child. “I don’t see what the problem is.”

“Oh, you don’t? Well, I do.” Seokjin’s voice automatically rose as his anger flared. “They could have discovered you and seriously injured you—”

“But it didn’t happen!” Jeongguk interrupted him, raising his voice in response. “They barely saw me, and I left them behind almost immediately in the forest. None of their bullets even passed close by!”

“And so it’s fine that you almost got killed?!” Seokjin screamed. “I thought a mountain god would have a little more sense and know how to choose his battles better instead of deciding that he can die and abandon us to ourselves!”

“Is this everything that matters to you? The fact that I am a god, and my duties?” Jeongguk asked, sounding wounded. “I am not saying I thought we had become friends, let alone that you fell in love with me, but that at least you cared about me regardless of my nature—”

“I do! Of course I do!” Seokjin exploded, feeling on the verge of tears, opening and closing his hands nervously. “I care about you for the… the person you are, for who, n-not for… for what you are…” he floundered, looking at Jeongguk, at the stormy expression on the other’s face, and what was worse – it was sceptical.

Jeongguk doubted him. He truly believed that Seokjin didn’t have even a gram of affection for him.

The ground slipped out from under Seokjin, and before he could quite realise what he was doing, he took a step forward, closed the distance between them, and kissed Jeongguk.

Not on the cheek, as two friends would do, nor on the nose, although the leopard’s one was adorable in his hinted potato shape. Seokjin kissed Jeongguk directly on his lips, pouring his affection in actions rather than words, in the fierce movements of his mouth, closing his eyes as he cupped the other’s face in his hands to pull Jeongguk towards him. He wanted the leopard to believe him so much that it burned like a need.

Jeongguk was bewildered for a second, or maybe two, but certainly no longer than that, and when his brain – his heart – finally processed what was happening, his arms rushed to wrap Seokjin in a hug, pulling the human against him until their bodies perfectly adhered to one another. A moment later, he tilted his head, and the next, he opened his mouth, capturing Seokjin’s lips between his own. The gasp that left the human’s throat at the small bite Jeongguk gave him brought immense satisfaction to the snow leopard. He wanted more – so much more that Seokjin couldn’t even fathom.

Jeongguk started with a small lick on Seokjin’s bottom lip, a request the human gladly granted, parting his lips to allow Jeongguk to slip into his moist, scorching mouth. Their tongues touched, tentatively at first, then they intertwined, and Jeongguk had to support Seokjin when the human’s legs gave out at the feel of that unusual tongue, so rough, long and thin it almost seemed prehensile as it gently sucked on his. Oh, if it touched him elsewhere…

Jeongguk took advantage of that moment of pleasant bewilderment to pick him up, Seokjin’s legs automatically wrapping around his waist as the snow leopard took them to bed – that bed supposedly so small that it had not been able to fit him to sleep, but which now accommodated both of them with ease when Jeongguk laid Seokjin on the mattress and climbed on top of him, tucking his head into the crease between the human’s shoulder and neck. He ran his nose, his tongue, his teeth over the skin, humming to himself, and Seokjin knew exactly what Jeongguk was feeling, how Seokjin’s scent communicated an unmistakable, undeniable desire for mating, which Jeongguk gave shape to by pressing his groin into the inviting hollow between Seokjin’s legs. Seokjin moaned, pushing his hips up. Even though the room wasn’t heated, the temperature was unbearable, the clothes too tight. They had to go, and he grabbed Jeongguk’s sweater to make him understand that, tugging at it until it slipped off, revealing the snow leopard’s torso in all its muscular magnificence, the rosette patterns emanating a delicate luminescence. His eyes also shone with a blueish light as he met Seokjin’s gaze, his expression filled with desire and passion.

Seokjin gulped, gently touching the leopard’s cheek as if in timid exploration. “Will… will we be mated if we do this?”

“Honestly? I don’t know,” Jeongguk replied, his voice hoarse. “The first time might not be enough. We might even have to do it several times before anything happens.”

The prospect made him purr, a low sound so intense that Seokjin felt it in his bones. His entire body shook with it as Jeongguk pushed himself further against him, leaning into Seokjin’s ear to whisper, “Do you want to try and find out?”

Unable to think, Seokjin just moaned in pleasure, a leg snaking around Jeongguk’s waist if not to pull him even closer – an impossible task unless they removed the few layers of fabric separating them – at least to hold him there where heat crackled to then radiate into Seokjin’s belly.

