“I don’t know.”

Jeno swore he slightly choked on a tiny piece of cheese when he heard that answer coming from Renjun, “-, what do you mean you don’t know?”

Renjun jutted his index finger up as a sign that he was asking Jeno to wait for a little while, before he scurried off to god knows where. Jeno could hear the sound of metal utensils bouncing against each other, then against the floor, followed suit by the yell of Mrs. Huang to ‘keep it down, don’t make a mess in front of our guests.’

When he was back as Jeno’s audience, Renjun was holding a tiny book. Bound in tattered leather who’d lost all its glory through years of being stored carelessly, the edges of its paper were yellowed and all chewed up from fingers rolling through it one too many times, or from the teeth of many little critters.

The boy flipped through the pages and stopped on one who looked even more pathetic than the rest. It was clear from how the ink on the paper was almost rubbed clean from the surface, that the page has seen a lot of love and attention given to it.

When the book was essentially shoved to him, Jeno eagerly took it from the boy’s hands and quickly scanned the content of the page. Or to be more exact, the recipe written on the page.

“Is this a cheese recipe book?” He asked with a lot of poorly masked enthusiasm sprinkled within his voice. When Renjun nodded in affirmation, Jeno could feel his fingers starting to tremble because, ‘oh my god cheese recipe book cheese recipe book CHEESE RECIPE BOOK.’

“How did you get your hands on this?” Because not even the castle’s library held one after the great cheese recipe purge that the King mandated to be done alongside with his cheesemaker purge out of the Inner City. If he was not mistaken, the reward for turning over a copy of anything related to cheesemaking is twenty gold coins. Seeing that this just barely-scraping-along family was still stubborn enough to hold onto a copy of theirs must’ve mean that cheesemaking is something very dear and close to their heart.

“it’s my father’s.” True enough, Renjun’s answer confirmed his suspicion. “I never knew him, Your Grace, never even seen his face. But… with this at least I can sort of know who he was.”

And Mr. Huang was a cheesemaker, the boy told him. Could make any sort of cheese asked to him by his customers. Recipe from the East, recipe from the West, soft, hard, creamy, sweet, anything. The most popular cheesemaker on the street they live in.

“Was that how your parents meet? Did the most popular cheesemaker fell in love with the most popular laundress?” Jeno interrupted Renjun’s tale with a lighthearted jab, which he was glad he did, because it brought a smile onto the boy’s face that was previously ridden with dark clouds of melancholy.

Looking back down to the recipe book, Jeno traced the tips of his fingers through the list of ingredients and cooking steps, all written with such little regard on clarity and repeatability. It was more akin to reading the absent minded thought of someone who’d mastered the art who was only jotting down some extra footnotes so that they wouldn’t forget the more measly aspects needed to create the perfect cheese. And indeed, upon rereading it Jeno noticed the lack of name on that particular recipe of the cheese he just ate.

On the top of the page there was only the drawing of a what he could only deduce as the backside of a pig. Just a circle with a pigtail tacked onto it in poorly drawn scribbles.

“You can understand all this?” He asked, to which Renjun answered with little enthusiastic nods of his head. The smile on his face read of ‘proudness’, and for the first time in their short time together, he didn’t look in the least bit afraid of Jeno. “But you were born after the banning…”

“Yes I was,” he once again nodded with his smile slowly bloomed into a bright grin.

“So you learned to understand all of these yourself… intuitively.”

‘This is amazing,’ Jeno thought, ‘a breakthrough finding.’ No back alley cheesemakers so far has been able to perfectly replicate the fading memories of cheese recipes with just pure instinct. That was what a missing generation would’ve resulted in, Jeno theorised, botched attempts at blindly trying to rethread a misty, unknown path. And he was sure even if they do have concrete recipes in their arsenal, it would’ve looked like this. Practically a gibberish to those who didn’t already have a strong base in cheesemaking knowledge. But to know that this boy was able to do so, even without being old enough to ever taste a legitimately made cheese in his life? ‘It’s borderline miraculous.’

Imagine what he could do if he has access to one of the hidden, well written cheese recipes in the castle’s archives. An excited shiver ran along the length of Jeno’s spine just with him having the thought of the uncharted possibilities of it all.

