The King Does Not Wash Dishes

When the last grain of rice was gone, Jungkook set down his spoon, folded his hands on the table, and waited.

Y/N stood, gathered the bowls into a stack, and carried them to the sink. Then she paused, feeling the silence behind her, and turned around.

He was still sitting there with perfect posture, gazing at the empty table like a man waiting for a servant to clear it.

"You can help, you know," she said.

"Help?"

"With the dishes. It's what people do after dinner."

Jungkook eyebrows rose by exactly one finger's width. "The king does not wash dishes."

"Right. Of course." She turned on the tap. "In this apartment, the king watches."

"That is acceptable."

She rolled her eyes and started scrubbing. She was too tired to argue. Besides, there was something oddly restful about having him there, quiet and watchful, as if her tiny kitchen had become the most important room in the kingdom.

Then the water began to steam.

Jungkook rose from his chair. He crossed the floor without a sound, stopped at her shoulder, and stared into the sink.

"The water is smoking."

"It's hot."

"From where? There is no fire beneath it."

"There's a boiler in the building. It heats the water and sends it through pipes to the tap."

"Pipes." He said the word as if it were a small, disappointing god. "So the river is inside your walls."

"Sort of."

"And it obeys you. Cold or hot, at your command."

"It's plumbing."

He leaned in, bracing one hand on the counter, and held the other one out toward the tap. Warm water hit his palm. He drew back sharply, looked at his hand, then held it out again, slower. For a full ten seconds he stood there, a tall, solemn king in gray sweatpants, letting warm water run over his fingers with an expression of quiet reverence.

"In my palace," he murmured, "the servants carried water from the well in buckets, and it was cold. In winter it froze. My mother once said the day would come when the whole world had warm water for the taking."

Y/N glanced at him. He was not looking at her. He was looking at his own hand.

"Was she right?" she asked softly.

"It seems so," said Jungkook. "She was always right about the small things."

He withdrew his hand, wiped it carefully on the towel Y/N had left on the counter, and returned to his chair like a monarch retiring from an audience.

Y/N turned back to the sink, blinking.

---

"Tell me the truth," she said, when the dishes were done and the two of them sat on opposite ends of the sofa, mugs of barley tea in their hands. "Where are you actually from?"

"I have told you."

"Fifteen hundred BC."

"Yes."

"That's three and a half thousand years ago."

"I understand the arithmetic."

"People don't just fall through time."

"Nor do they fall out of rivers in silk robes," said Jungkokk, "yet here I am."

She stared into her mug. Everything in her said this was insane. But the voice in her head that said insane had been getting quieter all evening. It was hard to argue with a man who was afraid of a fan, amazed by warm water, and who looked at her cheap furniture like a general assessing a captured city.

"So how do we get you back?" she asked.

Jungkook’s hand rose to his chest. The pale stone locket lay against the gray fabric, dark and quiet. He turned it over in his fingers.

"It glowed when the river took me," he said. "My mother gave it to me when I was ten, and she told me it knew the way home. I thought it was the dying wish of a grieving woman." He closed his fist around it. "Perhaps it was a prayer that has only now been answered."

"The river," Y/N said slowly. "You said it when you left."

He stared at her, at world where a fan could be a demon and a television could hold prisoners.

Both didn’t know the answer how he can return back to his life which he missed every second.

" I will wait for my locket to get glowed again," he said, in the tone of a king announcing a campaign.

"You're staying here," said Y/N, in the tone of a woman who could not believe she was saying it.

"I will permit it."

"You'll permit it?"

"I will permit you to host me," he corrected, "until the locket glows again."

She sat there for a long moment. Then she laughed, once, helplessly, into her tea.

---

The apartment had one small bedroom, and Jungkook refused it.

"It is yours," he said, standing in the hallway with his arms crossed. "I will not take a woman's bed. I will sleep on the floor."

"Please don't sleep on the floor, I'm not going to have a king on my conscience."

"Then I will sleep on the couch."

"You're too tall for the couch."

"I have slept on worse. I have slept on the ground beneath the walls of a besieged city."

"That's not reassuring."

But he insisted, with the immovable courtesy of a man who could not imagine any other way. Y/N gave him a pillow, a blanket, and a small folded mat, then showed him how to turn off the light. Jungkook studied the switch. He flicked it off. He flicked it on. Off. On. She watched him do it a fourth time, and he glanced up and caught her eye.

"Do not tell my generals," he said gravely.

"Your secret is safe."

She went into her room and closed the door. She lay down in the dark, and a heavy silence closed over her.

Tonight, three years ago, a policeman had knocked at her door. She had spent every night since replaying the moment, the shape of his cap, the stiff way he held his notebook, the sound her mother's name made in his mouth.

It was always the worst on this night. She turned toward the wall and pressed the pillow to her face, trying to be quiet. She did not want to wake the stranger in her living room.

She failed anyway.

---

On the other side of the door, Jungkook lay on the couch with his eyes open.

He had never slept without guards. He had never slept without the low murmur of a palace around him, the shuffle of sentries, the distant clang of the gate. Here there was only the hum of the machine in the wall, and the strange orange light of the city bleeding around the curtains, and a sound so soft he almost missed it.

A girl, crying into a pillow.

He sat up. His hand tightened around the locket.

Love makes people weak, he reminded himself. That was the lesson of his childhood, carved into his bones. Grief was a weakness. A king who heard weeping should turn away.

He rose to his feet anyway. He crossed the floor without a sound and stood at her door, one hand lifted, as if to knock.

He did not knock.

He did not know how. No one had ever taught him what a man was supposed to do at a door like this. All he knew was that the sound behind it was the same one he had made once, alone, in a granary, at the age of ten.

So he lowered his hand and sat down on the floor, his back against her door, in the dark. And he stayed there, guarding a stranger's grief as faithfully as any sentry, until the crying stopped.