“Tell me that you do,” Jeongguk continued, his hand moving to squeeze Seokjin’s thigh that held him before his head slid down, down and down until he pushed his nose into the human’s private parts and took a lungful of air. “Let me love you.”

Seokjin hiccuped. “I… I—”

A loud knock on the door made them both jump.

“Seokjin-hyung!” Seungho called from outside. “Are you at home?”

“Tell him no,” Jeongguk growled into Seokjin’s groin. “Send him away.”

“H-he will know I am home if I answer,” Seokjin pointed out as his mind emerged from the fog of lust.

“Keep quiet, then,” Jeongguk suggested, purring against the taut fabric, but Seokjin pulled away. The knocking didn’t stop.

“Hyung! If you can hear me, please! It’s important.”

“I need to check what he wants. It might have something to do with your little stunt,” Seokjin said, extricating himself from the tangle of their bodies. Jeongguk protested, but didn’t stop him.

“I’m coming!” Seokjin shouted to Seungho’s benefit, smoothing his messed hair and throwing on a dressing gown to pretend he had just woken up – and hide the effects of their recent canoodling. He hoped it wouldn’t be too obvious that his lips had been adored for the past several minutes, for he couldn’t hide them in any way.

“Stay put,” he recommended to Jeongguk, who in the meantime had stopped glowing, as he went to the door.

“Sorry for the time,” Seungho apologised as soon as Seokjin opened and greeted him sleepily from the threshold. “But we have an emergency, and I wanted to let you know right away.”

“Hmm? Hadn’t you gone to collect the snow leopard’s body?” Seokjin queried, noticing at that moment that the other still had the rifle on his shoulder and seemed to have just returned from the expedition. “What happened?”

“It didn’t go exactly as planned. The body was no longer there,” Seungho said with urgency, and, before Seokjin could keep playing dumb and ask what he meant, added: “We came across another leopard, and now it’s here in the village.”

Seokjin was suddenly very aware of Jeongguk’s presence in the house, and slightly closed the door which had remained open behind him. “What… What are you saying? Are you sure?”

“Not completely, but almost. We followed its trail on the way back, hoping to catch up and get rid of it, and it was undoubtedly headed to the village. If it’s not here, it’s definitely nearby,” Seungho explained hastily, then lowered his voice and begged, “Hyung, please, let me protect you.”

“I can do that.”

Seokjin froze, hearing Jeongguk’s voice, and saw, like in slow motion, Seungho shift his gaze to a point behind his shoulder. Seokjin also turned around, noticing with horror that Jeongguk hadn’t put his clothes back on and was still bare-chested, his pants hanging low on his hips but fortunately not visibly tight with arousal. His gaze was stormy.

“If there’s danger, I can protect Seokjin. You don’t have to,” Jeongguk reiterated, his tone not admitting replies.

Seungho gaped, looking back at Seokjin, at his lips especially – and Seokjin noticed with surprising clarity the moment the hunter understood what was happening when he knocked. It showed in the way Seungho blushed, maybe out of embarrassment or maybe out of anger, although it seemed more like the former when he stammered, “I, I’m sorry,” and walked away.

Seokjin almost went after him – what for, he didn’t know – but the temperature was prohibitive, and he had already been out in the cold too long without a coat, so in the end, he just took one last look at Seungho’s retreating before returning inside, his chest tightened in an uncomfortable grip.

Outside, a lone snowflake landed in Seungho’s tear duct, making him blink to chase away the chill – and dry the film of tears that had gathered in his eyes at the realisation of how stupid and naive he had been. He had thought that sooner or later Seokjin would finally notice the torch he had been carrying for him for years and would be his; instead, he lost him. Seungho felt he should have just resented his own inaction, his inability to voice and act on his feelings, but in that moment, it was easier to put all the blame on Jeongguk. Maybe he would have had his chance if that stranger whose origins no one knew hadn’t appeared in Seokjin’s life.

Seungho couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something terribly wrong with Jeongguk. Even a moment ago, when he had appeared behind Seokjin half-naked, there was something that—

He stopped in his tracks, and slowly, he turned to look at Seokjin’s house, which was still visible in the distance.

