Chapter Text
The first time Wonwoo met Kim Mingyu, he was nine years old.
He had slipped away from his afternoon lessons to crouch beside the pond in Gilseonggung’s garden. Tucked inside his sleeve were scraps of mandu skin he had saved from lunch. Enough, he’d calculated with some satisfaction, to feed the three-eyed carp twice over.
He tore the soft dough into smaller pieces and scattered them one by one across the water. The fish had just begun to gather, their mouths breaking eagerly through the surface, when a sharp crack split through the air. A heavy thud followed, the force of which traveled up through the ground and into Wonwoo’s knees.
When he looked up, there was a boy sprawled in the grass beneath the old pomegranate tree that grew beside the eastern wall. He was spread with his arms and legs cast wide, face up to the Heavens, completely motionless. A thick broken branch lay in the grass beside him.
Wonwoo’s first thought was that the boy was dead. His second was that he had never seen anyone fall out of a tree before, and that the branch, which was nearly as long as the boy was tall, must have briefly held him a considerable distance off the ground.
He held his breath and waited, but when the boy did not stir, he set the rest of the mandu skins down and inched closer. He had nearly reached him when the boy suddenly sat upright, a grin spreading across his face that was so broad it revealed every tooth, including two sharp canines that gave him the appearance of a young mountain dog.
“Hi!”
Wonwoo flinched back so hard that he lost his balance and ended up sitting in the grass beside him. That made the boy laugh. It wasn't the cruel sort of sound that mocked, but rather the warm kind that invited company, and Wonwoo found himself laughing too.
When their laughter eventually faded into the crisp autumn air, two questions pressed to the front of Wonwoo’s mind. He asked them in the order of their importance.
“Are you hurt?”
“Nope! Not even a scratch!” The boy leapt to his feet and spun in a full circle, arms out, as though presenting himself for inspection.
As he turned, Wonwoo looked at him properly for the first time and discovered that the boy appeared near his own age, though taller. His clothing was plain hemp, grass-stained, and his skin carried the golden glow of someone raised beneath open skies rather than sheltered under parasols and pavilion roofs. His hands were dirty and roughened, marked with scratches and old calluses.
A commoner, then. Wonwoo had not met many.
His second question suddenly seemed far more pressing.
“What are you doing in my garden?”
The boy stopped spinning and something uncertain flicked across his features.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I didn't exactly mean to end up here.” Then his eyes went wide. “Wait. Your gardens? You're one of the Yukryong princes!”
Wonwoo rose to his feet, brushing blades of grass from his robes with what little dignity he could recover.
“Yes. I’m—” he started, but before he could properly introduce himself, the boy was doing it for him.
“You’re the sixth prince! The Auspicious Star! The Harvest Bringer!” The boy bounced on his heels as he spoke, as if unable to keep still. “The first omega prince born in nearly two hundred years!”
Wonwoo opened his mouth, but again he was not given any space to speak.
“The Yukryong,” the boy continued, “all carry the king’s dragon blood. When a prince is born, it sleeps inside him. No one knows what it will become until it doesn't sleep anymore. Until his scent blooms. Then his magic wakes!”
As he spoke, he gestured wildly with both hands, nearly smacking himself in the face with his own sleeves twice.
“My father says omega princes are even rarer than white deer. That when one is born, it means the Heavenly Dragons are reminding us they haven’t abandoned the kingdom. That they’ve sent a gift to help the land flourish again. One that will wake the fields and fill the granaries.” He sighed and lowered his voice. “Which is good because we really need that.”
He paused then and stared expectantly at Wonwoo. A breeze moved through the pomegranate tree overhead, stirring the leaves.
“Yes,” Wonwoo said, because he did not know what else to say. “I know.”
He had been told these things before, of course. Countless times. By Master Yeongseok, in his kind and gentle way that made the burden feel more bearable, and by Master Sihyuk, who always framed it more as a duty than a blessing. By court astronomers who spoke to the space above his head rather than to him directly. By his older brothers, who acknowledged the importance of his future but still treated him like the baby of the family, to be looked after and teased like any other little brother. He had even heard the pride in his father's voice each time he presented his youngest son at court, in the few years before illness confined him permanently to his bedchambers.
Among commoners, omega children were born no less frequently than alphas. There was nothing inherently miraculous about being an omega. The rarity lay in being born an omega of the royal bloodline.
