The first time Taemin saw her, the night itself seemed to rearrange around her.
It was the kind of memory that burned bright and ridiculous in his chest—the way some images never settle into the polite smudge of ordinary recollection, but instead keep their edges and stay too sharp. He could still feel the cold in his boots, the brittle ache of wind that had no business on that road, and the sudden, absurd hush that fell over everything the moment Foxglove stepped out from shadow. Moonlight pooled in her hair like someone had poured milk over iron; the runes along her skin glowed faintly, purple and precise, as if the night had been inked with a language no one living should read. You wanted to look away and you could not. You wanted to look closer and you dared not.
They had been north because men with too many maps and too little mercy had wanted eyes in places the South could not see. Taek—silent, peripheral, eyes that always seemed to be cataloguing angles—had been the obvious choice for infiltration. Owl-spirit suited him: patient, patient to the point of cruelty, blessed with the kind of vision that turned darkness into a ledger of opportunities. Taemin had been the muscle in name only; officially he was Taek's shadow, supposed to be the body that stepped between spy and danger. Unofficially, everyone knew what Taemin was: a fox in wolf's territory—slick, restless, and impossibly difficult to ignore.
They had called it reconnaissance, an elegant word for trespass. Taek had moved like a shadow gifted with sight. He slipped past patrols as if lanes of sound and light bent around him, owl spirit humming low and patient in his bones, giving him an angle on the world that others didn't have. His reports were feathers of information, light and impossible to catch unless you knew where to look; that was why they sent Taek north. The South wanted to know where the North was planting its teeth.
Taemin's assignment was simpler on paper: accompany and protect. Keep close to Taek, be the blade if the night snapped. But the fox lived in him as more than spirit—cunning folded into instinct, charm threaded into movement. He remembered how his jaw had felt steady that night, how his smile was a small, deliberate weapon. The fox made people hand him keys without thinking, told them their names had always been on their lips. It made him light-footed and unpredictable; it taught him to read the rhythm of a patrol and find the beat that wasn't theirs. He wore the charm like an armor sometimes, and like armor, it carried its own weight.
They slipped past the outer pylons, low and patient, Taek mapping guard rotations through gestures and soft whistles. The plant sat like a ribcage of steel—vent shafts, catwalks, the constant pinprick of sensor lights. Taek crept ahead to a vantage where lines of infrastructure bent into diagrams, where the secrets of movement and fuel and artillery could be read like a ledger. Taemin trailed a little behind, heart a steady drum, senses sharpening the way teeth do in the dark.
The fox was a gift and a weapon. It gave him ridiculous charm that tilted people's favors with a smile; it tuned his reflexes until every hair on his arms sang when something shifted in the air. In unfamiliar towns he could make strangers like him with the tilt of his head and the casual tilt of a word. In the field, the fox made him small and dangerous all at once—an animal coiled on the edge of a spring, ready to twist into motion.
They had expected patrols, barbed wire, a dog or two. They had expected risk. They had not expected the sudden, impossible geometry of purple light on snow, the way the air around a woman could burn like a brand and still smell of something both floral and metallic. The first thing he noticed was the hair. It was absurd to remember hair when a life hangs in the balance, but hers was like a lie that insisted on being true: pale as moonlight, falling in a sweep that caught the corridor light and turned it into a seam of silver. It moved with a confidence that made the fluorescent tubes feel thin and exposed. The second thing was the runes: faint at first, like the afterglow of a struck match, then clearer, a lattice of violet script twining along skin that somehow looked almost too clean amid the oil-stained pipes. When she stepped into the corridor she seemed both impossibly small and impossibly vast, as if the space itself had been taught to frame her.
Taemin's chest went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with recognition. He'd heard stories of Foxglove — the radiant shadow — but she was no rumor tonight. No, for she stood like a commandment in fabric and light, and the air around her hummed like a string under tension.