Those tattoo patterns…

“You need to leave,” Seokjin said to Jeongguk immediately as the door closed behind him, blocking out the cold. Yet one would have thought it was still open from how chilly the room felt around him. “They will definitely keep looking for you, and the full moon is tomorrow. It’s too dangerous if you stay.”

Jeongguk knew his time was limited, but he hoped until the very end that they would not need to part from each other. He looked at Seokjin wistfully as he asked, “What about you? … Are you coming?” he added when the human seemed not to understand the first question.

Seokjin blushed and looked away, his eyes falling on the rumpled bed. “I, I don’t know,” he muttered, nibbling at his swollen bottom lip and wrapping himself more tightly in his dressing gown, as if to shield himself. “Earlier, I… I was trying to make a point and got carried away.”

“I see,” Jeongguk replied softly, and Seokjin hated that he didn’t sound either angry or disappointed, or even resigned. “At least it was good while it lasted.”

The leopard’s shadow entered Seokjin’s field of vision, and before the human could lift his gaze from the floor, he felt a gentle warmth touch his forehead. A delicate kiss, accompanied by the words, “I will think of you from time to time.” Every minute, every second until heartbreak consumes my soul.

Seokjin choked on air, finding himself unable to reply. He searched for something – anything – to say, sure that there had to be adequate words to bid farewell to someone dear who was exiting his life, but his head felt empty and his chest equally hollow, as if his heart were no longer beating in its place.

And so he just stood there in silence, gasping for air, watching Jeongguk open the back door, strip off his pants, and, without taking his blue eyes off Seokjin, shift into his animal form.

A blink later, he was gone, and another blink later, the tears came.

The reason why his heart seemed to have stopped beating in his chest revealed itself to Seokjin like a snowdrop unfurling its petals with the arrival of spring warmth: unexpected, but natural.

His tears triggered the first thawing of frost, while the completion of an overdue realisation was signalled by the most trivial of objects – and the definitely not trivial memories they brought with them. First, there were the goats and their relaxed bleating when they only smelled Seokjin in their surroundings, the animals’ happiness of knowing that a potential predator had gone away, which, however, was not reflected in their owner’s mood. Then there was the food Seokjin prepared for two, overdoing it with meat even though he couldn’t afford it all because someone wouldn’t have appreciated being served only tubers, and the awareness that he would have to get used to cooking for only one person again.

The final blow came from the still half-unmade bed, where Jeongguk had laid Seokjin that morning, as the newly risen sun gilded the snow-capped peaks and the silence amplified the sound of their breathing, the muffled moans between kisses, and the important questions left unanswered.

Do you want to try and find out?

Tell me that you do. Let me love you.

Seokjin still had no idea what he would have answered back then if Seungho hadn’t interrupted them, and maybe he would never know. But if it happened again now, if at that very moment, hours after the first time, he and Jeongguk ended up in bed again and, drunk on kisses and caresses, Jeongguk asked him the same question one more time, Seokjin would answer yes. He would help Jeongguk shed the few clothes separating them, open his thighs, and welcome the leopard inside him one gasp at a time.

Because Jeongguk had already entered Seokjin in every way possible, except physically. He was in his gestures, in his thoughts and his tears, and in his heart, which Seokjin no longer felt beating in his hollow chest simply because Jeongguk had taken it away with him when he left.

They had been together for weeks, but it only took Seokjin a morning to realise that he had fallen in love, and it was terrible.

Because now, wherever he looked with his eyes still red from crying, he didn’t see solitude anymore, but loneliness. And loneliness sucked.

“I… I think I need to leave,” Seokjin said to no one in particular, only to himself, and it was as if those words had freed him.

Of course, he had to leave. He had to reach Jeongguk before it was too late, admit he had been an idiot, and spend the rest of their existences together.

Having made his decision, Seokjin hastily got dressed and retrieved his backpack, which luckily he hadn’t unpacked since returning. He filled it with more food and warm blankets, and, not knowing how high he would have to go, he covered his face with a protective layer of ochre against the cold.

Compared to earlier in the morning, it had meanwhile started snowing heavily – not exactly a blizzard, but close enough that leaving the safety of a warm house would be considered crazy. Seokjin didn’t care. He didn’t have the luxury of being able to wait for it to stop: he needed to reach Jeongguk as long as the fresh snow remembered the leopard’s footprints, and he felt relieved to see that they were still visible, walking away from the house towards the woods.

With renewed resolve, he began to follow them.