“Yes I did, intwee… intwitee… intueeti,-”

“In-tu-i-ti-ve-ly,” this time, Jeno was too caught off guard by the delight that was Renjun’s attempt at saying a complicated word that he allowed himself to giggle his way through him slowly spelling out the word’s syllables to this eager student of his, “it means that it all came naturally to you, without need of mentors or tutors to hold your hands through the process.”

Jeno took another bite on the squeaky cheese and along with it came another smile. He could hear the chirps of mice with each chew and he thought, if only Mr. Huang could see how his son looks when he’s all grown up, he wouldn’t have drawn the backside of a pig on top of his squeaky cheese recipe, he would’ve drawn a mouse.

“It’s all done! Now we just have to let it hang and dry.” Like the wind of Autumn suddenly picking up and rustling all the fallen leaves from the ground, Mrs. Huang barged out of her laundry and shook the calm atmosphere of the dining room, proudly holding up Jeno’s freshly washed cloak with both of her hands.

“I… never knew that cloak is actually beige…”

“Beige?” Renjun asked while he looked up to Jeno with a dazzled expression, not unlike a puppy staring at his owner, waiting to be thrown a treat. Jeno never thought he’ll ever find another person who regards knowledge as a treat just as much as he (and Jisung, and Minhyung too) does.

“That’s another name for light brown,- Mrs. Huang! Your son makes really great cheese!” Jeno said as he propelled himself to his feet. His movement almost made it look like he was jumping around in joy, something that his father would least like to see a fifteen years old Crown Prince do. But as this was an ordeal tied so closely to cheese, Jeno couldn’t care less what his father might’ve thought. Besides, at that hidden place, he was not Lee Jeno, Lumina’s Heir Apparent. He was just a lone traveller, with a cloak so dusty he always thought it was made out of darkly tanned leather.

“Oh, does he really?!”

The way Mrs. Huang looked at Renjun was like a mixture of ‘I told you so’ and pride, all balled up in a smile so loving, and motherly, and pure in its intention that it even caused Jeno to get a little bit choked up, “I thought so too.”

From his periphery, Jeno could see Renjun trying hard (but failing) to use the cheese recipe book to hide the act of him wiping the budding tears of overflowing emotion. But Jeno decided to ignore that and instead approached Mrs. Huang to retrieve back his cloak. It was getting way too late that he was surprised he hasn’t heard the sound of the castle’s bells chiming across the darkened streets of the Inner City.

The bells only ever chimed on 4 occasions. Birth, death, coronation, and ‘Prince Jeno has gone missing’.

“No.” Her curt response came completely out of nowhere that it caused Jeno to stop dead in his tracks. He hasn’t even said anything and already Mrs. Huang read his mind and denied him of what he needed most. “No. You’re staying the night. I insist.”

“Ma’am, truly, you don’t need to,-”

“The Inner City is like an endless maze during the night, a stranger to the city like you will not survive it, not even for a second. I don’t even have to explain that your cloak is not dry yet, right, Mr. Traveller, sir?” as if she knew that Jeno was unable to escape her house without his cloak, she turned her back on him, his jacket still held tightly inside her protective arms, and walked briskly to what he deduced was her drying station. “Renjun, show him the guest room.”

A quick glance exchanged between him and the boy made it clear that they both have the same sense of puzzlement (and in Renjun’s case, a little bit of surprise too) floating around in their head at that very moment, ‘this decrepit place has a guest room?’

But as usual, Mrs. Huang, not only the best laundress in the street but also the best reader of children confusion, rolled her eyes in exasperation and proceeded to further explain her instruction, “let him stay on your bed, dear, and be the good host that I know you can be.”

Jeno was just about to let out a sentence, a word, at least a sound of protest, but it was stifled when he felt boney fingers circling around his wrist, tugging it along as they made their way deeper into the quaint home. Once they turned a corner and started ascending up an extremely narrow set of stairs that seemed to be something chipped out of the walls with a bone and a hammer over a number of years, Renjun leaned in to whisper reassuring words into Jeno’s ears, “I will help you escape from the second story window once she’s asleep, Your Grace. And don’t worry. I will get your cloak for you too.”

Once again a smile bloomed on Jeno’s face because of Renjun’s endearing quality. But unlike the previous two, that occasion was the one time when Jeno finally felt free enough to let himself go and fully give his prodigious cheesemaker what he’d always wanted to give. A genuine smile.

Or however genuine one could give a smile when scaling a dangerous path.