Her eyes were the last thing he registered—bright as bruised violets, precise as a surgeon's insistence. She was Foxglove in the way lightning is a storm: instantaneous, declarative, and impossible to forget.
Taek's training was a study in calm: a utility knife hidden in the weave of his boot, a throat that had learned to swallow surprise. But even his owl-sight had missed that particular reading. The rune cracked through the air and wrapped around Taek's collar like a noose made of light. He went still, not asleep but caught, limbs tethered by magic so clean and exact it left no room for panic.
He lunged because there was no other verb that fit. He was always supposed to be the body that protected; training had made his muscles honest about it. He shoved forward, felt the rush of him like something born from fur and cunning rather than soldiering: the fox within him — not visible, not a tail and ears, but a cold, cunning current — tuned every reaction. He slid between Foxglove and Taek with the kind of instinct that caught knives and shadows. The charm the fox spirit lent him — a soft, dangerous pull that could make the edges of strangers' faces slacken or trust the wrong lips — flared as a side effect, not a tool. For a heartbeat the guard at the far door hesitated, for no reason any of them could later name, and Taemin used that fraction to move.
He was not noble in the way some soldiers were; he did not consider the morality of stepping between an attacker and his target. He reacted. The first motion—an instinct the south had recognized and bred into him—was to close distance. He moved without thought of concealment, boots crunching on gravel, breath fogging in the raw shoulder of the pass. The more measured movements of a planless charge were replaced by the cunning of a predator who knew angles and exits: two sidesteps that put him outside the rune's arc, a shoulder into the thinnest gap between Foxglove and Taek, and then his hands were on the silk of her cloak.
She turned then, and everything tightened. Up close, Foxglove was a paradox: beauty threaded through with weather, the moonlight hair and violet runes like a constellation mapped onto flesh that might have been carved from an icicle. Her eyes caught him not with curiosity but with the precise appraisal of an executioner measuring a sentence. He felt seen — not observed the way prey is observed, but met, as though two dangerous things had finally acknowledged each other's existence.
They collided in a scatter of motion. Taemin remembers the taste of copper and the crack of his own breath. He moved like someone who had hunted since childhood: feints that were little lies, steps that read and readjusted, a blade flicked in and out like speech.
For every move he made, she had an answer that warred with his confidence — sometimes graceful, sometimes cruel — and the space between them filled with the sound of their measure.
They were evenly matched only in their disproportions. Taemin had the cunning, the slippery opportunism of a fox: a movement, a misdirection, a charm that could peel away a second of attention. He used it — smiled even, a blade of teeth and mirth in the dim light, and saw one of the guards step too close and glance the wrong way. The charm did not work on Foxglove; the woman wore indifference like armor. Instead it worked on the periphery, on the small mechanics of their world, creating slivers of chance where none should be. She reacted to his movements with a cold calm that suggested practice and intention, folding his tricks into the void as if she had been expecting them.
However, Taemin's foxliness was different. If Taek's owl gave him vision, Taemin's fox charm made him disarm people in rooms of diplomats, on the street it translated to improvisation. He used the environment—rusted scaffolding, a broken pipe, a discarded tarp—like extensions of his limbs. He flowed, slipped, and invented angles on the fly. Where Foxglove conjured order, Taemin sowed chaos: yanking a slab of concrete free to trip a rune's line, ducking low so her binding rifles passed over him, curling a hand into the inside of his jacket to bring out a blade when she overcommitted to a motion.
When it ended, they ran. They retreated south with pockets of bitter heat and the metallic taste of too-close encounters on their tongues. Taek had data enough for the South to plant operatives, but the cost had been the first ember of a myth that would burn long in Taemin's mind. He remembered thinking, as helicopters lifted them away, with her glowing gaze in his mind, that their paths would be fated to entangle again. Yet the way she had turned to move—her cloak snapping like a verdict—felt like a signed sentence in Taemin's chest.