At first, Jeongguk walked away from the village with long strides, hoping that the distance would make his heart grow less fond, but after nothing of the sort happened even when he covered enough kilometres to live through a sunset and a new dawn, he slowed down and had to come to terms with the fact that it was all wishful thinking.

He couldn’t forget Seokjin, just as he couldn’t tear his heart out of his chest without dying.

If he could roar in pain, he would have, but the only sound his throat was able to produce was a heart-rending howl – a cry and at the same time a call for his mate, capable of travelling for miles through the thin mountain air to convey his message to its destination.

When he went beyond the tree line into an open snowy expanse, and the shot exploded in his direction, Jeongguk knew.

It wasn’t Seokjin he had summoned.

Although he was a good walker, Seokjin pushed his body so hard to make up for the hours-long head start Jeongguk had on him that he feared he would collapse prematurely, but it didn’t happen: it almost seemed as if, however brief his breaks were and however little food he ingested – not to mention the increasingly pronounced cold – there was something that helped him not to collapse, but to keep going. It somehow gave him strength and warmth, and from time to time, Seokjin felt he had company on his solitary climb to the summit. On the morning of his second day, he even thought he heard a sound, like a cry or, absurdly, a song, calling him, after which he was lucky enough to find some leopard tracks in the little snow that had managed to penetrate through the treetops, which were thinner now that he was reaching the tree line.

The tracks were so fresh that Seokjin would have bet that he could reach Jeongguk in less than half an hour if the leopard continued to maintain the slower pace he had adopted at one point in the journey, so he demanded one last effort from his numb legs. At least it had stopped snowing.

The shot came so unexpectedly that Seokjin froze in surprise, his breath being knocked out of his lungs as he tried to figure out what was happening. The forest seemed to have had the same reaction, because it remained still, not a single bird rising in fear above its foliage.

But it was natural for it to be so, because at that altitude there was no prey to hunt. There was only…

No. No no no NO, Seokjin’s mind started screaming as he dropped his backpack to the ground and ran breathlessly and desperately, hoping to make it in time, before the irreparable happened.

He exploded out of the woods just like the bullet that was fired at that exact moment and landed to his right, in the snow, far from the leopard crouched on the ground, without protection except the now useless one of its camouflage cloak. Jeongguk had his back to him, so Seokjin couldn’t see if he was hurt, while he had a perfect view of his attackers: Seungho, Dohyun and Eunseong were right in front of him.

“I told you we have to catch him, not kill him!” Seungho was screaming at Eunseong, who was trying to take aim with his still-smoking rifle.

“What do you care about knowing what he is exactly?! He’s a monster, and he is dangerous!” the other hunter yelled back, tugging the weapon free from Seungho’s grip as Dohyun nodded in agreement. It was he who aimed as his companions were still scuffling, and Seokjin’s body reacted autonomously.

“NO!” he pleaded loudly, throwing himself on top of Jeongguk as the shot went off.

It missed, kicking up a spray of snow where it landed.

For a very long moment, no one moved, busy processing what had just happened. Seungho was the first to recover, and his roar in Dohyun’s face – “Are you fucking out of your damned mind?!” – pulled Seokjin out of his haze. He immediately checked that Jeongguk wasn’t injured and took a breath of relief, seeing that he was unharmed. He hugged the leopard, and Jeongguk purred into his neck.

“Get out of the way, Seokjin-hyung!” Eunseong screamed, aiming again despite Seungho’s continually unheard protests, then, without looking away from his target, ordered Dohyun, “He is mine. You stay out of it.”

“He is not yours!” Seokjin countered in rage through gritted teeth. “He is mine!”

He turned to Jeongguk, meeting his joyful and loving gaze, and gently caressed his muzzle, slipping his fingers into his fur that felt soft and warm even through the fabric of the gloves, and softly repeated, “He is mine.” The tips of their noses brushed together. “And I am his.”

As soon as he said it, Seokjin felt a spasm in his chest that took his breath away, followed by a pleasant sensation of warmth so intense that he was surprised he didn’t see the snow melting around them. The heat subsided before he had time to worry about his safety, but it didn’t go away entirely, remaining simmering beneath his sternum, right where his heart was now beating wildly again, and somehow reaching out to Jeongguk.

I love you.

In hindsight, Seokjin probably should have panicked when he heard the leopard’s familiar voice – just a touch more purring than usual – ringing in his head, but instead he just parted his lips and whispered, “Good Heavens, we mated.”

