When A Branch🌸Blossoms🌸

She pressed pause. Nothing happened. She pressed it again, harder, the way people press elevator buttons when they've already decided the elevator is broken. The screen flickered — not into the warm doorway shimmer she was used to, but into a single line of text across the paused frame: NO RESOLUTION REQUIRED. REQUEST DENIED. Jiejie stared at it. "Excuse me?" Vinja leaned over, read it once, and returned to his notebook with the calm of a man who had been expecting this for years. "It appears the portal agrees with me." "The portal doesn't get an opinion." "The portal appears to have one anyway." Jiejie mashed the button three more times. The message did not change. Iggy22, who had not even stood up yet, who had not sensed danger at all this time, tilted his head at her with mild curiosity, as if to ask why she was fighting a television over the weather. "Fine," Jiejie said. "Fine. Let her stay dry. I have bigger fish." She began jabbing buttons at random — pause, then menu, then a button neither of them had ever established the function of — muttering pause, pause, just work under her breath like an incantation.

On screen, Vinja stood very still in the middle of a hall he did not recognize, in clothes that did not belong there, doing the only thing that had ever reliably kept him alive in unfamiliar territory: nothing, until he understood the room. Servants froze mid-step. A pair of guards near the far pillar reached for weapons they seemed unsure how to aim at a man wearing no visible threat and no visible explanation. On the sofa, Jiejie leaned forward so fast Iggy nearly slid off her lap. "Don't just stand there, say something — oh, right." She caught herself. "He can't hear me. Great. Great, this is great." Iggy blinked at the screen, entirely unhelpful. Then a voice cut through the murmuring — young, sharp, more curious than alarmed. "Stop." A young man stepped out from behind the guards. Fine robes, but plain ones — no ornamentation, nothing that announced rank, the kind of clothing a person chooses when they have decided not to be looked at. He studied Vinja the way Vinja usually studied other people: quietly, thoroughly, already three conclusions ahead of everyone else in the room. "You are not from the palace." Vinja's voice, when it came, was even. Careful. "No." "You are not from anywhere I recognize." "No." The young man tilted his head slightly. Jiejie mouthed the subtitles half a beat before they finished appearing. "You're not going to bow." Vinja considered this. "I don't know the customs yet. I'd rather ask than perform something incorrectly." Something shifted in the young man's expression — not offense. Interest. "Most men in this hall lie confidently rather than admit ignorance honestly." "That sounds exhausting to maintain." "It is." A pause. "I am Sumeun Jisa." Jiejie squinted at the subtitle. "Sumeun Jisa?" She glanced down at Iggy, who offered no opinion. "Hidden branch? Somebody in that world has main character energy and doesn't know it yet. Sound familiar?" On the Prince studied the stranger a moment longer, then made a decision the way people only make decisions when they are already tired of not making them. "Walk with me. Before the guards remember they are supposed to be afraid of you."

They ended up in a side chamber — low table, scattered ledgers, a single oil lamp doing its best against the dark. The Prince dropped into a seated position with none of the formality he'd worn in the hall. "You noticed. In the corridor." "You slowed down." "I did not think anyone would see that." "I told you. I pay attention." The Prince turned the ledger so Vinja could see it too — not a small gesture in a place like this. "The southern provinces are reporting harvest numbers that do not match what the merchants are quietly saying in the markets. My brother's ministers say the numbers are fine. I do not think the numbers are fine." "Someone's skimming between the count and the report. Probably at the collection point, before it ever reaches the capital." Vinja tapped the column lightly. "You already caught it. You didn't need me for that part." "Then why does it feel like I needed someone." "Because catching it, and saying it out loud, to the right people, in a way they can't dismiss — those are different skills. You have the first one. Most people don't." "My brother has never once looked at a ledger past the first page." "I believe that." "And yet he is the one they will crown." Vinja recognized the sentence too well — the specific tiredness of watching the wrong shape get chosen for a role you'd have filled better, and saying nothing, because saying something felt like reaching for a thing you'd already decided wasn't yours to reach for. "That's not the numbers' fault," Vinja said finally. "And it's not permanent. Not if you stop leaving the room every time you're right." On the sofa, Jiejie had gone quiet for the first time all evening. "He's the tree in there," she murmured, mostly to herself, mostly to Iggy, who had no comment. "Nobody told him to shrink. Nobody's watching him wait his turn." She frowned slightly. "I always figured he liked being the quiet one around me. That it was just — his choice. His comfort. But nobody's making him small in there. He just... isn't." She didn't finish the thought out loud. She reached for her tumbler instead, found it empty, and set it back down without drinking anything.

In the hall, Vinja felt it too — the exact half-second where the Prince's spine started to fold. And Vinja's own instinct rose up right alongside it, just as old, just as familiar: step in. Smooth it over. Take the hit so he doesn't have to. The easiest, safest, most well-worn move he had. He'd made it a hundred times for Jiejie without ever deciding to. He opened his mouth to do it. And stopped. Because if he answered for him, nothing here would have changed at all. So instead, Vinja said nothing. He just looked at the Prince. Steady. Waiting. The room's laughter was already fading into an uncomfortable silence, waiting to see which way this would break. Sumeun Jisa's hands, folded behind his back, tightened once. Then he lifted his chin. "The numbers are borrowed from nowhere, Brother. They're borrowed from the ledgers you were given and never opened." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "I would be happy to walk you through them myself, if reading them is unfamiliar." The silence in the room changed shape entirely. On the sofa, Jiejie had both hands pressed over her mouth. "IGGY. Did you SEE that—" On screen, Vinja allowed himself the smallest exhale — not relief exactly. The specific feeling of watching someone else do the thing you spent years being too careful to do yourself. Jiejie sat back slowly. "He let him do it," she said, mostly to Iggy, mostly to herself. "He wanted to jump in. I know that face. That's his 'I am about to fix this for someone' face. And he didn't." She sat with that a moment longer than she meant to. "When has he ever not done that for me?" Iggy had no answer for that either. Neither, for a long moment, did she.

Jiejie flopped backward onto the sofa, still muttering about dead batteries and betrayal. Vinja said nothing. He simply stood, retrieved two fresh batteries from the drawer in the entryway console — the one Jiejie always forgot existed — and slotted them into the remote with the quiet competence of a man restoring order to a universe that had briefly gotten away from him. Iggy, sensing the danger had fully passed, made his usual unhurried exit toward the hallway. Vinja lowered himself onto the floor beside the sofa, close enough that his shoulder rested near Jiejie's knee. He tilted his head slightly in her direction — small, deliberate, unmistakable. Jiejie, without opening her eyes, reached down and obliged, fingers moving lazily through his hair. "You almost gave me a heart attack tonight." "Understood." "An iguana cannot provide adequate emotional support in a crisis, Vinja. He has no arms." "I'll mention it to him." She kept rubbing, slow and unhurried. Vinja reached for the remote and switched off Splendid Match mid-loop, turning instead to The White Lotus. English dialogue filled the room, unhurried, dry. Jiejie's hand slowed. Then slowed further. Then simply slid off the side of his head and came to rest against the cushion, still. Vinja glanced back to confirm it. Fully asleep, mouth slightly open, one arm hanging off the edge of the sofa where her hand had given up mid-motion. He rose carefully, retrieved the throw blanket from the armchair, and draped it over her without disturbing the dangling arm. He left the television on low. Then he picked his notebook up off the kitchen counter, returned to the small table alone, and opened to a blank page.