Spice and silk | Yoonseok

Chapter 3: The Moon in the Morning

"The Earth is not a god, although it is easy to mistake it for that, as I did. They do not treat the Earth as something to be prayed to. They treat the Earth as though she is alive, and maybe she is, and she cares for them as they care for her."

- excerpt from "Clans", a series of articles written by the Royal Advisor

Yoongi throws the slip-shoes away when they stop, right before Hoseok dumped the leathers at his bare feet. He can feel the Earth below him, welcoming him back, and it's the calmest he's felt in the three months since he left her. She tells him she's glad to feel him back; he wriggles his toes into the soil a little further. "Why do you want me to go?"

"I-" Hoseok's eyes seem fixed on the dirt and soil caressing the arch of Yoongi's foot. "Because you aren't meant to be here."

"I'm a pleasure slave," and god, with the Earth underneath him again, Yoongi is back home. She'll tell them all he's alive, still, and she'll reassure Jeongguk and Daesoo, and she'll stop Eunhyun and Minhyuk from doing anything stupid, and she'll help Chaeyoung and and she'll -

the Min -

do not return until -

The smile falls from his face.

"You were a pleasure slave," Hoseok says the words like they pain him, "And you were Jungyoo's, in any case. I - I'm getting rid of the traditions of my father's time, and Jungyoo is... just another tradition."

"I'm a tradition, then, and you want to get rid of me because of what I represent," Yoongi says, a little harshly. Seokjin has set up the fire next to where the two horses are gently grazing - he guesses they must have travelled far, far enough to be miles away from Jungyoo's castle, and from the smell of the fire, Seokjin is roasting something. They are (they are) still royal travellers, even if they aren't travelling with the ceremony and processions Jungyoo might do.

"I'm telling you to go because you obviously don't want to be here, and you were taken against your will," Hoseok says through gritted teeth. He turns on the heel of his boot. "So go."

When Yoongi is sure Hoseok has stomped back down to the campfire, he flings his robe off as fast as he possibly can. Sky-blue and white, peace and purity, and he grinds it into the dirt, jumping up on down on it until it's rumpled and muddy brown and ripped and torn and unwearable ever, ever again. His throat hurts, and the cut on his cheek has barely scabbed over, not to mention the one on his wrist, but he doesn't -

"I don't care," he tells the robe, feeling stiff in his throat. "I don't."

His tail's been free. It stands, curving, black, almost as long as his torso, before he wraps it around his upper thigh.

To look at, Yoongi has never been anything particularly exceptional. He's smaller than the usual, which is smaller again than the humans, with furred, pointed black ears parting his mop of black hair - a little too long, after three months without claws to cut it. Snow-stolen skin as pale as the weather in the mountains. Blood-pink lips. Green eyes, the part of him most like the cats that they resemble; green and slitted, a brown iris around a black slit, the strangest hybrid between human and feline of the whole lot.

His tattoos are simple, too. Yoon-Gi-Min, on his back, and a brittlebear paw on his chest; his first kill. The skeletal outline of wingflesh claws on his shoulder-blades. The sizzle of the Earth. A stickshrine spiral. His mother's hieroglyph; his father's. The Min's. (His grandfather's.)

Nothing very exceptional. The only thing that makes Yoongi important is that he's the first of his kind that Hoseok is ever seen -

That, and the Earth.