The stairs to Renjun’s room were narrow, and each steps were set in different heights. The only thing stopping them from slipping off the damned thing and breaking their neck were small candles stacked inside shallow dips on the wall that Renjun ever so kindly lit up one by one as they made their way into what Jeno could only guess was an attic room.

And indeed it was. Just like the rest of his house, one swing of a rickety wooden door later and Jeno was met with the sight of a dilapidated sleeping quarter. More like a crawl space than a room, if he had to be completely honest. Press him to compare it to something from his castle, and he’d probably say, ‘the toy chest inside his baby brother’s room’.

But it has a wide window that almost completely took the entirety of the Eastern wall so that even without any candles being lighted, the room was fully lit with the silvery wash of the full moon.

“While we wait for you mother to sleep, is it okay if you bring me another plate of your cheese?” He wasn’t intending to sound like a typical Prince and come off as being bratty and needing to be tended twenty four-seven, but the moment he sat down on the sunken mattress covered with rough and itchy blanket seemingly made out of used potato sack inside the small dwelling of his mouse, Jeno realised that having a bit of snack at the side while they waited for nigh to fall wouldn’t be that bad of an idea at all.

“Oh…?! You… you really do like them Your Grace?”

“If I don’t like them, I won’t ask for second servings, won’t I?”

Jeno just noticed the way Renjun would scratch the back of his head everytime he felt flustered, even if just for a little bit, and there goes another item to be added into his mental list of ‘why the little mouse who lives in the wall can be so endearing’. “That’s true, Your Grace. It won’t be long,-”

“Jeno.”

“... sorry?”

He leaned forward and invited Renjun to a friendly and very informal handshake. A way to possibly decrease the apparent power imbalance between them and reduce Renjun’s frequency of having to bow down to him out of respect (or fear). Because however hard he tried to deny it, Jeno was starting to get restless by how poorly Renjun executed his bows. He will have to teach him how to do a proper one someday, “just call me Jeno, please.”

“But, but, Your Grace,-”

“In the words of your mother, ‘I insist.’”

It seemed that a little laughter was all it took to shake off the arbitrary formality left between the two barely-adult children. Because after their laughter had fizzled to a soft giggle, Renjun took Jeno’s invitation and held his hand in a somewhat firm handshake, “okay then, Je… Jeno?” Renjun’s word ended in a high note of hesitation that was only brought back to normal when he saw Jeno nodding his head in a show of acceptance and further encouragement, “then it won’t be long.”

“Thankyou so much Renjun, I owe you one.”

_ _ _ _ _

Jeno ran back to the castle as fast as his little sleepy legs could take him. A lone pebble rolling along the deserted street of the Inner City. And it was a hard task too, you know, with the slightly damp cloak plastered across his back and adding at least an extra kilogram to his cheese-filled belly.

It felt like he’d been talking with Renjun for only an hour, even less. But when they finally heard the sound of Mrs. Huang retiring to her room, Jeno looked at the sky and noticed that it was already midnight.

‘Oh god oh god oh god,’ he chanted silently inside his mind when he paused underneath the wall he needed to scale to get into the castle. Only silently because his mouth was too busy panting out puffs of breath to be used to say anything intelligible.

One stone, two stones, what if mother was waiting for me in my room. What if she’s upset.

Three stones, four stones, what if father was waiting for me in my room?! What if he’s mad?!

Five, six, seven, eight, and off he went, boots and cloak clutched closely against his heart, so that only his socks-clad feet would patter against the stone floor. Alerting no one of his return back to a place where he shouldn’t have been gone from in the first place.

Jeno had memorise the schedules and routes of the castle’s guards as clearly as the pattern of hair on the back of his hand that it was easy for him to reach his room without any unfortunate happenstance that would’ve lead to something that range from blackmail in the least, and reporting his night escapades to his father at worst. His room was dark when he creeped into it, clinging to the door because he was hoping his weight hanging on it would stop the hinges from groaning out like a dying mule.

‘Of course it’s dark,’ he berated himself, ‘nobody’s in it.’ Then, when the realisation hit him, of what nobody’s here really meant, Jeno was awashed with a feeling of gladness that he finally could let out all his worry in one long exhale.

