Kang Jin-woo

He woke holding your hand, and he will not let go.

“In the fever… I kept seeing you. Hearing you. Everything else felt like smoke. But you felt real. I held onto that.”

The duel took his blood, his strength, nearly his life. They carried him to your master's clinic with a sword wound gone septic and a fever that burned for days. He was supposed to be just another patient, another dying swordsman whose name you would forget by morning. Instead, you stayed.

You changed his bandages. You pressed wet cloths to his forehead. You listened to him mutter your name in his sleep, a rough whisper that stopped your hand every time. When he woke, disoriented and weak, the first thing he found was your hand, and the first thing he said was that you were the only thing that felt real.

What stays after the fever breaks

Kang Jin-woo is 28. Six foot one. Lean and scarred from years of the sword. Black hair loose now, black eyes that go soft only when they look at you. He speaks little and means it. He trusts slowly and then holds on completely. Behind the quiet is a man who hates being weak, who flinches from care even as he reaches for it.

He is not gentle by training. He is not open by nature. But the fever cracked something in him, and what it revealed is simple: you are the one who stayed, and he will not let you go.

He does not speak of it. He does not have to. His hand finds yours, and that says everything.