Everyone in the kingdom possessed some amount of dormant magic, a lingering inheritance from the age when dragons had walked the earth. In most people it remained little more than a sleeping spark, buried too deeply to ever catch. Only those descended from the royal line still carried enough of the dragon’s blood to wake it, and what woke in a prince when he Bloomed would shape the rest of his life and the life of the entire kingdom around him.
Alpha princes were born reliably, their domains powerful and varied. The king had been blessed with five of them before Wonwoo’s birth, without difficulty. But where alpha magic tended toward military prowess and governance, the domains of omega princes leaned toward abundance, fertility, and growth.
In every generation fortunate enough to produce an omega prince, his magic had helped the kingdom thrive. Harvests came in generously under his influence. Orchards that had once stood barren bent heavy with fruit. Rice paddies that had yielded nothing flooded green with new growth. Well fed people were healthier and hardier, so sickness took fewer of them, and what plagues did come passed quickly. Their populations grew. Trade prospered. Armies were stronger. Where once there had been only the effort of staying alive, there was now room for art, scholarship and invention. The kingdom quickly became more than it had been.
But nearly two centuries had passed since the last omega prince was born, and so when Wonwoo came into the world, his existence alone was taken as a promise of the brighter future the people had so long prayed for. They spoke of him as though prosperity had arrived wrapped in swaddling cloth. The famine would loosen its grip soon, they said. The long years of failed harvests and dwindling granaries would finally give way to plenty. The Heavenly Dragons, at last, had remembered mercy.
It was a heavy responsibility to place upon the shoulders of a child. To be taught, day after day, that hope itself had taken his shape. To know that strangers looked to him and saw fertile earth, healthy loved ones, and full storehouses, all before his scent had come in. Before anyone, even Wonwoo himself, knew what kind of dragon slept inside him.
But this boy didn't seem to want anything from him. Not at this moment, anyway. Despite having just recited half the royal almanac, he appeared to have moved on from it just as quickly.
“I'm Kim Mingyu,” he announced, puffing out his chest. “Sole and irreplaceable son of Head Gardener Kim Yeongjae, keeper of the grounds at Haesong Palace. And I am in your garden because I was trying to reach that pomegranate.”
He turned and pointed up toward the highest bough of the tree, where a single fruit hung, large and deeply red, its skin split along one side with ripeness.
Even from a distance, Wonwoo could tell it was the biggest pomegranate he had ever seen.
But the fruit itself was not the surprising part.
Haesong Palace sat at the easternmost edge of the royal grounds, where the land gave way to sea cliffs and the air was always laced with the smell of salt. It was the residence of the king's second son, Prince Jeonghan.
Prince Jeonghan had Bloomed early, though as inevitably as the tide, given his affinity for water since birth. When his alpha scent came in, it carried sea mist and white tea, water lilies and brine, and his magic had followed in kind.
The fishing fleets that sailed under Jeonghan's blessing returned heavy even in lean seasons. Storms that would have swallowed lesser vessels parted for his navy. Sailors whispered that the sea itself listened when he spoke and that nothing sank within his domain without his knowing.
Most in the kingdom called him the Abyssal Dragon, but coastal folk and traveling merchants knew him as Yongsin, a reincarnation of the sea dragon spirit itself. They believed that the king was not his true father at all, claiming instead that Prince Jeonghan had been sired by Yongwang and left on the wet rocks of the eastern cliffs as a beautiful, mischievous gift to the royal house.
The point being, Haesong Palace was not close.
“You climbed all the way from Haesong?” Wonwoo asked.
Mingyu turned back toward him, beaming with pride.
“Yep! I know all the walls of the palaces,” he said, as though this explained everything. “My father oversees the gardens at Haesong, but he helps tend the grounds at several of the other residences too. I have been climbing between them since I was five.”
Wonwoo blinked.
Which palaces, he wondered. Which of his brothers might also have encountered Kim Mingyu tumbling unexpectedly into their gardens? Had he fallen from their trees as well? Interrupted their introductions?
He wanted to ask, but he didn't get the chance.
"Uh oh." Mingyu was still grinning, but his eyes had fixed on something over Wonwoo's shoulder. "I think I should go now."
Wonwoo turned to find Master Yeongseok making his way along the stone path, a stack of lesson texts tucked under one arm. His face carried the weariness of a man who had been searching for his pupil for quite some time.
When Wonwoo turned back, Mingyu was already halfway up the wall.
“Will you return?” he called after him. “For the pomegranate?”