After he securely closed the door and waited for a good thirty seconds to make sure nobody was around to lend a few eavesdropping ears, Jeno quickly discarded of his disguise inside a loose stone at the far corner of his room, hidden carefully underneath his study desk, before changing into his night slip so quickly he almost tripped on the clothes’ long hem.

Luckily, his bed was within reach and so Jeno fully allowed gravity to take ahold of him and fell head first to a human being’s shoulder blades.

His first reaction was a quiet, ‘what,’ said only within the confines of his brain.

But his second was a loud, “WHAT?!” And he had to quickly plop his hands over his mouth to stop himself from furthering his yell with words that are unsatisfactory.

Jeno softly padded his hand over the lump of something (or someone) on his bed and for a second he thought, ‘have I been dreaming? Was all of today a dream? Is this the real me, sleeping, while the me right now is just my soul flying around in limbo?’

But then he saw the unidentified human’s terribly unfashionable hair cover peeking out from the swash of thick blanket and Jeno proceeded to slap some life into said person.

Who else would wear such ugly hair net to sleep? Only someone whose personal signature is a questionable taste in hair accessories.

“Mmhmm, what…?” Minhyung groaned as he blindly reached out for the source of his slumber-interruptor. But then, when enough amount of consciousness spilled into his brain for it to start working, he immediately shot up into a sitting position and stared directly at Jeno with bewildered eyes, “oh you’re back? You’re back… good… good… good,-”

“What are you doing here?” Jeno whispered, confusion heavily tinting his voice. He was stuck between wanting to feel frustrated or glad or weirded out because, ‘what in seven hells is Minhyung doing in my room?!’

Because of the darkness of the room, Jeno couldn’t see Minhyung’s palm flying in the direction of his face until it’s too late. More like, until his open hand made contact with the supple skin of Jeno’s cheek.

It was seemingly Minhyung’s take on revenge for what Jeno did to him earlier, but in Jeno’s opinion, it was totally disproportionate. Minhyung was hit on his shoulder. He hit Jeno on his face. Is this how a friend says thankyou after being allowed to sleep on a royal sized bed? How ungrateful.

“I covered for you, you reckless pigeon.” Minhyung said in the middle of a yawn, “the Queen checked the room twice after lights out. You should thank me for covering for you because if not, I would’ve lost the bet with Jisung.”

Ah, the bet. Of how long the castle’s bells could stay un-chimed in regards of Jeno’s whereabouts. Jisung bet on ‘anything shorter than a month.’ While Minhyung bet on ‘longer than a quarter of a year.’

It’s only been two weeks ever since the last time the whole castle went into frenzy trying to find a missing Jeno (he fell asleep in the crypt after spending the whole morning tracing the graves’ decorative reliefs with a piece of charcoal), and Minhyung being Minhyung, the stingy piece of dried tofu skin wouldn’t want to pay anyone five gold coins if he could help it.

Jeno pulled a strand of Minhyung’s dark brown hair and let it fall unceremoniously on his droopy eyes, “you fooled the Queen without masking this hair?”

“It’s dark, she won’t notice.”

He only sighed to that, “she’s my mother, silly, she must’ve noticed…”

He surely won’t be looking forward for tomorrow morning’s breakfast. ‘This morning’s breakfast,’ his sleepy mind reminded him, Minhyung’s yawn seemingly luring out one from within himself. Wide and lion-like. So unsuitable for a Prince that it even caused Minhyung to chuckle.

“You’re not going to send me away?” Minhyung asked when Jeno silently uncovered the corner of his blanket and snuggled into the other side of his bed without anymore protests.

“And risk you getting caught by the castle’s guards? I don’t think so,” he said, followed soon by another yawn, “just make sure to wake up before everyone else. Oh, and get Jisung to ready up everything he’s got. I have something really important to share.”

There was a slight pause, most likely because Minhyung just had to digest the fact that he was really going to spend the night on the same bed as the Crown Prince, before he shrugged his shoulders and scooted himself back to his previous position, “your wish is my command.”

The silence of the night was quick to settle back into the nooks and crannies of the room, only briefly disrupted by Jeno’s quiet voice. “Minhyung?” the last ounce of his energy for the day used to admit something to Minhyung (he knew he had to do it then because at least then their collective fatigue prevented any physical skirmish from breaking off between the two of them), “I’m sorry but long story short, I lost your ugly hat.”

“... I hate you so much right now.”

“You’re welcome my friend, you’re welcome.”