He did not win. Though, he reasoned that fighters do not always "win" the first time. What he did was what he had been tasked for: he broke her hold long enough to drag Taek out of the plant and into a tangle of service roads where the fog swallowed tracks and the cold erased the finer details of a battle. He was the thunder in that retreat—bold, loud, visible—so Taek could be the shadow that melted unnoticed into the night.
And there was another truth, quieter and slipperier: the fox liked the attention. Whether it was loathing or obsession, being the center of someone like Foxglove's focus felt, in a way he would not confess, like proof he mattered. Pride is a small, dangerous thing. For Taemin it braided itself with hurt—he resented being prey, and he resented, deeper, the possibility that she might not be the monster he wanted her to be.
He could still see her then—Moonlight in her hair, purple script on skin, an expression unreadable as a locked door—sliding away under the night. He had clung to the moment and made it into a legend inside his skull: the instant a life changed course. Whether she had ever truly hated him, or whether she had simply been doing the work she thought necessary, became, to Taemin, less important than the mythology he could build around it.
He turned those wounds into a story he could hold: the arch-nemesis narrative. Legends are tidy maps; they tell you where to rage. Foxglove became, in his mind, the personification of a vendetta. Every missed landing, every binding spell that tightened like a noose, fed the tale that she hated him—personally, profoundly, with a private malice that could not be explained away as orders or strategy.
When he turned the memory over now, older by a handful of missions and hardened by scars, a part of him admitted, grudging and small, that some of the story had been chosen, not witnessed. Another part, louder and less reasonable, refused to let the fantasy die. After all, the hunt was sweeter when it was personal.
_______________________________________________________
Late afternoon leaned into gold, and the city wore its long shadows like a ribbon. From the alley below, Kang Taemin looked up at the stacked glass and stone of Bora's building and decided it would be faster to climb than to wait for a call or an invitation. To think that now, he was seeking out his enemy, his Foxglove, for his very life? Hah.
He moved the way metahumans did when they wanted the world to feel incidental: not rushing, exactly, but impossibly efficient. Where the fire escape and stairwell would have taken ordinary minutes, he threaded himself up the face of the building in a series of long, feline strides, hands finding micro-edges in the façade, feet pressing into the seams between panels, breath steady as if climbing a wall were no more remarkable than walking. The air grew thinner and the city's sounds — horns, distant laughter, the high susurration of traffic — fell away into a muffled tape. By the time he swung his leg over the balcony railing, the sunlight had gone soft enough to hide prints.
Landing was a study in control. He lowered himself onto the decking like a person settling into a chair, alert in the stillness.
He expected to find emptiness. He expected the flatlined peace of a home left alone. Instead, movement drew his eye: a single figure kneeling at the planter boxes, hands busy among the leaves. A woman, hair twisted up in a tight bun that rode high at the nape in a style he had seen in propaganda pictures and older operation briefs—southern. The bun struck him as a marker, the kind of small cultural shorthand that in another life would have been nothing, but now read as a signal. Foxglove had enemies. The south had names he still disliked saying. The sight set a lock in his chest.
Puzzlement was a fraction of a second long. He catalogued: posture low, hands dirty, the tilt of her shoulders—no obvious weapon. Then memory sanded over the hesitation. Foxglove's enemies did not announce themselves. They infiltrated. They planted. They waited. Taemin moved before his doubt had settled into words.
He attacked not as a brute but with the economy of someone trained in efficient incapacitation. His first motion was a silent step forward, a lunging sweep intended to cut off her retreat. He aimed for control—wrist, shoulder, a joint that could be immobilized without spectacle. The world around the motion slowed for him: the way her scarf fluttered, the scatter of soil in her wake, the whisper of leaf against leaf.
But the woman wasn't blind to him. She pivoted at the last possible heartbeat, as if her body had already been braced for violence. The angle of her dodge was sharp, efficient, trained. His fist sliced air instead of her shoulder, his momentum caught by the railing.