Hmm, yes, Jeongguk hummed in confirmation, rubbing his whiskers on Seokjin’s cheeks and taking advantage of the human’s bewilderment to give him a lick on the face. Until a moment ago, Seokjin would have taken them as affectionate gestures from a pet looking for cuddles, but now that a telepathic channel had opened between them, Jeongguk felt completely human, so Seokjin blushed as if he had just been kissed.

Meanwhile, Seungho had managed to assert himself over his companions and, having seized the rifles from the reluctant Eunseong and Dohyun, rushed to the couple.

“Hyung, are you alright?” he asked as soon as he was within earshot.

Seokjin glared at him. “Not thanks to you.”

“I am sorry,” Seungho said, contrite. “I didn’t want this to happen. I…” – he glanced at Jeongguk – “I only wanted to ask him questions.”

I think he is being sincere. He’s the only one who didn’t shoot me.

“It’s him, right? The snow leopard we chased to the village… is Jeongguk, right?” Seungho asked Seokjin in the meantime. He gulped, looking at the elder with a lost expression. “Hyung, what is happening?”

“Can we listen to the explanation, too?” Dohyun yelled at them. “… Please?”

After getting a nod of permission to let them get closer from Jeongguk, Seokjin shouted back, “Alright, you can come!”

“Can I tell them everything?” Seokjin asked Jeongguk softly as Dohyun and Eunseong approached.

If you wish.

And so Seokjin told the hunters everything: how Jeongguk – then a leopard – had saved him from certain death after the attack and helped him heal and return to the village, how Jeongguk had remained, who, what he was. Why he was there. Seokjin didn’t mention terms like mating in his explanation, simply saying that the mountain wanted an alliance between humans and snow leopards to restore the balance of nature and save them from the fury of the elements.

“It took me a while to convince myself to do it, but now I’ve made up my mind,” Seokjin concluded. “I will accept his proposal.”

Announcing it out loud was like taking the last step on a long journey, and it gave him a sense of finality. He was really doing it. There was no going back now. Which reminded him…

“My backpack! I dropped it in the woods earlier, but it contains supplies for the rest of the journey…” Seokjin trailed off, hesitating. He wanted to go back and fetch it, but at the same time, he didn’t trust himself to leave Jeongguk there alone with the hunters. Seungho seemed truly remorseful, but Seokjin wouldn’t bet on the other two, who could have outnumbered the lead hunter easily if they really wanted to.

I can go get it, Jeongguk proposed, rising from the ground, which made the hunters visibly tense. Seokjin had the impression that the leopard was larger than before, and wondered what had caused it, whether the proximity to the veil or the mating, while watching Jeongguk walk away.

“Hyung, you don’t need to do it,” Seungho said as soon as Jeongguk was far enough away that he couldn’t hear him. “If someone needs to sacrifice themselves for the village, I can do it.”

As if I could ever want him!

“It’s not a sacrifice,” Seokjin responded with a smile, more amused by Jeongguk’s outraged tone than empathetic for the hunter’s concern. “And I’m not doing it for the village either. I… I want to do it. Because I cannot imagine my life without him.” His smile turned pitiful as he told Seungho, “I love him.”

The hunter didn’t seem to know what to reply, just staring down at his feet with a conflicted expression. Behind him, Eunseong and Dohyun had been looking around in fear ever since Seokjin had told them how things were, as if the mountain could attack at any moment.

“I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’d like you to do me a few favours,” Seokjin said softly when Seungho looked back at him.

“Whatever you want. I… I will do it. It’s the bare minimum,” the other muttered back.

Seokjin thought it would be easy to entrust Seungho with the task of finding Boksung and Moran a new master, and his house a new owner, but it was not so: he found himself on the verge of tears and breathless several times, reactions that Seungho could have interpreted as signs that Seokjin was not firm in his decision, instead the hunter listened in silence, and by the time Seokjin ended, he too had red and teary eyes.

“So is this farewell?” Seungho asked weakly. “Will you never come back?”

“I… I don’t know if I can. I don’t think I should, anyway,” Seokjin replied, looking away. His eyes landed on Jeongguk in the distance, returning with the backpack in his mouth.

The moment had arrived.

Seokjin rubbed the sleeve of his coat over his eyes and placed his hand on Seungho’s shoulder. “Don’t forget the rituals. Don’t forget the pear tree,” he urged in a firmer voice than he thought possible. “I trust you, Shin Seungho.”