Mingyu paused at the top, throwing one leg over so he straddled the stone, the low afternoon sun glowing behind him like a halo. He glanced toward the fruit still hanging high in the branches, then back down at Wonwoo.
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug.
Wonwoo stared at him. This boy had risked his neck to reach the thing, and now seemed totally indifferent as to whether or not he got it at all. How strange.
“Farewell, Your Highness!”
With that the boy vanished over the far side of the wall, leaving nothing behind but the broken branch in the grass and the faint rustle of leaves settling back into stillness.
“Was that a friend of yours?” Master Yeongseok asked, arriving at his side.
“No,” Wonwoo answered quickly. He had known the boy for less than an afternoon, during much of which he had barely managed to speak. He would hardly call that the foundation for friendship.
Still, as Master Yeongseok guided him gently toward the pavilion where his neglected calligraphy lesson waited, Wonwoo glanced back one last time toward the pomegranate tree.
The fruit still hung there, swollen and red beneath the leaves.
He thought, quietly, that he would not mind if Kim Mingyu returned for it.
Kim Mingyu did return, eventually.
By then, however, the pomegranate tree had lost all of its fruit, its branches stripped bare and buried under the first snows of winter. The entire gardens of Gilseonggung lay beneath white drifts, and the koi pond had frozen solid enough that Wonwoo could only just make out the pale, ghost-like silhouettes of the three-eyed carp moving sluggishly beneath the ice.
He had come to the pond out of habit more than purpose. He had nothing to feed them today, and no way to do so through the ice even if he had, but he lingered anyway, standing at the pond's edge with his hands tucked into the sleeves of his winter robes, watching his breath cloud the cold air.
This time there was no sharp crack of breaking branches. Just a gasp, then a muffled thud.
Wonwoo turned to find Mingyu flat on his back in the snow, arms flung wide, staring up at the sky just the same as he had been during their first meeting. Only now there were no grass stains, the tips of his ears were a bright red from the cold, and he was a little taller than Wonwoo remembered. Thinner, too.
“Are you injured?” Wonwoo asked at once.
Mingyu turned his head toward him, cheek half-buried in snow. His grin had not changed at all.
“Nope,” he declared cheerfully. “Not even a scratch.”
“You really should be more careful.”
Wonwoo briefly considered asking how many other palace walls Mingyu had fallen from since autumn, but didn't. Instead he turned and looked solemnly toward the pomegranate tree.
Even a child who had never tended so much as a flowerpot understood the turning of the seasons. They knew that deep autumn took the fruit before winter came to take everything else. A gardener’s son would know that cycle better than anyone. Still, the thought of Mingyu coming all this way with the pomegranate in mind, only to find its branches stripped bare, made Wonwoo uncomfortable for some reason.
“It’s gone,” he said quietly, fingers twisting together inside his sleeves.
“Hmm?” Mingyu sat up, snow sliding from his shoulders. He followed Wonwoo's gaze to the tree. “What is?”
“The pomegranate. You're too late. They fall and rot before the first frost.”
“Oh!” Mingyu laughed, bright and unbothered, the same warm sound as before. “Well of course it's gone. It's the middle of winter! But I didn't come for the pomegranate anyways.”
Wonwoo glanced around the snow-covered gardens, expecting to find some other prize—another high branch, another perfect fruit—but there was only white as far as he could see.
“I came to see you, Your Highness.”
Wonwoo’s attention snapped back to him.
Mingyu was still looking up at him from the snow, still grinning, and a thrill jolted through Wonwoo’s chest. The feeling reminded him of sparring with Seungcheol, the rare lessons where his eldest brother let him train with a real sword instead of a wooden one. Seungcheol never held back his strikes the way the instructors did, and when he knocked Wonwoo off his feet, he did not soften the fall afterward. He was the only one who did not treat Wonwoo like a child when they practiced, and it always felt dangerous and slightly terrifying but he liked it anyway.
“Oh,” Wonwoo said, swallowing. His mouth had gone dry. “Why?”
Mingyu jumped to his feet and brushed the snow from his sleeves.
“Why not? There aren't many kids your age on the royal grounds, are there? I thought it might be fun to play together.”
He wasn't wrong. The royal grounds did not hold many children, and even fewer of them came through Gilseonggung.
