All I Wanted

The thaw didn't last.

Not that Yunhua had expected it to. She knew better than to mistake kindness for permanence—especially here, in this brittle outpost wrapped in rules and stone. What had passed between her and Rowan was not resolution. It was reprieve.

And reprieves, by nature, end.

It started with small things. Misalignments.

An extra beat between glances. A tension in Rowan's voice when she asked if Yunhua was going to sparring. The way Yunhua hesitated, one second too long, before agreeing.

The cold had turned sharper that week, the frost biting at the roots of the garden until even the feverwort gave up the ghost. Yunhua spent her mornings cutting the dead stalks back, pulling limp herbs from the soil in silence. Her gloves—Rowan's gift—were worn at the seams now. She hadn't replaced them.

Maybe she didn't want to.

Maybe she didn't want to admit they needed replacing at all.

"Something's wrong," Rowan said one evening, unprompted.

They were in the eastern hall, waiting out the wind that roared like a beast through the upper corridors. Yunhua stood beside the window, arms folded, eyes on the courtyard below. Rowan paced, which wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the way she kept glancing at Yunhua, as though trying to provoke a reaction.

Yunhua didn't look away from the glass.

"Wrong with what."

"With you. With us."

Yunhua's shoulders tensed.

"There is no 'us.'"

Rowan laughed—but it was hollow. "Gods, you say that like you mean it."

"I do."

"No, you don't." Rowan's boots scuffed the floor as she stopped pacing. "You're doing that thing again."

"What thing."

"That... that disappearing trick. Like a cat who pretends it never let anyone touch it."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Rowan stepped forward, frustration lining her movements. "Yes, you do. You're shutting me out. Again. And I'm tired of acting like that's normal."

"I never asked you to act otherwise."

"You didn't have to. You just let me hang there."

Yunhua turned to face her then. Slowly. Controlled.

"I never promised you anything, Rowan."

"You didn't have to promise," Rowan snapped. "But you—gods, you let me in. You let me care. And now you're backing off like it was a mistake."

Silence stretched between them like wire pulled taut.

"I didn't ask for that."

"I know," Rowan said. "That's the worst part."

The wind shrieked against the shutters, loud enough that for a second, it swallowed everything else.

Then Rowan's voice dropped. Low. Sharp.

"Do you even feel anything, Yunhua? Or is this just a game to you?"

That landed. Yunhua flinched—barely. But enough.

"No," she said. And it wasn't cold. It wasn't bitter. It was raw.

"I feel too much."

"Then why—?"

"Because I don't know what to do with it!"

The words ripped out of her before she could stop them, louder than she meant. Loud enough to echo in the stone corridor. Her voice cracked on the last syllable.

Rowan stared.

Yunhua never raised her voice.

Never.

And now, her expression wasn't the usual mask of unreadable calm. It had splintered. Not completely—but enough for Rowan to see what lay beneath: fear, resentment, longing, shame. All tangled into something unbearable.

"I don't know how to want things without losing them," Yunhua said, quieter now. "I don't know how to let people in without wondering when they'll leave. I don't know how to believe that someone like you—someone bright and reckless and alive—would stay."

Rowan opened her mouth. Closed it again.

For once, she didn't have something flippant to say. She looked—crushed. Struck clean in the chest.

"I would," she said softly. "I would stay."

Yunhua looked at her, eyes burning—not with tears, but something worse.

"You say that now."

"And you don't believe me."

"I want to. I don't know how."

They stared at each other. The air felt thin.

Rowan stepped forward. "Then let me prove it."

She was close now. Too close. Close enough for Yunhua to feel the heat from her skin. The air between them was warm and fragile, like the moment before something precious fell and shattered.

Yunhua's heart stuttered in her chest.

Rowan reached for her hand—slowly, deliberately.

Yunhua didn't pull away.

But she didn't reach back either.

Their hands hovered—fingertips nearly brushing.

Then Rowan whispered, "I think I—"

She never finished the sentence.

A sharp, echoing sound cut through the corridor: boots on stone, too loud, too fast. Someone approaching from around the bend. The moment snapped like a wire pulled too tight.

Yunhua jerked away instinctively. Not far. But enough.

Enough that Rowan noticed.

Her face hardened—not into anger, but into something worse. Resignation.

"You always run," she said, voice like frostbite.

"I don't—"

"Yes, you do. You flinch from everything. From people. From affection. From anything that might hurt."

Yunhua's jaw clenched.

"That's not fair."

"No," Rowan said, taking a step back. "It's not. But neither is this."

They both turned as an instructor rounded the corner, oblivious to the tension hanging in the air. He offered a curt nod and moved on.

But the spell had broken.

Rowan didn't speak again. She simply turned and walked away, her boots echoing with each step.

Yunhua watched her disappear down the hall.

She didn't follow.

Couldn't.

Not yet.

---

That night, sleep didn't come.

Yunhua lay rigid in her cot, staring at the ceiling beams. The rafters were familiar shapes by now—lines and cracks she could trace with her eyes closed.

But tonight they offered no comfort.

She replayed the conversation a dozen times.

The accusation. The almost-confession.

The space between their hands.

It was all too much. And not enough.

At some point, she sat up and lit the candle. The light flickered weakly against the frost-lined window.

She didn't know what she was doing.

Only that she couldn't stay still.

So she wrapped her cloak around her shoulders, pulled on the fraying gloves, and stepped into the dark.

---

The garden was almost unrecognizable in the dead of night.

Frost gleamed across the stones like glass. The herbs were brittle skeletons of their former selves. The bench they used to share was half-buried in snowdrift.

Yunhua sat there anyway.

The cold seeped through the fabric, but she didn't move.

She stared at the patch of earth where feverwort had once grown, dead leaves crusted over its roots. Rowan had laughed there once. Said it looked like a weed pretending to be noble.

Yunhua had never found the joke funny. But now—

Now, she missed the sound of Rowan's laugh so much it hurt.

She closed her eyes.

Tried to imagine reaching back across that space.

Tried to imagine saying the words she'd never learned how to say.

But in the dark, all her courage felt thin.

She stayed there until the stars had wheeled far overhead.

And when she finally rose, frost clung to the hem of her cloak like the memory of something she could no longer name.