After a moment of hesitation during which his nostrils flared, Seungho nodded solemnly, squeezing Seokjin’s shoulder in return. “I won’t let you down, hyung.”

Eunseong and Dohyun too silently nodded in agreement.

Ready to go?

Seokjin turned to Jeongguk and took the backpack, putting it back on his shoulders. “Yes.”

Jeongguk was indeed bigger, Seokjin realised as he climbed onto the leopard’s back and wrapped his arms around its neck to keep from falling. It was definitely no ordinary animal.

Are you comfortable up there? Are you cold? Jeongguk asked as they set off.

“I do feel a bit cold,” Seokjin admitted, hugging him more tightly. “But you are nice and warm. I can manage.”

Soon we’ll be passing through the veil, and the temperature will improve. I can’t wait to show you the den and the house. A pause, during which Seokjin felt him swallow under his hands. Our bed, too.

The human chuckled softly, rubbing his face into the fur at the nape of Jeongguk’s neck. “Someone is overeager.”

Is it bad that I look forward to finishing what we started?

“No. I want it too,” Seokjin admitted. “I, too, am curious to see what the place you come from is like, to find out what awaits us now that we are mates. What the future has in store for us, and… and everything else.”

So why are you crying?

At such a direct question, Seokjin sobbed involuntarily, burying his face in Jeongguk’s fur.

… Are you regretting it?

“No. I love you. I chose you because I want to be with you,” Seokjin stated as tears dripped from his eyes. “But I feel a little sad and I— I can’t stop it.”

Then don’t stop it, my love, Jeongguk told him in an understanding voice. You can be sad now. We will have plenty of time to be happy later.

And so, Seokjin let himself go. He thought of what he had left behind, of the people he would never speak to again, of the places he would never see again. He thought of Seungho, of Eunseong and Dohyun, of Boksung and Moran, of Grandma Sung and the villagers. Of his parents. He thought of the temple he had rebuilt and of the pear tree he had planted, whose blossoms and fruit he would never be able to see.

He thought about the life he would no longer have, about the one that was unfolding before him with every step, about Jeongguk and the feelings that united them.

Seokjin had lost a lot to gain just as much.

Under him, Jeongguk started purring a soothing song of love.

Dear Seokjin-hyuhg,

Earlier today, I ventured up the mountain on yet another one of my expeditions – not hunting expeditions, though, do not misunderstand: I quit it some time ago. The others opposed it, but it just did not feel right anymore. I have learned to live without meat, and it is not so bad.

I confess that the reason behind such frequent trips was the hope to somehow meet you again, to tell you in person what the village was experiencing. According to Eunseong, it was not hope but wishful thinking. After we said goodbye to you that day, he told me nothing but this: that I was a fool for moving into your house, that I was a fool for not having forgotten you yet. But I did not want to forget you, and if that meant I would be a fool my whole life, so be it.

Obviously, I never met you on my expeditions, but this never discouraged me, so this morning I left as planned, even though snow had just covered the mountain tops and the valley was particularly cold. I walked through the forest, climbing higher and higher to the tree line, to the place where we said goodbye.

And there, for the first time, I saw something that was not meant for the human eye.

I do not know why I thought you would stay unchanged, but as my gaze followed the black leopard’s movements through the fresh snow, I realised I had been a fool in this too: what for me was a death, what I offered a few pears once in a while for, was but a rebirth to a new life for you.

Maybe while I had not forgotten you, you had left us behind. Maybe even my belief that I had been observed a lot without knowing it during my numerous expeditions on the mountain was but wishful thinking.

So I backed away and went back to the shelter of the pine trees. And I did not tell you that the pear tree you planted grew so big and strong that I hung colored silk ribbons from its branches, and that at the end of the day, I pray to the mountain divinity to let it survive for a long, long time.

I did not tell you that, as you recommended, I did not forget the rituals; that we keep them regularly, at every change of the moon and at every change of the seasons. That we still offer what we have in thanksgiving for births, to celebrate marriages, and to bid farewell to the deceased who left us, like Grandma Sung, who passed away last spring.

I did not tell you that when he joined you, and you started playing in the snow, I understood that the time had come to put my heart at peace.

Because you were happy.

(Shin Seungho’s last letter to Kim Seokjin, committed to the flames)