There was Cho Seungyoun, the Head Royal Physician's youngest grandson, who attended Wonwoo's medicinal studies twice a week. There was Lady Im's granddaughter Nayeon, who sat beside Wonwoo during the court ladies' poetry recitations and sometimes passed him notes shaped like tiny fish beneath the low writing tables, which Wonwoo enjoyed considerably more than the poetry itself. And there was Changkyun, a young attendant-in-training, witty and sharp-tongued, who was not expressly permitted to be Wonwoo's friend but had become one anyway.
They were good companions, and Wonwoo did not want for company, exactly, but he had also grown accustomed to the loneliness that came with living on the royal grounds, made worse since his brothers had Bloomed and moved to palaces of their own.
Kim Mingyu, meanwhile, would almost certainly not be among the approved companions deemed appropriate for the kingdom's auspicious omega prince. But Wonwoo remembered how unbothered Master Yeongseok had seemed last autumn, watching Mingyu climb back up the garden wall. So perhaps this was all right.
“Very well,” Wonwoo said. “What do you want to pl—”
A snowball hit him squarely in the face.
The cold shock of it traveled from his nose to the back of his skull as he stood there, blinking, snow melting on his lashes.
Across from him, Mingyu was already crouching for another handful.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, eyes gleaming, “that you’ve never had a snowball fight.”
Wonwoo had. Once, maybe twice, in the years when he still shared a palace with Soonyoung. His fifth brother had introduced him to snowball fights in much the same way he approached everything else in life: with tremendous enthusiasm, no advance notice, and complete disregard for royal decorum.
But that was before Soonyoung’s Blooming. Before the first snow of his fourteenth winter, when he went up to the mountain shrine and came back six days later smelling of pine resin, fur, and saddle leather. His magic had revealed itself. Soonyoung could speak to beasts. Not with words, but through something beyond language. It was a connection that ran both ways. The proof had followed him home—a tiger cub walking at his heel like a hunting dog.
After that, Soonyoung had been moved into a palace of his own, and the demands on his time multiplied quickly. Extra lessons, training, consultations on cavalry and the handling of the king's war beasts. Soonyoung was being shaped into something useful, pointed somewhere important, and Wonwoo was left behind, still waiting to learn what gift slept inside him.
Another snowball struck him in the chest.
Mingyu stood several paces away, packing a third.
“Yes, I have had a snowball fight before,” Wonwoo informed him, rolling his eyes as he bent to scoop up snow.
Experienced or not, Wonwoo was not a good aim.
He already knew this, archery lessons having established it beyond reasonable doubt, but the snowball fight somehow made his failures far funnier than archery ever had.
His first throw went wide by a considerable distance. His second struck Mingyu's shoulder only because Mingyu deliberately stepped into its path. His third sailed clean over the stone wall.
Mingyu, by contrast, was unerringly accurate and showed no mercy whatsoever.
“You’re terrible at this,” he called gleefully, ducking behind the trunk of a persimmon tree to pack another missile.
“I'm aware,” Wonwoo called back as he hurled another snowball.
It missed.
Still, what he lacked in precision he made up for in perseverance. He threw steadily, advancing through the snow while Mingyu retreated, laughing too hard to defend himself properly, and was able to land a few hits.
After a while, the hems of his winter robes became soaked through and heavy, and his fingers went completely numb. The sharp winter air stung his lungs with every breath, and he was shivering from head to toe, but none of it seemed to matter. His face actually ached from how hard he was smiling, and he was having more fun than he could remember having in quite some time.
The battle eventually ended when Mingyu slipped on a patch of ice near the pond's edge and sat down hard. Wonwoo stood over him with a snowball ready and a serious expression.
“Yield,” he commanded.
Mingyu looked up at him, dark hair mussed and dusted with white flakes, cheeks flushed pink from cold and laughter alike. Then he threw himself backward dramatically into the snow as though struck.
“I yield. You win, Your Highness.”
Wonwoo dropped the snowball onto his face anyway.
Afterward, they lay side by side in the snow-covered grass beneath the pomegranate tree, staring up at the pale winter sky through the dark lattice of its bare branches. Wet cold seeped through the layers of Wonwoo's robes, chilling his skin, but he did not think to move.
“Will you come back again?” he asked, keeping his gaze fixed on the branches overhead and trying to make the question sound unimportant.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mingyu turn his head. Frost clinged to the ends of his hair.
“Do you want me to?”
Wonwoo considered lying. It would have been wiser. More proper, certainly, given what divided a prince from a gardener's son. But the cold air caught in his throat, and the truth slipped out instead.
“Yes.”
Mingyu grinned wide and gave a firm nod.
“Then I'll come back.”