Her eyes—sharp, calculating—met his for a flash, and Taemin knew for sure that this wasn't a civilian. This was someone practiced. Someone dangerous.
Neither of them spoke. The silence was deliberate, protective. They both understood: Bora was inside. The last thing either wanted was for the noise of their clash to draw her attention—or worse, to bring damage crashing into the home she had made.
Taemin's second strike came faster, a hook meant to corner her against the glass. She ducked low, her leg sweeping out in a precise arc meant to take his balance. He jumped it easily, his heel catching the floorboards and cracking them faintly. Even that sound felt too loud in the quiet.
The fight narrowed to a dance of limits. Taemin pressed with raw speed and power, his body moving like a blade unsheathed, each strike deliberate, calculated to incapacitate. The woman countered with skill that came from years of training; her dodges sharp, her blocks efficient, each motion conserving energy, eking survival out of precision.
Her breath came in low, even exhales, betraying control. His, steadier still, though his strikes carried the heat of a predator who refused to yield. The boards creaked under their shifting weight. A pot of basil wobbled dangerously with the rush of air from Taemin's swing, steadied at the last second when the woman's hand grazed it as she twisted away from him.
She was good. Too good. Civilians didn't move like this. This was a soldier's discipline. Special training. But the shape of her style wasn't Southern. Not entirely. She carried the rhythm of someone who had fought too long, learned to adapt on the fly, body worn to instinct.
Taemin's eyes narrowed as his next jab forced her back against the railing. She caught the bar with her palm, flipped herself neatly to avoid being pinned, and landed light on her feet, her face sharp with effort but not fear.
For all her skill, she was straining to keep pace. He saw it—the half-second lag, the tighter set of her shoulders, the way she had to put everything into staying just out of reach. Against anyone else, she might have been untouchable. Against him, it was a matter of time.
Taemin's advantage was undeniable. His strikes cut through her defenses, each near miss forcing her narrower and narrower into the corner of the balcony. Her breath quickened, though her eyes stayed sharp. He moved like a shadow given muscle and speed, every blow coming from an angle that would have been impossible for most men.
But she was not easy prey. She turned her body with effort and grace, barely slipping past his hand as it slammed into the railing, leaving a dent where her ribs would have been. Her counter was immediate, a sharp elbow strike meant for his jaw. He caught it with his forearm, redirected the force, and pressed her back another step.
Their struggle was quiet, breath against breath, the scrape of shoe soles, the soft impact of bodies meeting and recoiling. The city outside buzzed with life, oblivious to the duel waged in silence above it.
Taemin lunged, hand outstretched, intent on closing the distance once and for all. Nari braced, her muscles coiling for another evasive twist. But before either could complete the motion, a sudden force erupted between them.
The interruption tasted like static. Taemin felt it along his skin: a pressure that wasn't wind and not quite physical, pushing against him with the polite cruelty of a door slammed in one's face. Nari's mouth opened in a small, involuntary sound—half gasp, half laugh—that died as her eyes found the source of the stillness.
Bora stood in the threshold of the balcony door as if she had stepped out for a breath and found the world misbehaving. She had her arms crossed, an implacable line to her shoulders, and for a moment she simply watched them with the bland assessment she saved for tasks. The late afternoon sun flattened her features in a way that made her look smaller and more dangerous at once.
Before either Taemin or Nari could respond, the violet shimmer unfurled. Thin, sinuous tendrils of magic coiled into existence around her like smoke given shape, reaching outward with deliberate grace. They curled and snapped through the air before latching onto both of them.
Taemin felt the sudden weight at his arms and chest, bands tightening as if steel cables had wrapped him in place. He tested them out of instinct, his strength pressing against the restraints, but the more he struggled, the more the tendrils constricted. Magic. Her magic. He clenched his jaw, forcing himself still, though the violet glow painted his cheekbones in eerie light.
Bora lifted her hand slightly, and the tendrils obeyed. With a single, fluid gesture, she drew them both inward, the magic tugging their restrained bodies across the balcony as though they weighed nothing. Neither Taemin nor Nari dared to resist—not because they lacked the skill, but because it was her.
She released a long, measured sigh and finally spoke again, her tone as sharp as the look she leveled at them.
"Would either of you care," she said, each word laced with quiet steel, "to explain why I find you trying to tear each other apart on my balcony?"
Bora's voice cut the air like a line drawn through smoke. "Would either of you care to explain why I find you trying to tear each other apart on my balcony?"
The words landed, simple and sharp, and the tendrils that had been keeping them both immobile hummed obediently in the silence that followed. Taemin's jaw clenched; Nari's chest rose and fell in a measured breath. The kitchen light made little halos on the tendrils' purple sheen, turning them into living ribbons that reflected in the panes of Bora's ornamental glasses.
Neither answered immediately. The only sound was the faint crackle of the grill pan still keeping dinner warm, and the low hum of the tendrils that held them both suspended in check.
The tendrils loosened only when Bora signaled them to, withdrawing with the same elegant inevitability with which they had appeared. They fell away like ribbons of dusk, leaving Taemin and Nari sitting on the floor in the center of the living room, breathing a little too fast, hair mussed, clothes dusted with soil and a few scattered leaves.
The penthouse hummed on around them: the rice cooker's final whistle, a curl of sesame oil still sizzling on the grill, the soft tick of hidden clocks. It felt ridiculous and domestic after the violence of the balcony, like finding a bandage in the middle of a battlefield.
Bora, arms still crossed, let her gaze slide from one to the other. The sigh she gave carried the weight of someone used to messes finding her at her doorstep.
"You know," she murmured, tilting her head slightly, "I asked for lettuce. Not a spectacle."
The words landed sharp. Nari gave a small laugh, quick and bright despite the tendrils wrapped around her. "Well, in my defense, I was only picking lettuce. Someone decided to drop out of the sky like a bat out of hell." She shot a look at Taemin, who responded only with a quiet flare of his nostrils.
Bora's brow creased. Her fingers twitched, and the tendrils shifted, angling their bound bodies closer so they stood less than a stride apart.
The glow painted their faces violet, catching the strain at Taemin's jaw and the stubborn lift of Nari's chin.
"Explain," Bora said simply, her voice low, even. It wasn't a request.
Taemin's silence stretched. He didn't like to answer when he didn't yet understand the full shape of what was happening. He had climbed the tower expecting surveillance, threat, perhaps even ambush. And instead, he was staring at a stranger in Bora's home. One who carried herself with the same instincts as any seasoned operative.
He shifted slightly against the bonds, testing their strength again. They held fast. He finally spoke, his voice edged. "You left your balcony open."
"Excuse me?" Bora's eyes narrowed.
He tilted his chin toward Nari. "And she was out there, south-style bun, digging around in your plants. You know as well as I do what that looks like."
The air thickened. Nari's laugh this time was short and incredulous. "South-style bun? That's what gave me away? Gods, if I knew hairstyle fashion was a crime in your book, I'd have braided it just to spite you." Nari's brow arched, her lips curving in a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Bora told me to pick lettuce, and I was doing just that when you decided to swoop in like a crow mistaking me for prey."
"Your stance," Taemin said flatly, "wasn't the stance of someone picking vegetables."
"Old habits." She gave a one-shouldered shrug as far as the tendrils would allow. "But you wouldn't know about that, would you? You saw a bun in my hair and assumed the South sent someone to gut her."
Taemin's jaw tightened. "Because they do send people, and you looked the part."
Bora exhaled again, long and steady, before lifting her hand higher. The tendrils tightened; not cruelly, but enough to silence both of them. Their words cut off in mid-breath as the coils pressed against their ribcages.
Nari tilted her head at him, mock-innocent. "Still upset you couldn't land a single hit?"
"I didn't need to," he said coldly. "If Bora hadn't stopped us, you'd already be on the floor."